Storyline: Unfinished Roadtrip
Aug 23, 2021
“Bonjour”, a man on a bicycle greets us and continues in fast Quebecois French. We are walking on the paved shoulder from the village back to our campsite a little over a kilometre away. Sounds like he is telling us that we’d be faster if we had our bikes.
“Lentement, s’il vous plait” (Slowly please), Alex says and the man immediately switches to English. He is a local guy. Bored perhaps and likes to chat with tourists. He tells us that big oil tankers used to dock below what now is the campground.
There were two huge oil storage tanks on the Point. Oil from the ship would be pumped up the hill and into these tanks, from where it would be loaded into tanker trucks and driven to the copper extraction plant. He used to work in the mines.
“This yellow house is where the truck driver lived…” He also tells us that he is the last of 19 children. Nineteen! Ten girls and nine boys. “Well, there was no TV back then”, he adds with a smile.
We looked at him with some interest. “No, not me, I only have two”, he answers a question we didn’t ask. It is hot and humid and we carry a bag of groceries, hoping to make lunch. But it is nice to chat with a local, who tells us the story of the campsite and his village Mont-Louis.
Otherwise, for us it would have just been an idyllic place where we found a campsite for a few nights. When the ore was exhausted and the price of copper fell, Mines Gaspé ceased its activities, dismantled the oil tanks and decontaminated the soil. The mandate was that the Point be used for tourism.
That’s how this campground was born. Who knew?! “Thank you for camping here. Please come again next year”, the guy says as he bikes away from us. Felt like we were in Morocco, where we’d often be stopped with “Welcome to Morocco and thank you for visiting.”
Our campground is called Parc et Mer, although in the past, before the mining activities, the point was called “la pointe sec” (the drying point). The name relates to drying cod. Early settlers were fishermen, who built their homes around the point, where they dried their catch. Apparently, the locals still refer to it as “la pointe sec”. Subsequently, agricultural fields occupied the area until the mining activities changed everything, and everything changed once again when the mining ceased.
This is our second week on the road with Doranya, our campervan. Although we’ve had her for 11 months now, Covid restrictions and “stay at home” orders prevented long road trips. We used the available travel windows to explore our Southern Ontario area for a few days at a time, which is quite different from living on the road.
This Covid year is somewhat different from before the pandemic times. To be on the safe side, excluding the first night, I’ve prebooked our campsites to the Labour Day weekend. We hope we’ll able to be more spontaneous after Sept 6th, but with stubborn 20% antivaccers, who knows what will happen in two weeks?
The Parc et Mer is our fourth campsite. Canadians are not allowed into the US by land border crossings, but Americans are allowed here; no international travel is open for us either (not that we are interested right now), but international travellers will be allowed into Canada as of September 9th;
nothing makes a lot of sense, but the Canadians stay mainly close to home, camping in their provinces or across provinces, once provincial borders opened.
First was an incredibly quiet night, with only a family of ospreys making us company at Merrickville Fair Grounds. Boondocking.
We do hope people do not trash that absolutely beautiful and quiet park by the river, so others too can enjoy a night there, too.
Next day we crossed a (provincial) border for the first time since January 2020, crossed Grande Ile and continued to our first booked campsite near the south shore of St. Lawrence River, just north of the town of Saint Ours. We try to avoid limited-access highways (freeways/autobahns/motorways/expressways, whatever your local usage is).
Our idea of travelling is not the destination where we’d park for a night or three; it is exploring the country itself. One can’t see anything but cars on a limited-access highway. We stop in small villages, check artisanal kiosks, try some local food or wine/beer, pop our heads in art galleries; you get the picture. Our intended driving time is around 4 hours.
Sometimes it can be up to 5 hours. Add all the stops and exploration and you have a full day. We would like to get to the point where we don’t pre-book sites, but this could be a while away, when international travel for Canadians resumes.
New to the RV camping lifestyle, we are not exactly the RVers that will hang around a campsite for a week or more, unless there are activities around. The reason we bought a campervan was to travel comfortably, especially now when many public spaces are closed. Practically we can stop everywhere.
We can find a camping site, we can park in a hotel/motel lot if we’d like to enjoy some city life, or just settle in the wild. In the past we did some road trips with our car(s): most recently in 2018 with Milan (covered in the blog) and one in 2010 to the East coast.
In 2010 we didn’t plan or book anything. We found accommodation when tired and wanted to call it a day. It was easy then. Not anymore. At least not now! On this trip we hope to retrace some of our year 2010 steps. We are curious to see Lunenburg NS, after one of its famous shoreline buildings burned to the ground and also plan to visit new places, weather permitting.
In the First Nations town of Kahnawake, just west of Montreal, we noticed that the stop signs were in French and Mohawk (Arrête / Testan). The road signs in Quebec are predominantly in French only, as opposed to Ontario where they are in English (plus French when demographics merit). I will not go into politics and politicians manipulating people’s feelings.
Coming from Europe, where everyone speaks easily 3 – 4 languages, I still don’t understand why officially bilingual Canada is not a bilingual country. Learning and speaking more than one language or two is good for one’s brain! I remember, at the time, just fresh from Belgium, where one spontaneously uses Flemish, French and English in one sentence, showing my Belgian driver’s license to a clerk at Ontario MTO (Ministry of Transportation). He wanted me to bring a certified English translation. “It is written in French sir” was my answer (it was French and Dutch) “and if you don’t understand it you have to trust my translation”. After all the clerks there were supposed (or so I thought) to be bilingual. And he did.
Back to our long-awaited road trip.
Our first campsite was by the Richelieu River. “Best camp site”, the receptionist told us, and I think it was. Facing the riverbank down the hill that was protecting us from road noise, enjoyed the sunset and the fantastic fresh seafood in their restaurant, although our fridge and freezer were still full.
It was a layover stop as was the next. I’ve booked 2 nights for all transient places and 3 nights at places we’d like to explore more.
Soon we’ll find out that be it because the weather at the end of August is tricky east of Ontario, or be it that we are older now and can’t pack too much under our arms, we may need more time at a place to explore its surroundings. We are still learning how to live in a campervan, about 8m2, bathroom and kitchen included.
In 2010, both working, we had only 10 days to get to the East Coast and back. We drove a lot more in a day. Now we have the time to take the smaller roads and enjoy the scenery.
But boy, is it a big country! To the village of Mont-Louis we’d done 1150km.
In the next few blog posts and videos, we’ll take you through Quebec, mainly following the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, all the away up and around the Gaspé Peninsula, and the Bay of Fundy area of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Since we started late in the season, we don’t know at what point of time we have to turn back and head home. But intend be home before Canadian Thanksgiving Day.
Sept 3, 2021
Unfortunately, due to some health issues we had to turn back before even reaching the Bay of Fundy. We turned back shortly after entering New Brunswick. Travelling during Covid times has its unique challenges. We’ll cover them later. On the other hand, many parts of the Saint John and Fundy area are currently flooded due to the tail end of Hurricane Ida. We’ll have to visit earlier in the summer, I guess.
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