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