August 4, 2019 – August 10, 2019

We crossed from Labrador City into the province of Quebec and the road once again turned to gravel. We were in a somewhat remote region of the province and the road twisted around lakes, crossed rivers and circled around large mining sites. We were headed towards the Manicouagan Reservoir, a huge reservoir with a massive island in the middle. The almost perfectly round lake was created about 214 million years ago by the impact of a meteorite that was 5 kilometres in diameter….wow.

As it turns out, views of the lake were limited, and the place we had planned to camp was really not to our liking, with no facilities and some derelict resort buildings nearby…why would we pay for no services, not even an outhouse? So we continued on and found a wild camping spot on a small arm of the lake. It was a beautiful spot, with a small fire pit, but the black flies were out in the thousands, forcing us once again to spend the night hidden away in our camper.

We continued on the next day, arriving in the town of Baie-Comeau, and getting our first view of the St. Lawrence River…she is a big one!

We went on a whale watching trip in the St. Lawrence River near the town of Tadoussac. We were the only english speaking couple on the tour, so the guide would do his spiel to the other tourists as a group, in french, then he would come and sit with us and repeat everything in english, but then would chat with us in between his group talks. An intrepid and interesting guy; he had guided explorers to the North Pole and hikers on the east coast of Newfoundland, he had worked as a drill operator in remote diamond mines and had taught children in communities in Canada’s far north. He had a great sense of humour and we really enjoyed our one on one time with him.

But the tour was about the whales. I never knew that whales came this far up the St. Lawrence, but indeed they do, attracted by the abundant fish and krill in the area that are, in turn, attracted by the nutrient rich outflow of the Saguenay River.

We headed north up along the Sagenay River. We stopped for the night in a campground near the town of St. Rose du Nord. Very few people in this regions speak english, or, at least, they did not speak english to us and our French was so very rusty after having tried to absorb and use Spanish for the last two years….every time I tried to say anything in French, all the words would come out in Spanish. The heart of the separatist sentiment in Quebec is strong in this region. Just in talking, Derek ended up in a discussion with a Quebecois woman (in English), who had no issue of telling us all the reasons that Quebecers should separate because all the bad things the “henglish” did. Lucky that we’re all Canadians now then.

We continued on to Quebec City. We camped for free across the St. Lawrence river in a municipal park in the town of Levis. We had a great view across the river to beautiful, Old Quebec City.

Quebec City is beautiful, full of shops, bakeries and nice restaurants, and we enjoyed a few days in the area. We had both visited Montreal in the past, and as cities can be difficult with the truck and the dog, we decided to bypass it on this trip and head towards the border with Ontario to Ottawa, the capital of Canada.

A side note about our experience in the province of Quebec: we had been unsure how rural Quebecers would receive us, with our lousy french and our Alberta plated truck. For the most part, people were indifferent, and, of course, anywhere that was touristy, staff would have at least a little english…we would stammer away with our broken french, and things would work out. But in non-touristy locales there was no english spoken, and we sometimes felt a little less than welcome. We did have one bothersome, although minor incident…three teenage girls were walking along the road and one of them threw a paper cup with a remnant of ice in it at our windshield. Okay, they were young, and maybe someone was trying to be cool in front of their friends, and maybe we were not even targeted as being from out of province (although we do have a front license plate that was obviously not from Quebec), but it felt so un-Canadian to us, and it made me sad. Here we were, having driven about 70,000km through 16 foreign countries, and the first time anyone chucked anything at our vehicle was in our own country. Très triste.