Day 13 - Canadian Maritimes 2026 - Water Thief, Perce Rock and Paspebiac Beach

We woke up after a peaceful rest on the quay in Clorodorme-Quest, as grateful guests of the owners of the Cantine du Pechuer. We took a little walk around in the morning and absorbed some more of the salty sea air. But now it was time to start heading further East and reach the end of the Gaspe Peninsula.

This is going to be more rugged terrain with a lot more high hills and low valleys. We are grateful to have a smaller motor home now than the big 40 foot rig we used to have. We are much more nimble getting up and down these type of grades...

I do think later on we saw 18%, but I didn't have time to flash a picture of it!!! 

Here is our intended route today, to get around the rest of the Gaspe Peninsula and curve into New Brunswick on the other side of the Gulf of St Lawrence. Now we will be going into an entirely new province!

The roads were good while we wound our way along through the countryside. Every curve and every turn was an amazing new scene. I think in this stretch I snapped 171 photos with my camera. I kid you not.

It was somewhat cloudy and every now and then we got a little splattering of rain. So it's a good day to get some miles on behind us and approach the New Brunswick border. 

Of course, into every bit of traveling there must come a little bit of road construction...

I always say that it gives us the opportunity to look out the windows and check out the wildlife and maybe see something interesting while we wait. I know some people get impatient about having to wait. But I look at it as an opportunity...  This was the view out of my passenger window:

I noticed these little shelf fungi growing on this tree. I always think of my mom when I see shelf fungi. 

As children, we would pull them down if we could reach them and bring them to her. Sometimes my dad would have to go back with a saw to get them off. 

Then my mom would sketch or paint on the underside surfaces. She would set them on end, and cut the base smooth ... or mount them onto pieces of logs. She would do beautiful scenes painted on the shelf fungi as a decorative art item.

One time I remember she did a locomotive coming through a tunnel on a double wide one. Another time, she had done The Last Supper and gave that to our Grandma.  Many times she would do wildlife scenes such as deer or bear or birds. Then our friends who owned a tavern would put them up for sale. Hunters and fishermen bought them as a souvenir decor piece for their hunting camps or to bring back a memory of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan back home with them. She would make extra pocket money that way. 

Whenever there was a Civic group holding a raffle for a fundraiser, she always donated a couple to help raise funds. 

Anyhow, I ramble on here as I'm sitting and looking out the window, waiting for the pilot car to come and bring us through the road construction.

Soon we could see traffic coming from the other way led by the pilot car. Even these big huge double logging trucks have to wait. We counted I think 18 cars that were held up coming from the other direction.

Once they were all past us, it was our turn to go. Goodbye shelf fungi, I will leave you now for somebody else's mother to paint on you. 

On another topic, have you ever heard of a "water thief"???  Lol ... This is what it is. This brand is a "water bandit". 

It is commonly used by traveling RVers to allow them to hook a garden hose connection to a faucet that doesn't have threads. We keep one in our side compartment just for the very instance that we need to fill with water from a faucet lacking the appropriate threads.

This little town had a beautiful park and had the free drinking water symbol on their sign that it was available. But when we pulled in, the water station just had a regular faucet, similar to a kitchen sink. We fortunately had along our "water thief" to hook up and run the hose into our freshwater holding tank.

We do appreciate the opportunity to fill from City water sources. We know that generally the water is sanitized and potable, meaning it's drinkable. We mostly use it just for washing dishes or flushing the toilet. All of our drinking water is filtered through Life Straw pitchers and Life Straw water bottles to protect us from any harmful bacteria or contaminants as we travel. 

While the tank was filling, Steve took the opportunity to get Nick out and about and run off a little of his energy. My knee is doing much better by now, but I really don't want to risk it by walking on uneven ground. So Nick has to get his fun and exercise on the end of a leash with Steve instead of me.

Once we were filled up, Steve put the hose and the "water thief" away. It was time to hit the road again and maybe get some more miles on. Or in this case, in Canada, kilometers. 

It's been fun converting back and forth between miles and kilometers. Steve knows he can go into the settings and change the electronic dash over to kilometers but he really doesn't want to. Then that means he has to turn it back. So I've turned it over on my GPS on the Microsoft Streets and Trips program that I run on the laptop. I can watch the speed and convert it for him. After a couple of weeks, he's starting to figure out where 90 km is or 70 km etc is on his dash.

We rolled along, admiring the countryside, the beautiful coastal waters, and also the architecture. Many of these gorgeous homes are easily over a hundred years old maybe closer to 200. We are enjoying a lot of the different styles and influences.

And as we said before in previous blogs, so many of them are well taken care of, neat as a pin, and the pride of ownership is evident.

Even old farm houses like this, are definitely being preserved and repaired. See the scaffolding?

I guess I just enjoy looking at old houses. For those who don't know me personally, for years I was a real estate agent in Green Bay. I always found showing customers the older homes much more exciting than the same basic three bedroom two bath ranch homes popping up as beige boxes all over in a new subdivision. I could get excited when a customer would say find me a beautiful old brick Belgian farmhouse on 10 acres of land as a Hobby Farm! Those were my kind of customers... Just look at this adorable gray weathered old barn. Even that building looks to be in good repair and well maintained.

It didn't matter the size, from the littlest tiny house that were cute as a bug's ear...

... to these glorious seaside homes with wrap around verandas and probably as many as eight bedrooms!

We found a nice little beach area to pull off and take the time to make some lunch. The waves were gently lapping on the shore as the winds have now died down. There wasn't anyone else around, so we pulled up crossways against the pilings to have a great view out our window.

After our lunch, we figured the rain would hold off long enough to get down on the beach and walk around.  I had a simple task in mind, but I didn't know if it would work here.

My friend Vicky asked me to look for Beach Glass. As many of you know, Beach Glass are discarded shards of glass, maybe from the old habits of towns dumping their refuse out to sea. It's the bottles that were broken and worked ashore ... they get ground down from the wave action. Eventually they become as beautiful as pebbles, with different hues and colors of the type of glass bottle that they originally were.

We walked along up and down the shore, and I set a camera up on a tripod. It didn't take me long at all before I found what was probably the one and only piece of beach class on that entire beach!  There it is, beautiful brilliant green.

Just think, it was probably long ago a 7-Up soda bottle??? 

But now it was a treasure to bring back to my friend Vicky from the Atlantic Ocean. 

We ended our walk as it started sprinkling a little bit again. Time to hop back in and extend the rest of the way to the far easternmost point of the Gaspe Peninsula. 

There is a town called Perce, which means "pierced". A huge island of rock just off at shoreline, protruses way up into the air. At one section of the rock there is a hole through it, and that's why it's called "Pierced Rock". I guess back in the 1700s there were two holes but one section of the rock eventually collapsed in leaving just a towering column on the right side.

It's a pretty famous landmark and photographed often in tour magazines and historical books of the area. The town itself was crammed full of tourists. We had an opportunity to find a little quiet parking lot near an observation deck. I did not yet trust my knee to go up the path, so I sent Steve with the camera. He made a wonderful video that's included in the link down at the end of this blog. Steve is becoming an accomplished camera man, who'd have thunk it?

After we stopped at the other end of town for another vantage point, we snapped a few more pictures and headed on our way. The sun was starting to set and it had just rained again. We had a place in mind to go but we were driving right into the setting Sun as it glared off the wet roads ahead of us. 

It's not really showing up in this photo but we were squinting and using our visors just to see the road ahead.

Off to one side, imagine our surprise to see a big thick rainbow reaching down into the water. I was able to snap this picture straight across underneath Steve's chin as we were driving to the west.

Eventually the sun sunk down below the horizon and we were able to see again. We drove on down to this craggy rocky area of twists and turns to get to our next destination for the night.

The setting Sun was glorious, and it looked like the skies were clearing up and hopefully tomorrow would be a beautiful day?

A little village called Paspabiac-Est has a city park with beach access down the hill. It was getting pretty close to dark and we really don't like ever driving that late. We found our way through the park, between the mini golf and the soccer fields and the playgrounds, to reach the hill that went down down down---

It's hard to blindly follow a route that somebody else has told you about, and put faith in the fact that at the end we hoped we'd be able to turn around if there was no place to camp. Traveling in the dark is not comfortable for either of us. So we were keeping our fingers crossed that this place would work out once we reached the bottom of the hill.

We found a nice wide parking lot with bathroom buildings and all these cute little picnic tables with wooden canopy structures over the top. There was only one other small RV and a car parked there. We were able to pull in as quietly as we could and turn off our headlights to not disturb them. Our reward was the moon rising up over the water!!!

What a perfect ending 

 to a perfect day

 in a perfect spot 

with a perfect moon

We whipped up some late supper and had a special treat for dessert. Earlier in the grocery store I had spotted these maple leaf cookies. From time to time Aldi's grocery stores in the United States carries something similar. I hoped they would taste the same. So we opened up the package. Nope. They tasted even better!!! 

Now I wish I had bought a couple more packages...

Here's the video that goes along with today's blog:

154 miles traveled today 

1,714 miles traveled so far

Day 12- Canadian Maritimes - Cloridorme and Cantine Parking with POUTINE!

Waking up in Cap Seize, it was dark and grey and it was time to hit the road again. The winds had finally died down from the last 2 days, and we felt it was good to work our way back down along the seashore. The main route around the Gaspe Peninsula runs basically along the seashore with just a few roads that cut through the very middle.

Go back down into Saint Ann de Morts with the intention of getting fuel, and also finding a laundromat. Good old Google pointed us to the only laundromat in town. So we really didn't have a choice of all clean or dirty it was... we really needed to do some laundry because we've been on the road for 13 days. 

Usually when we travel, we bring along this Costway washer/spinner unit. It is so handy and portable. It only weighs 30 lbs. And it doubles as a laundry hamper while traveling. Just put our dirty clothes right inside of it as it sets in our shower stall.  When it's time to do laundry, we just fill it with hot water from the shower head and let it agitate right there in the shower stall. We let it drain right through the floor drain in the shower. Then for rinsing we move the clothes to the side and refill with rinse water with fabric softener. Once that is done, a smaller batch at a time is loaded into the other side where they spin. They actually spin almost dry! Then we hang them on hangers to finish drying by the end of the day. It's so handy.

But sadly, this time we decided to not bring it along. We had figured that we would be doing a lot more boondocking, thus limiting our access to extra water. Onboard water is precious when you don't have a lot of places to fill it like at campgrounds or dump stations. So when planning our trip we decided to bite the bullet and not take it along and hit the laundromats instead. 

In retrospect, we found out that Canada is very welcoming to travelers and almost every town has free access to safe portable water to fill up for travelers like us. If we had known that, we would have brought it along for sure.

Have I mentioned that 

I hate laundromats!!!

 Ugh! 

We gathered our Loonies and Toonies, which are $1 and $2 coins in Canada. Steve grabbed the hamper and I grabbed the soap and dryer sheets. We trudged on in and looked around. This was not very promising. The first three beat up avocado colored machines by the door didn't even have coin boxes in them. We assume they are out of order.

We walked down the row of washing machines and only ONE machine was available. All of the rest were filled with people's clothes, but they were already done running through their cycles. Just sitting there. There was not a single solitary person in the place to unload them! There was one machine that was empty but it was jammed and we couldn't put money in or shake the jammed coins out. So that left us to only one single machine to do two loads of laundry. 

The place was definitely stinky, the floors look like they hadn't been mopped in ages. The bathroom, which was moldy and filthy, stunk to high heaven. This was not going to be fun. But we had already put our money in the first machine and had it filling with water to do our first load.

This big huge extractor machine in the back would have been great, except it had a sign on that said out of order. The sign appears that it had been there for quite some time...

Someone came in and removed two loads of wet clothes and left. So now we had a second machine accessible to load in our second batch. 

While the machines were running, we did have the opportunity to go back in the parking lot and Steve was working on cooking us breakfast. Now it was time to access the dryers.  The first two big turquoise ones didn't look very clean. I think people use them for work clothing? The other six white ones were being used by four other people. So fortunately we have two available for ourselves.

We have learned that laundromat machines either heat up too hot that they burn everything and set in the wrinkles as well as dissolve some of the elastic rubber in clothing. Either that, or the machines don't heat up enough and it takes you three times the coins to get your loads finished. It's really the luck of the draw? 

This was kind of a dreary and desolate place. As our clothes were drying, we didn't even want to fold them on the tables. Bit by bit we picked out the dry items and carried them back to the motorhome in stages.

Yes, this is my "laundromat waiting face" for the rest of the loads to completely dry.

Eventually we had everything trekked on back out to the motorhome. While I finished up the breakfast dishes, Steve brought out the last few items. Some damp things were hung up on hangers and suspended them from the cabinetry to dry while we went down the road.

Soon we were back on the road and working our way along the shoreline. The amazing cliffs and the beautiful sceneries soon took away the ickiness of doing our laundry in a laundromat. We just know next time, we won't second guess ourselves and leave the Costway unit at home!

Even though it was raining, the weather kind of fit the scenery. The salty sea air, and the blustery winds, and the crispness and the cold were all a part of the experience. This is what we were looking for, something different than what we were used to. Traveling along through these tiny villages was a real different environment. We imagined what it would be like to live here, but we knew we really wouldn't want to.

The raw beauty of the land surrounding each of these little villages just reinforced in us the fact that it was very rugged and difficult to live in this part of the country. It takes special people to survive out here. They may have the basic amenities, but they are so far from any large cities including medical and industry, as well as competitive shopping and fuel. So they pay what they have to in these small villages just to get by. I am sure many of them rely on the passing tourists to help their little businesses.

And speaking of businesses, we were told in this little tiny town of CLORODORME-QUEST that there was a little food place down on the quay. 

 (A quay is a man-made structure jutting out into the harbor. It is used for loading and unloading of boats for the fishing industry. It is usually made of dirt and rocks).

This little adorable place called Cantine du Pecheur was said to have the best food in town. Not only that, it would also allow you to spend the night on the quay in complete comfort and silence. Next door there was a little ice cream shop. 

Now this was going to be our FIRST restaurant food of the entire trip. We don't often eat out. But we decided to splurge because we read that their crab and lobster rolls were the absolute best... 

What an adorable little place! They have a takeout window, as well as a few tables off on the side and an outdoor public restroom building detached from their tiny business. We noticed a lot of locals coming to pick up their orders and leaving, so we know the food must be good.

We went up to the window to order and three of the staff people inside only spoke French. They did ask us to wait for the fourth person who was English speaking to come up so we could ask about staying in the lot. He came from in the back where he was preparing food, wiped his hands on his apron, and spoke to us in perfect English. And yes, of course we could stay in the lot. 

We decided to order crab rolls with onion rings and a big pan of poutine! Steve had never tried poutine before and he was very anxious to sample this traditional Canadian delight.

They even said they would bring it to us out in the motor home in the parking lot because it was starting to rain. We walked back along the quay, among the piles of fishing nets and lobster pots and crab cages. This was really a working fishing quay, and we were fortunate to be granted the permission to stay here overnight.

We parked off to one side, 

so we wouldn't block any trucks 

that would be coming and going.

Colorful fishing nets piled up, as well as what are known as lobster pots. They are stacked up together when not in use. But when they are submerged out in the ocean, they are stretched out like long cages to capture the lobsters and the crabs.

Just like this: 

 

Soon we had a little knock knock at the door. The gal working inside had graciously brought out our meal to us. When Steve handed her a tip, she seemed genuinely surprised. I guess she didn't think bringing our meal out to our motorhome was service? It sure was nice of her...

We unboxed all of our goodies, and boy did it ever smell good! Extra special treat was that neither of us had to cook anything for dinner. There was actually enough food here for two meals each. 

We were also surprised to see that our crab roll also included french fries. We were already having quite a bit of food here. So we scooped up the french fries and stowed them away in our freezer for later. We reheat french fries in our air fryer, and they are just as good as the day that they are made. The crab roll was so big that we had to cut it in half to share it between us. Plus we needed a fork to eat up all the extras that fell out because it was overloaded with crab meat.

And now for the POUTINE!!! For those of you who don't know, this is a famous comfort food made with hot french fries, fresh cheese curds, and a rich brown gravy.

Steve had never had poutine before. I did because sometimes traditional Canadian foods wander their way down into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. So this was something that can be found from time to time in the states. Or people just make it at home because they love it after visiting Canada. 

I could eat some of it around the edges, but I can't do the cheese curds. (lactose intolerant). But the gravy is such a rich gravy with a almost red sauce taste texture rather than a regular brown gravy made with flour and meat drippings.  It has a little "zing" to it's flavor.

We also ordered some onion rings on the side, and they were probably some of the best onion rings we've ever tasted. The homemade breading was just perfect as well as the rings inside. I think they were made with Vadalia sweet onions. We really enjoyed them and saved half of the pile to reheat later for another meal.  They came with little dipping containers of honey?? 

Once we were done eating our fill, we put the leftovers away for another day. I had had enough and was stuffed, but Steve saved just a little bit of room to wander over next door to this little ice cream shop also situated on the quay.  We loved the brightly colored buildings which look so attractive against the grayish environment of the harbor buildings. It really helps to stand them out as a business rather than just someone's house. 

He brought back his cup of ice cream for dessert, and that was just the sweet treat he was looking for at the end of such a large meal.

Plus, Nick got to lick out the bottom of the container, so he didn't feel left out.

With full tummies, we curled up in the comfort of our nice cozy warm motor home to watch a little TV before bedtime. We have our star link along so we can watch anything we want with our Roku stick attached to the tvs. Believe me, there aren't any broadcast television stations way out here on the Gaspe Peninsula. 

It was raining on and off through the night. But we didn't care, we were cozy and warm and well fed. Thank you Clorodorme Quest for hosting us.

Here is the YouTube that goes along with today's blog post:

93 miles travelled today 

1,560 miles travelled so far

I think this was also the highest price that we paid for fuel which after converting it to US currency was $8.84 a gallon for diesel!!!