July 29, 2024. Rivière-Ouelle to St-Vallier

    We were pleased that we woke up about 5:00 and left a little bit before 7:00 as today was supposed to be hotter than yesterday. Amazingly, the guy with the big truck left even earlier and quietly. Thankfully the wind was not strong today, the hills were mild and the day went well. We went about 64 miles which is a bit over a metric century.

  We had many beautiful views of the seacoast, farms and small farm fields of hay, oats and other grains. Many of the fields were slightly higher in the middle sloping down to a drainage ditch on each side. 

        Farm fields along the St. Lawrence

Every little village that we passed through had an huge church building in a style similar in appearance to all the others, most with 2 steeples though we did see 3 and even 4 spires on some. The sad thing was that most did not seem to have much activity.

    In one village we saw a display that was titled in French, “Fishing Without a Boat,” that included some sort of traps. Nearby was a sign in French that discussed fishing for eels. A sort of fence is set up in the water perpendicular to the bank that has side fences on the upstream side that funnel the eels into traps as they go down the river as the tide drops. Seeing the pictures made us realize that we had seen people working on one of those fences earlier and we had wondered what it was, now we knew. 

   As we came into the village where we were going to camp at a warm showers host’s house, we stopped at a fromagerie our hosts had recommended. They make their own cheese there, and we bought ice cream cones and “fromage à l'érable”—“maple cheese.” It was cheese curds that had been coated in maple syrup and then compressed into a block—very delicious! 

  When we got to our hosts’ house along the village road, we discovered that they had created a camping area almost a city block behind their house, and then, continuing back about a similar distance was the St Lawrence. They took us down to the camping area past their green house and garden and down to a mowed grassy area surrounded on most sides by high dense brush that included wild raspberries. (Yum!) It contains a picnic table, a spot for tents under the trees, a tiny flowing stream behind the tent area, a fire pit with a wooden bench, and wood stacked nearby. It also had an outhouse the husband had dug himself that also contained a battery powered by a solar panel for charging your phones. For washing up, there was a bucket you could fill from a hose by a couple rows of blueberries about 50 yards away. For potable water, they had a large jug up at the house. 

    We were invited to bring our food up to their back porch and eat it there with them while they ate their supper. She speaks English very well and he speaks some. We had a wonderful conversation with them while we ate, and also had some tea made from fresh linden flowers. We heard about some of their backpacking adventures, both in Canada and in Norway, and about taking their sailboat all the way to the Bahamas. 

   She grows a number of vegetables in the greenhouse and garden, and although she doesn’t have a farm stand, sells them when available to friends. So we went into her summer kitchen and bought some vegetables and blueberries to take with us.