The weather so far has been excellent, although a bit windy and we’ve been blown right along with it.
From Godbout, we drove to Sept-Iles stopping in Port-Cartier to try the chocolates at Chocolaterie Cartier and the pastries at Ma-Mie, two stops on the Cote-Nord Gourmet Trail.
Unfortunately, neither was particularly impressive. The caramel filled chocolate Capelin (a small fish) were good but the dark chocolate bar with cashews and the white chocolate bar with cranberries were just so-so. They were also cast in a pattern that was impossible to break apart cleanly.
The Ma-Mie bakery was really tiny and we missed it the first time we passed by. Ellen had a vanilla cream filled croissant shaped like a muffin that was a bit hard to handle and I had a cinnomon roll. Both we okay. The coffee was a bit disappointing. As Ellen remarked, It’s better at Tim Hortons.
Onward to Sept-Iles. We got to the Visitor Center at nearly 1pm. It is also the office for the municipal campground which is on the water behind it.
The first thing we noticed was the truck camper parked in front of the EV charging stations in the visitor center parking lot. On a closer look, we noticed it was oa Ford 150 Lightning, Ford’s EV pickup truck. Our first sighting of an EV camper.
Actually, Camping in an EV or driving an EV on the Cote-Nord is very easy. Every small village along Route 138 has at least one EV charging station supplied by Hydro-Quebec. Except in the smallest hamlet, they are fast charging DC Chargers. We’ve seen EVs pretty consistently on the road. We were passed in both directions today by a small Hyundai EV going to Kegaska. He was pretty obviously driving the length of Route 138 because it could be done.
Back to Speedy Camping. The sites at Sept-Iles were facing the harbor but set back from it a bit. It was a small campgroup with 18 serviced sites all in a row, Ours was site 14. It was pleasant enough, but we decided to only stay one night. Sept-Iles is the largest town and was a bit too city-like. The birding was pretty sparse.
While we were looking out at the water in the afternoon we noticed large clouds west of us up the coast. They were actually clouds of smoke from wildfires that had blown up in the wind. We could just watch as the the smoke made its way towards us. We were pretty lucky as the smoke stayed out over the water where we were, but we could see it coming across the harbor and onto the land west of us. By Saturday morning, the sky was quite clear, but the smell of the smoke was definitely in the air.
Saturday morning, we decided to continue on along the coast. We weren’t sure where we would end up. We made a couple of stops along the way to look at some small villages and also happened upon some possible boondocking spots. The first stop was at Riviere-au-Tonnerre where we found a parking spot across from the church overlooking the harbor. Wonder of wonders, they had a sign allowing overnight parking up to three days. We mght actually stop there on the way back.
The othet town we stopped in was Riviere-Saint-Jean, another spot with a nice harbor and ocarn view. It had a little park right behind the post office looking out at the Gulf. It had a little building with toilets and picnic tables and a playground. There were no signs prohibiting overnighting.
This was unusual, as many of the turnouts and seaside parking spots now have parking signs indicating no overnight RV parking. I suspect this is a recent trend as it would be easy to overwhelm the local parks with the hordes of vanlifers now on the road. We have seen many more vans on this trip than almost any year in the past. Last night we were parked in a row of four.
We ended up at Camping de la Minganie at Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan, a really nice spot along the coast and one of the hubs that run boat tours out to the islands of the Archipelago of the Minganie, a National Park. The campground is moderately large and had all kinds of sites along the beachfront and also along the woods awy from the water. We took an unserviced beachfront site way out at the end. We were pretty much by ourselves. The site was primarily a tent site but Speedy was small enough to fit in . We had a great view out to the islands.
It was really windy when we arrived on Saturday, but the seabirding was pretty spectacular. There were scores of Gannets and Terns diving with rafts of ducks, primarily eiders, floating by. We had loons and mergansers as well as spotting a small group of razorbills pretty far out. It was our first real trial of Ellen’s new spotting scope and it worked out well. By mid-afternoon the heat waves in the air precluded very long distance observation, but most of the action was closer in. The wind kept us in Speedy late in the afternoon and in the evening. Speedy was definitely rockin’.
It had calmed down by Sunday morning and we were able to walk about for a bit including a walk along the boardwalk that went from the campground along the beach to where the boats left for their island excursions. Between the boardwalk and the beach are very vegetated dunes which contained more Savannah Sparrows that I’ve ever seen before. They seemd to pop up evey few feet. Lots of good looks here.
The same was not to be said of the seabirds. The Gannets and Terns had just avout disappeared it was very quiet out on the water with virtually nothing but a few gulls to be seen for most of the day.
Yesterday morning we continued on to Havre-Saint-Pierre for a night at their municipal campground and our next stop on the Gourmet Trail, Boutque du terroir Chez Julie, right across from the Visitor Center on the harbour. The scones were good, but the coffee at Tim Hortons was still better. We also picked up some local preserves and more chocolate frome a different chocolatier (It was better chocolate).
The municipal campground was at the other end of town from the main harbor, but it is a much smaller town than Sept-Iles. It has both inland wooded sites and beachfront sites. Once again, we chose an unserviced beachfront site with a view. The weather has been so nice, 60-70s during the days, 50s at night, but with the winds, that our solar panels and the daily drive have provided plenty of power. After checking in we drove over to the local supermarket to find it closed. It was Saint-Jean-Baptiste day, a Quebec provincial holiday. We drove back to camp and took a long walk instead. The seabirding was pretty quiet but the view out to the Archipelago was quite nice and it eventually gets dark and quiet and the local lighthouse looms out on one of the islands.
This morning we moved on with the intent of driving to Natashquan and camping there. We first stopped at the local supermarket to reprovision a bit as it was now open. We also stopped at the Tim Hortons next door for better coffee than the fancy places…this is according to Ellen.
The drive out towards Natashquan was quite interesting as the landscape had changed to open flat boggy areas with lots of little full lakes. It is similar to the pothole prairie area of the US midwest. It was very flat in places except from an area between Aquanish and Natashquan where it was quite rolling through a section where lots of bedrock ledge was exposed. There was a large section shortly beyond Havre-Saint-Pierre where the scrubby forest had been recently burned with miles of bare scraggly tree skeletons.
We stopped in Aguanish at the local smokehouse, Fumoir le Goynish, to check out their products. They specialze in smoked salmon and they gave us a sample of each of their products—all wvery good. We left with a piece od cold-smoked salmon and a small container of salmon mousse.
Our last stop on the Gourmet tour was a lunch stop the Cafe-Bistro l’Echouerie which supposedly had local cuisine. Not exactly, but we did have bacon, egg and tomato sandwiches and a sort of gravlax appetizer, more lax than grav with lots of diced cucumber and onion rather than mostly salmon. It seemed to be run by and populated by 20-somethings with computers, kind of a rural Starbucks office as they had good WiFi. I wasn’t quite sure who were the employees and who were the customers. They did have good country blues in backgorund though.
After lunch we went on to the municipal campground which was a real disappointment, sort of an open sandpit by the side of the road, nowhere near the ocean. We decided not to stop and continued to the end of Route 138 in Kegaska, 40km further on. Aside from the “FIN” sign at the end of 138, there didn’t seem to be nuch there beyond the ferry dock. There is a beach further up a dirt road with a shipwreck that is the other photostop, but we didn’t bother. Ellen took the obligatory picture of Spoeedy at the FIN sign to complement the one at the end of US 1 in Key West (but that was in old Speedy). We were now on the return leg of our drive of the Cote-Nord.
The closest campground beyond Natashquan was outside Aquanish, which is where we are now, at another beachfront unserviced site with a great view. It is again a bit windy and again had good birding with many of the same species as Longue-Pointe, but with the addition of an Osprey instead of Gannets.
After a tasty steak, new potatoes and burst tomato dinner, we settled in for the evening and I wrote up as much of our travels as I remembered.
We are way ahead of our expected travel time as distances were closer than we thought and some sites were not as interesting as we expected. I’m not sure what we will be doing from here, but we will probably make our way back to Godbout and take the ferry to the Gaspe. What happens then is TBD.
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