Jun 30 - Shopping in Matane, QC
We arrived at Camping Annie a couple of days ago at
the same time as an RV tour caravan did. Yesterday, we
met a couple – Dan and Jann Miller from California
with the tour. We had a great chat. We swapped
"business" cards and wished them well. Who knows?
We may see them again as they are on a 58-day tour of
the Maritimes, Quebec, and Newfoundland.
Today was departure day for their tour group.
Twenty-two participants: 2 Sprinter-based motorhomes, 2 – large 5th wheel trailers, and the rest were mostly diesel pusher motorhomes. Beacoup d'argent tied up in those puppies!
They started pulling out just before 7 a.m. and the "tail-gunner" left 3 hours later. He's the guy that brings up the rear and keeps the strays in order as they venture down the road!
As you can see from the picture, the weather wasn't particularly brilliant this morning. But we decided to head out anyway. Where to? Well we headed east to Matane. Yeah, we'll be going through there again tomorrow, but we thought we'd go check the place out. A little easier without Ali!
When we saw a road heading into a village, we took it. Smack dab in the middle is the large Catholic church. Here's the one in Baie-des-Sables.
Not much happening here, not even a coffee shop.
We got to Matane – a city of over 14,000 – and drove past this dam on the Matane River.
Quite a bit of water coming over the dam from the recent rains.
We drove into the old part of town and found a very nice little café. It was busy. Wifi was available so Jen downloaded
3 books from Amazon for nighttime reading.
After coffee, we headed back to Camping Annie. We made a few stops along the way at places we had seen on the way to Matane.
The St Lawrence looks more like the open ocean than a river, doesn't it? By the way, we saw the ferry that runs between Matane and Baie Comeau on the north shore of the St Lawrence. It takes 2½ hours to make the crossing. For those of you familiar with the ferry trip to Vancouver Island, that's over an hour longer just to cross the St Lawrence river!
Here's another sleepy little village.
Back out on the highway, whaddyathink of this?!
Just look at the formations and the colours!
We continued our drive along the St Lawrence. We pulled into a rest stop for a break and saw these rock formations.
Here's Jen having a closer look (I think she spotted something in a tidal pool!).
As it turned out, we pulled in behind a truck and trailer from BC. We chatted with the couple from Winfield, BC (in the Okanagan Valley between Kelowna and Vernon). They asked us if we had visited the cheese shop across the highway. Well we hadn't but we did when we left the rest stop.
And we're sure glad we did. We bought a couple of cheeses, one with herbs and one like a Camembert. Damn the latter was good! I think we will be stopping there tomorrow on our way east to pick up some more.
So that was it for today. We're back at the campground and the sun has appeared. We can put the heater away for today. (The daytime high temperature has hovered around 13ºC for the past 2 days)
Tomorrow we head for Mont-Saint-Pierre for the Canada Day weekend.
See you there.
And the proverbial.
