New Carlisle, June 11

A terrific biker's breakfast of eggs, spinach, croissants, coffee, potato pancakes, followed by a farewell to Bruce, who was driving back home this day. So Nancy was to reprieve her role as den-mother. She went off for food, and to do the laundry, and also to visit a second-hand bookstore she had found.

Barry and I took off, stopping soon to repair a broken wire on his bike computer. We were along Highway 132, and it was busy in the morning, but the shoulders were good. We went towards New Richmond, and the the Route Verte took us into the town through some pleasant scenery but rough roads, and conveniently by a coffee shop and patisserie. So of course we stopped and indulged. Met an 86-year-old man having coffee with a bunch of younger men, all solving the problems of the day. Barry broke his (new) rule and had a coffee (it appears to make him pee an inordinate amount of times), but all was well with the world as we sat in the sun, outdoors, sipping coffee (and carrot cake and cookies).

Then back on Highway 132 for about ten km, before heading north to the 2e Rang, which we followed quite happily for over twelve km. A few twists and turns through variable land and some difficult dirt roads, the land being mostly for farming, down a wonderful hill where I got up to 64 kph, then past the Bonaventure airport to the town of Bonaventure.

By this time, I had lost any cell signal I had had before, so had no way of contacting Nancy (we had agreed that we would use the phones to arrange a meeting for lunch), and the two of us were tired and hungry. But a miracle happened: we had stopped to rearrange our energy, and were wondering how we would contact Nancy, when she drove around the corner! She had come to the same conclusion that we would not be able to use the phones to make contact, so decided to drive as much of our route as she could, and there we were.

Lunch by the side of the road, and we went on, unfortunately then over an old bridge and along some pretty tough dirt and gravel roads for many kilometres. But eventually back onto pavement and back to the highway. The ride to New Carlisle was easy and smooth.

New Carlisle is the birthplace and youth home of René Lévesque, and they have a statue of him in the park there. We learned later that the statue was life-size, and had been meant to go in Quebec City, but the folks there were shocked at how small it was (he was only about 5'2"), so refused to display it. The claimed it for New Carlisle, and there it sit, in a children's playground.

Slightly further down the road was the Maison Hamilton, and Nancy had found us a place there. We had done about 81 km (the phone ran out of power, so it was not all captured by the cyclometer).

The Maison Hamilton was built in the mid-Nineteenth Century by a judge and merchant named Hamilton, entirely out of stone, and in a style which is apparently quite unique in Quebec. The couple who now own it (Nicole and Marc-Andrée) bought it two years ago as a derelict building, and have spent a lot of time and money (with little help from the Government of course: they were even hesitant to designate it as an historical building, and there are no tax or other breaks for people maintaining such buildings). Nicole regaled us with stories of old buildings in New Carlisle which had been left to neglect then demolished. This area was the main area for the southern coast of the Gaspé during the last century and the first part of this century.

Then the daily question of supper. Nicole suggested, and we took her up on, the restaurant at Paspébiac (which had been a major area for fishing, particularly cod, in the old days; they had had stages for drying and salting cod in great number, but now have a fishing industry without the cod). Interestingly, this area was settled by a number of people: Acadians [we saw a number of Acadian flags], basques, British, and so on. Dinner was delicious, and we returned to our beds, and soon to sleep.