My husband led me astray today.
For weeks as we’ve been preparing for this trip, he’s been talking about leaving the coast and traveling on all these gravel roads that crisscross the peninsula – a little like ‘light’ off-roading. So after driving a couple of hours north on the Trans-Canada Highway, we turned off in the middle of nowhere:
(I’m not sure how well you can make it out but that’s a house in the distance, just to the left of the trees – that guy clearly hates being around other people. What a way to live.)
And then we ventured inland. To be fair, it was quite pretty, but it was far more farmland than either of us were expecting. We did come across possibly the world’s best road sign:
Periodically we ran into a grove of trees with what looked like blue string wrapped around the grove. We were really puzzled by this, until Jon realized they were maple trees, and the blue string was really tubing. They were extracting the sap to make maple syrup. Which was a little bit like ‘doh, right, we’re in Canada – of course they are producing maple syrup’.
We kept passing all these warning signs for moose and deer, but the best we managed to see was a bunny rabbit. I mean, he was cute and all, but it doesn’t really stack up to the moose sighting I’ve been waiting for. I’m starting to think the moose have some sort of secret communication and they’re telling each other to hide when you see those people from Jersey drive by.
We took a little bit more of a detour, and drove along Lac Matapedia, which is part of a provincial park – we couldn’t get that close to it, but did get a couple of nice pics. This doesn’t show how big the lake really is:
We made it to Matane in time for dinner. Our hotel is right on the Saint Lawrence, hopefully we’ll get a couple of nice pictures in the morning.