It appears we used up all our good weather on the first day. Today was rainy most of the time, rainy and foggy the rest of the time, with very brief dry periods. We have good rain coats with us, but didn’t actually have them on during the heavy rain. We will learn!
Our first interesting stop was at Ste.Anne-de-Beaupre which is magnificent, rebuilt in the 1920s following a fire. The first church was built on the site in 1658.
Our drive through the Charlebois district was somewhat formed by the weather as we were clearly going through magnificent countryside and overlooking the St. Lawrence at times, but it was mostly obscured by rain and at times quite heavy fog. However we stopped in Baie-Saint-Paul which has an active restaurant area and consoled ourselves with local beer, smoked meat poutine, and a smoked meat sandwich.
We followed Hwy 138 along the shore, stopping at a fromagerie to stock up our cooler, and then joined the line for the ferry at Baie Sainte-Catherine. The highway just stops here at the Saguenay River, so there is a free ferry that runs continuously every 20 minutes and surprisingly takes large trucks. Its first come first served, but we were lucky and made it on within a few minutes of arriving. The crossing was a bit rainy and foggy, but we could get glimpses of the spectacular scenery looking up the river towards Saguenay, and coming into Tadoussac.
Tadoussac was historically a fur trading centre and there is a replica of Pierre Gauvin’s trading post. There is also the oldest remaining wooden Chapel in North America, dating from 1757. The town now reminds us of Tobermory, which we visited last year to take the ferry to Manitoulin Island, with a touch of Muskoka as the Hotel Tadoussac that looks very much like the Windermere resort on Lake Rosseau.
At the end of the day it stopped raining long enough to take a short walk along the sand dunes past Tadoussac and enjoy at least a bit of the St. Lawrence scenery.
Wandering with Wendy 