We had to go to the Gaspé Peninsula. It was a must and not because of the history, scenery, bakeries and parks.
The urgency had started four days earlier. We were on our planned route to St John’s, Newfoundland when it made sense. Milissa had been saying for a few days that that big storm in the Bahamas was headed our way and I had casually and callously ignored the warnings, only to later apologize for my disregard of Dorian. The storm track maps kept showing that Nova Scotia and Newfoundland were directly in its path, and my wife’s cautionary concerns were validated with every update.
By Labor Day, we had made it as far east in Newfoundland as Terra Nova National Park and had planned to take the ferry from St John’s back to Nova Scotia on the next Monday. That would have allowed us to see the SE part of Newfoundland in the next week. But something about the Halifax weather forecast for 40 mph winds with gusts to 80, and the graphics in this Boston Globe story changed our minds.
So we rearranged our ferry crossing to Thursday (Wednesday was booked) from the SW of Newfoundland. In two days driving back across “The Rock” as they call it, several locals scoffed and said that they’ve seen plenty of bad weather. Yes, it might have been fun to see just how much wind it takes to tip the trailer over (I often sleep on my side anyway) or rip off the roof vents, but the thought of waiting in a windy multi-day downpour for the right combination of RV repair and trying to get a spot on a re-scheduled 16 hour ferry crossing just didn’t appeal.
As Dorian closed in on us and Donald kept defending his Sharpie drawing, we took a third day to cross on the ferry and drive two hours down Nova Scotia under pleasant skies. Day 4 was a long drive across New Brunswick. Clouds started shaping, and fleets of utility trucks were heading east as we bore west to the relative safety of Gaspé.
We took a break at a visitor center just inside Quebec, and we noticed one older couple pointing at us and snapping pictures. Never missing an opportunity to pose for stardom, I walked up and asked what they were marveling at. Speaking almost no English, the couple had just arrived from France, and they had never seen an RV so big. We explained that ours was small to medium compared to most 5th wheels. I think I even heard an ooh-la-la as we invited them inside, opened up the slides, and had them pose for pictures behind the wheel of the big brown truck. Much fun.
We camped at Carleton-sur-Mer just at the outer reaches of the storm’s path and listened to pounding rain and 25 mph winds most of the night. Recovering from our four day exodus, the following day we strolled the beach for beach glass, and watched two kite surfers playing in the windy residues of Dorian. Then on the third day we set out on an expedition to test our bikes on a steep long climb into the mountains where we found a big wind farm (you could get really close to those turbines) and a muddy, rocky road to the back side of the Oratoire Notre-Dame-Du-Mont-St-Joseph, a chapel built in 1935 with a great view of the bay and village below. https://montsaintjoseph.com/.
Time to move on, so we headed to Gaspésie National Park. It’s a well known fact that the prevalence of moose and the availability of bandwidth are inversely proportional. But in these many weeks in the Maritimes, despite the frequent warning signs and locals’ tales, we hadn’t seen a single moose. I was beginning to think it was all a big marketing scam, like “I ❤️ NY” or the Loch Ness Monster, simply trying to lure gullible tourists. Finally, as Milissa was driving after dark back to the campground, there it was! Right on the side of the road, a big moose butt stilted over outrageously tall legs, daring and scaring us, unpredictably poised to dart either way. Damn that thing was BIG! And antlers the size of Long Island gave a flashing glance just as Bullwinkle’s brother ran off into the dark woods.
Only at the top of the hike the next day did we have a tiny window of bandwidth. How gauche to text photos and make phone calls from the mountaintop. But there was no one else around, and it felt delightfully sinful after having been through our own bandwidth Lent these past weeks.
Mont Xalibu
And that, my friends, explains why our blog posts have been so slow and out of date. We hope to catch up and get on schedule once we depart from these moose infested regions.