Jim & Jeanette's Travels: Day 23 – Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Metis-Sur-Mer, Quebec to Petit-Rocher-Nord, New Brunswick – 182 Miles

Before I start to describe today’s journey, I want to go back and clarify my discussion of Quebec in yesterday’s post. I was probably a bit too harsh and opinionated, as well as naïve, seeing as how I had spent all of two days in the province – hardly long enough to make me an expert. I suppose much of what I said was based on preconceived notions about the “Frenchness” of Quebec and how that relates to the Balkanization of our country over the past few years. So take what I said with a grain of salt.

Today dawned bright and clear, about 60 degrees when we woke up. We went through our usual routine of having a cup of coffee while we propped up in bed, going over the maps of the day’s journey ahead. Then it’s make up the bed, dress, and have breakfast before shutting down the water heater and unhooking the power. Since we hadn’t dumped our waste tanks in several days (most of which time they went unused as we parked at our friends’ houses in Peterborough and Ottawa), we stopped at the dump station on our way out of the campground. The routine is to drain the black tank first, then the grey tank. I won’t go into the nitty-gritty of what all that entails, but it should be pretty self-explanatory. While I was draining the grey tank and washing out the sewer hose, Jeanette was doing some cleaning in the bathroom and dropped a sponge down into the black water tank. Again, without going into all the gory details, it was necessary to fish the sponge out before we began using the plumbing facilities so it wouldn’t block the drain. This took a bit of ingenuity involving a coat hanger, a long rod, and about thirty minutes, but we finally got it done and were at last on our way by about 9:15.

As you know, we had followed the road up the south bank of the St Lawrence River. This road continues up and around the Gaspe’ Peninsula, a large mass of land that juts up into the Gulf of St Lawrence before returning southward, completing a loop of approximately 450 miles down to Campbelton, New Brunswick, at the point where Quebec and New Brunswick meet at the head of Chaleur Bay, an arm on the western shore of the Gulf of St Lawrence. Rather than take the long way around, we elected to take the shorter route to Campbelton by cutting across the neck of the Gaspe’ Peninsula, a distance of less than a hundred miles.

The road inland from the town of Mont-Joli climbs quickly into the hills that make up the interior of the Gaspe’ Peninsula. We topped out at something over 900 feet, according to the altimeter readings on our GPS, then began the long, slow descent down to the Atlantic side. The countryside was a mix of small farms and a few villages for the first half of the way. We passed a large lake, Lac Matapedia, near the town of Amqui, then entered the narrow, canyon-like valley of the Matapedia River, following that broad waterway all the way down to Campbelton. The terrain here was more rugged – steep hills covered with forests of dark spruce and fir mixed with the almost lime-green new growth of the intruding birch, making a patchwork of green shades on the hillsides. For most of the way, the highway followed one bank of the river and the railroad followed the opposite bank. There were many scenic pull-offs where we would occasionally see fishermen along the bank or in canoes out on the water. At one point there was a long, picturesque covered bridge which we captured in photographs.

It was right at noon when we reached Campbelton, and with the change into the Atlantic time zone, we moved our watches an hour ahead. Campbelton is a fair-sized town, so we stopped at a supermarket to stock up on a few groceries and odds and ends. We also made a quick stop at a hardware store to buy a couple of things, then pulled off into a large parking area on the bayfront to fix a sandwich for lunch. By then it was approaching mid-afternoon with the time change, and time to get going again.

Taking our usual backroads byways down the north coast of New Brunswick, it was refreshing to be back into a bi-lingual province and to see signs in both English and French as we passed through the many small towns that dotted the coastline. However, we were soon into the Acadian region of New Brunswick, and things became thoroughly French again. If you remember a brief chapter or two from your high school history, you may recall that after the British defeated the French in the war we call the French and Indian War (the rest of the world calls it the Seven Years’ War) in the 1760s, they began incorporating what had been French Canada into “English” Canada. The French who remained were required to swear an oath of allegiance to the English king. A group of hold-outs in what are now the Maritime Provinces refused to do so, and those that did not take to the woods and mountains to hide out were rounded up and deported to French Louisiana, where we know them today as the Cajuns of the lower bayou country around the mouth of the Mississippi River. So if I understand it correctly, the Acadians of today are a mix of those who swore allegiance to the king and those who eventually came out of hiding when things settled down.

So tonight we’re back into a new slice of French culture in America. We’re staying in an RV campground in the town of Petit-Rocher-Nord, which sits right on the shore of Chaleur Bay. In fact, we’re parked only about a hundred feet from the water’s edge, and thus, as I predicted a few days ago, we’re now on the shores off the Atlantic Ocean – albeit a somewhat inland arm of a larger offshoot of the ocean itself.