Road Trip - Au Revior Québec
Yesterday was a relaxing day for us and we didn’t really achieve much, so this blog post covers both September 8 and 9. All we really did on the 8th was sit around the cold campsite while it rained on and off, which wasn’t such a bad thing as we had a couple of long driving days coming up and we’d had a full-on day the day before. We felt bad for not properly exploring the beautiful Jacques Cartier National Park, but we can’t do everything.
Today we woke up reasonably early, with the aim of being back at the Citadelle in Quebec for a tour that started at 10am. We decided to get breakfast on the road to save some time (for me a double-double and Beyond Meat sausage and egg muffin from Tim Hortons), but despite our best efforts we missed the tour. Not a problem though, as there was another starting at 11! We drove right in to the Citadelle through the winding entranceway that was just wide enough for our car to fit through.
The tour led us around the inside of the Citadelle for an hour. It’s home to the Royal 22nd Regiment of the Canadian Army and as such is an active military installation, so we were not permitted to look around without a tour guide. We were shown a shooting gallery, an amazing view from on top of one of the bastions, and the Cap Diamont Redoubt which was the first building to be built on the site back in 1693.
The Citadelle is built in a star shape, which gives defenders open lines of fire to any point along the outer walls, eliminating all blind spots. If the outer walls were square, as soon as an attacker was close enough, they would be out of the firing arc of the defender’s canons. But with this shape, the outer faces of all the walls are visible from another wall of the citadelle. There are other interesting design features, such as the winding entrance passage which is designed to give retreating defenders immediate cover from attacking fire. Even the placement of the necessary drainage ditches is such that they provide an obstacle to an attacking force.
After the tour, we got back on the road again towards Sugarloaf Provincial Park in Campbellton, New Brunswick. We hadn’t planned to drive along the east coast of New Brunswick, preferring the more direct Highway 2 that runs down the western edge of the province, but a guy I met at my WeWork office in Toronto told me that that highway is terribly boring, and the coast was a much nicer drive. We took his advice and booked this campsite only a couple of days ago!
Along the road we passed through lots of small towns, all with huge Catholic churches towering far above their rooftops. At one point we were looking down into a valley and could see three different towns, identifiable primarily by the shining silver steeples.
It seems compulsory for every farm to have a huge partially collapsed barn. We've seen so many of these, not just in Quebec, all in various states of collapse. I wonder if they're still used for anything, and what era they're from?
We had a short stop for lunch at Rivière-du-Loup and took a walk out onto a small peninsula that sticks out into the St Lawrence river. Google had suggested that there was a big lighthouse here, but all we found was a modern-looking breakwater protecting a little marina, and a car ferry.
While we were here, we started looking at alternate plans for the next part of our trip, as things are starting to be disrupted by Hurricane Dorian. The campground at Cavendish, Prince Edward Island has just emailed to let us know that due to storm damage they will be closed for the rest of the year, and so they’ve refunded our booking. There’s a few other National Parks on our itinerary that are still evaluating the damage and haven’t announced if or when they will be opening again.
As our last stop in Quebec, we called in to a service station (dépanneur) to buy some more ice and road trip snacks. Side note here, our $60 Coleman Cooler is incredible, and there will still be ice in the water after 3 days, even though we open it multiple times per day. We’ve found ourselves in several situations where nobody at the shop we’re in speaks English, and this was one of them. Katie saved the day by asking for the ice in French!
The drive out of Quebec was beautiful. The road followed alongside a Restigouche River with lush green forest on either side before crossing the interprovincial bridge into New Brunswick. Immediately on the other side of the bridge the road signs had English on them again! New Brunswick is still very French though so most signs are bilingual, and make creative use of the word ordering in the two languages, for example a road sign would point to Chemin Restigouche River Road, which in French would be Chemin Restigouche River, and in English is Restigouche River Road.
We arrived at Sugarloaf after dark, and in a new time zone (we’re now on Atlantic Daylight Time, UTC -04:00). This park requires an access card to gain entry, and we got here after the registration office closed, so I rang up the park security. The guard met us at the gate after picking up our info that the park officer had kindly left out waiting for him, and showed us where to drive through the park to get to our campsite. He even followed us up the road to make sure we found it in the dark, and that we’d be all good for the night. We’ve heard lots about the friendliness of people in the Maritimes, and from our first impressions the rumours are true!