August 2, 2024. Trois-Rivières to Sorel-Tracy

    After wending our way through the busy west edge of Trois-Rivières, back through the countryside we went. We crossed the expressway, which was a little unusual as it had almost always been inland from us, and it stayed closer to the coast while we went a ways inland. Our route was again following the old Chemin du Roy, the “King’s Highway,” a historic road completed in 1737. In Yamachiche, we chatted with David, who was bicycling to raise money for children's cancer.  

   We stopped at an antique/old-fashioned candy/speciality-food shop/former general-store museum out in the country and bought a couple glasses of lemonade and drank them on the porch. As we were about to leave, the owner of the building came out and and talked and talked about the history of the building, and how he and his wife had sold their house and traveled all over the U.S. in their RV.  He also told us about how in the past before icebreaking ships, the St. Lawrence would get ice jams and flood vast areas of the farmland.  The floodwaters would even extend up to the road we were traveling on, even though we were 4 to 5 miles away from the St. Lawrence at that point. Due to the flooding, the road was put in there along the edge where the bottomlands ended and the hill began, and was named the “route at the foot of the side (or slope)” in French.  He also told us about the big rainstorm the afternoon before that had caused some erosion and small landslides in places along the hill and caused a big hole in the parking lot next to the building.  We were again thankful that bad weather had missed us!  We had seen dark clouds ahead of us yesterday but they had passed north of us..

.            The store/former museum
As we traveled along, we looked for evidence of the heavy rain, and did see gullies cut into the gravel shoulders, evidence of a lot of water in the ditches, and in one place some ground had slumped down onto a gravel side road.
At St-Ignace-de-Loyola we took the ferry to Sorel-Tracy on the south side of the St. Lawrence. We enjoyed seeing the other river traffic as we crossed.

.     Although we landed in a good-sized town, we didn’t pass any grocery stores or restaurants on our route to the motel we are staying at, and once we got to it, we discovered that it would have required backtracking several kilometers to get to one. So tonight’s dinner is food from our panniers—peanut butter sandwiches and some trail mix. The motel is on the river, but is definitely not a tourist destination as it looks rather tired and doesn’t overlook the river except  from the back of the parking lot.