North side of St. Lawrence Seaway

[Ouiji Veck]

I have the beginnings of plans to head that way in Aug.

Wondering if it's as spectacular as The Gaspe..

If not maybe do the Gaspe again...maybe just stay drunk in

Quebec and chase the little French girls around...

Anyone have pics?

[g.forrest]

I have the beginnings of plans to head that way in Aug.

Wondering if it's as spectacular as The Gaspe..

If not maybe do the Gaspe again...maybe just stay drunk in

Quebec and chase the little French girls around...

Anyone have pics?

 

pics of being drunk with little french girls............[i'm not sharing them]...

[Ray]

I was up there last summer. Fantastic, rode up through Baie Comeau, then ferried back to Gaspé at Matane. Next time will explore further north up the Saguenay to Chicoutimi, maybe even a ride up to Labrador when not under time pressure.

 

I have posted the story with photos on the Maine Euro Moto site:

 

http://www.eurobikemaine.org/cgi-bin/yabb2...?num=1170915305

 

Love it up north. Fewer cars, fewer cell phones, better food, better scenery. Nice language. More oriented toward two wheels. Here's a piece of Qubecois public art, for instance, the separatist norseman of the St Laurence. Perhaps this might be the quiz stumper for next week?

 

 

Link's not working, just go to http://www.eurobikemaine.org/ and look for the Guzzi forum. It's there. Maybe I'll repost it here too.

 

 

Here you go, I'll save you all some point and clicking. Enjoy. This summer's booked for me but I'd go again in a second. Story follows:

 

Well I've been back from my roadtrip for a while. Just got around to sharing the memories of our ride to Quebec and the North coast of greater Maine. For those of you who are still interested, for six days last week (I wrote this in August), Chris Dingwell (Sanctuary Tattoo owner and new owner of Larry Haynes' Le Mans II) and I rode our respective motorbikes up to Quebec City, along the north coast of the St. Laurence River to Baie Comeau, ferried to Matane on the Gaspe, and rode the perimeter of the Peninsula, then back through New Brunswick, Aroostock County, and Far Downeast Maine, all on secondary roads, until the last jam back down the interstate into blistering heat from Bangor southward.

 

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n178/rs...ewethereyet.jpg

 

Dinner in Quebec City tourist village, but more authentic than merely quaint. It rained on our outdoor cafe dinner and we blasted out of town to find a place to stay. First night outside Quebec City just short of St. Anne de Beaupre, in a lovely inn on the Puce River. Our idea of primitive camping:

 

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n178/rs...n/Firstcamp.jpg

 

We returned to Quebec City on a neat little road of stone houses and flowerboxes, antique shops and country church towns. We thought we were in France. And we were. All six hours north of Portland.

 

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n178/rs...gosofQuebec.jpg

 

We spent our second night in Tadoussac, at the mouth of the Saguenay River, apparently the last resorty spot on the north side of the St. Laurence. The St. Laurence is a steep-walled fjord (salt water tidal river) with all sorts of rivers and waterfalls running into it. Some low tides, too.

 

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n178/rs...lledtheplug.jpg

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n178/rs...in/FukawiQC.jpg

 

Whale-watched at sunset from the top of a 300 foot dune. Camped in a "Yogi Bear" campground. Not bad, once I became a pushy NYer and demanded a better tent site that wasn't squeezed in between two cars. Good bohemian cafe dinner and met a couple from near Chicoutimi, Caroline and Martin, who were on vacation from their teenage daughters, having recently banished them to Cuba for the sumnmer. All along I had been speaking French pretty well, but it got much better once we hit the Amigos (our watering hole in Portland) of Tadoussac - live country music in French, drinking Belle Guelles ("Nice Cheeks") on the deck.

 

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n178/rs...stysaguenay.jpg

 

Spent most of the next day killing time in Baie Comeau waiting for the ferry. The bowling alley was closed, so we found a beautiful waterfall (Falls of the Outarde)

 

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n178/rs...ingromantic.jpg

 

and picked blueberries instead.

 

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n178/rs...ein/bleuets.jpg

 

Met Francois and a crowd of affable drunken Quebecois H-D riders all in the motorcycle ghetto waiting area of the ferry parking lot. Came across very few Americans at all, mostly Quebecois tourists, as a matter of fact. Spent the third night in an "Uncle Ernie's Holiday Camp" tourist hotel on the other side of the ferry crossing, in Matane. The five places we tried previously had no vacancies. We started to get worried as we were still buzzing the town at 11:30 at night, but we ended up a nice old place on the beach, and the bar was still open. This was not the first of our fortuitous discoveries, as it turned out. With very little planning, we cast our fate to the wind and the scant remaining tread left on our tires.

 

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n178/rs...orientation.jpg

 

Saw Francois leave the same hotel 10 minutes before us on his V-Strom. Rode with him the next couple of days to Forillon National Park along the beautiful and largely uncrowded northern Gaspe coast,

 

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n178/rs...in/openroad.jpg

 

before cutting inland to ride through the interior mountains.

 

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n178/rs...coisforpres.jpg

 

Ate lunch with a moose head for company. Rode through Murdochville, a defunct tin mining town and I blew my rear shock seals on the fairly frost-heaved road. (Have an Ohlins now, thank you.) Skipped rocks for an hour on a beach of perfect skipping stones near the tip of the Gaspe. (My Camera battery was exhausted after this point.)

 

http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n178/rs...in/landsend.jpg

 

Another gourmet dinner, not 10km from the campsite. Camped that night under ridiculously bright stars across the road from the beach and watched a satellite cross the sky, and meteorites plummeting through the atmosphere.

 

Rode down the south coast of Gaspe, viewing weird rock formations and riding switchbacks under sheer sandstone cliffs, reminding me of Utah more than the east coast. Said au revoir to Francois at Chandler as he continued his trip to the remote Ile de la Madeleine offshore. We started finding increasingly suburban towns on the south coast, dodging thunderheads and logging trucks, and finally hitting road construction, Canada style, in the New Brunswick French-English linguistic borderlands. Back across the US border at Van Buren, north of Caribou through potato country, then it got increasingly isolated and remote just as we needed a place for the night. Road weary and aching of monkey-butt, we were making big miles to get back on schedule to make up for our days of aimless slacking. Considered camping on the utility line right of way, but found an Uncle Ernie's Holiday Camp on Grand Lake south of Danforth, ME just before dark, where we pitched tent in the playground. Swam in the heated pool before turning in. Ahh, the simple life, another fortuitous accident. Loons whistling that night too.

 

Woke up and headed for the coast to look around Machias and Lubec. Cold and misty on the verge of rain most of the morning, blueberry pie for lunch, Took a leak at the side of the road and ate more blueberries. Then through Bar Harbor traffic and up to I-95, where we jammed back to Portland to beat rush hour traffic. Spent rush hour beering in the garden at Amigos, official watering hole of our home port.

 

One might find some of these places online:

 

Auberge Sault a la Puce, (west of St. Anne de Beaupre, QC)

Domaine des Dunes camping, Tadoussac, QC

Hotel Belle Plage, Matane, QC

Forillon National Park, QC

Greenland Cove Campground, Danforth, ME (on Grand Lake)

[badmotogoozer]

and chase the little French girls around...

 

 

The big ones are easier to catch.

 

Rj

[Ray]

I'd say it's worth going. The north side is all sheer cliffs and fjord-like, with waterfalls careering down. If you got as far east as Montmorency, you get the idea. Same all the way up, but as the river widens, you can't see the other side. The road follows the coast at the river floodplain level, and here and there the towns climb up the slope if it isn't too steep. The population peters out north of the Saguenay - prime whale watching there at Tadoussac, a quaint little summer town full of trust-fund hippies. We missed the turnoff at Baie St. Paul and kept going, but hear there's culture and fellowship with the fairer sex afoot there too.

[Ouiji Veck]

Thanks Ray...just what I was fishing for.. sans some good areial

shots of the road itself...

Yea mon....looks like the "way out" places we like to get too.

It's getting harder and harder to find places to get lost.

Thanks a heap.

[Ray]

Ouija,

 

A place I found on the map, not exactly a secret, I guess, is a place I'd like to visit up there, a perfectly round lake with a wide, round island in the center, a meteor strike, Lake Manicouagan. I'm thinking it would be a neat place to go canoeing, essentially a river that goes around in a complete circle. Up above Baie Comeau.

 

Send back a report.

 

Ray

[Ouiji Veck]

Yea....Reservoir Manicouagan ...I was checking that out. First thing that came to mind was

"meteor hole" Incredible lakes, rivers and wilderness just a couple days ride...

Yea..I got a new camera, you can expect a photo essay.

Gonna be a great summer!!!

[Orson]

Thanks for the trip report Ray

 

Gaspe looks like a great destination

[ferguzzi]

I've flown over it 3 times in daylight in the last month, bad timing I'm afraid as I won't be in that neck of the woodsfor another 2 months or so ,so I can't get a few photos.

Mind you ,all you can see from 35000 ft at the moment is snow, snow,snow....

[Ray]

Here's a nice one from the web. Google Lake Manicouagan for more info. Once thought I'd take the tub off my Ural and make a cradle for a kayak. This would be the trip for that rig.

 

I've also been around Newfoundland twice, but on 4 wheels only. Pretty frost-heaved and straight roads, but great destinations and people very open to socializing with visitors. Not a Sport/ Lemans trip, more a Norge slab surfer trip. Icebergs are plentiful around late May, before the blackflies. Drove up through Nova Scotia through clouds of blackflies - watch your timing, as you CAN'T be outdoors for a northward moving two-week window without netting and insect armor. Drove back on Cabot Trail, but kept at it on the road and didn't stop at all to smell the flowers. Will be back there too.

 

Ray

 

[nhmainiac]

I have been up that way on snowmobiles. We took a ferry across from Matane. Head Northeast it is very beautiful. I am planning a trip like that myself.