The second leg of our trip found us leaving Tadoussac, QC, taking the ferry across the St. Lawrence river, then driving along the northern edge of the Gaspé peninsula, reaching our destination of Forillon National Park(pronounced For-ee-on ~n silent). I won't put you to sleep with all the boring details of actually getting there, but the scenery was pretty much fantastic once we got above the city of Rimouski. It was one of those drives where you go around the corner and go "holy shit, look at that!" Much of the road is right on the seaway, so it's hard to keep your eyes on the road. Picturesque towns dot the way and sometimes we just had to stop and try to take it in. One of the things that caught our attention was the windmill "fields" for lack of a better term, that we saw. Curiously, only about 20% were actually operational.
Here are a few photos of the drive up:
Remember ESSO?
WELL....
Finally after a very long drive and some anxiety over whether or not we'd actually find a campsite at Forillon, we arrived at our destination. Luckily and incredibly there were plenty of campsites available. National park, middle of summer, no reservation required. Who da thunk? Dog tired, we were treated to this view after we entered the park:
Spectacular to say the least and it would keep getting better. We only had a couple of days to spend here, so in the morning we woke up early, had hearty breakfast and took off on a 16 or so mile hike that would take us to the tip of the peninsula. We hiked up to a lookout tower where we had fantastic views, through some pretty active bear country, and along pastoral seaside paths that eventually led us up to the lighthouse at the very tip of the peninsula. On the way back, we actually saw some whales breaching out in the bay, waterspouts and all! Fantastic.
Here are some photos from that day - starting with the hike over the stem of the peninsula up to the lookout tower:
Incidentally, we had binoculars with us and you could look down from the tower and see seals playing/eating/surviving/doing whatever the F seals do down in the surf below. Pretty cool.
Now for the seaside part of the hike. This is along the south shoreline of the tip of the Gaspe. The path is part of the international Appalachian trail, which is an extension of the original AT. This part starts at Mt. Katahdin in Maine and the terminus is the tip of the Gaspe. The trail goes through an old fishing village that the national park service bought out in the 1970's and many but not all the buildings are preserved. Anyway, I'll let the photos do the talking.
Nora and Dave at the very tip of the Gaspe!
The lighthouse:
Here are some photos from the walk back to the car. As I said before, the area is infested with bears. They feed on Osier and Raspberries. We didn't see any on our hike, but we found plenty of evidence:
OK, at this point, my ADHD is kicking in and I'll just post a few more photos of the rest of the trip, which includes a sunrise on the beach (we actually came across a porcupine in the path) and the drive back through the touristy town of Perce and it's famous Perce Rock:
Perce Rock
So, that's pretty much about it - we had a stop or two along the way, we stopped to visit some of Nora's friends from New Milford who actually have a cottage on the Gaspe that they paid 10G's for, remarkable... I wish I had the camera when we walked out their back yard to the ocean, incredible scenery.
One of the funny parts of the trip was the border crossing when we were coming back to the states and being interrogated by border patrol: "uh, so where you folks goin' tonight?" I reply, "well sir, we're trying to make Caribou." Nora got a grand kick out of that... like we were in the middle of a snowstorm and Caribou was 500 miles away. Here it is the middle of August. She still laughs about it. Ok, I can take it.
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