Between the long weekend, summertime in general, and people finally feeling comfortable to travel, finding accomodation the past week or so has been a challenge. John could find no rooms at all around the Gaspe so we had to scrap that plan and today we just drove across the bottom of the peninsula from Dalhousie to Rimouski and then headed west along the St. Lawrence to Montmagny again for the night. We left our hotel at 10 and arrived at 5:30 Atlantic Time, which was now 4:30 Eastern Time.

The drive was more scenic than we expected. We thought we would be going through forests until we got to the St. Lawrence River, but we spent a lot of time passing farms, Huge dairy farms and really large fields of silage corn or wheat.

There was a sign for a viewpoint off to the left so we made the turn, not expecting too much as we had trees on the right side of the road and farm land on the left. After going uphill about a half mile we arrived at the Val-Brilliant kiosk with an amazing view of the Lake Matapedia and the surrounding farmland.

It’s not your eyes, this photo is out of focus. The truck hit a bump just as I hit the shutter. The viewpoint is at the top of the hill.

At lunch time we pulled into Bic National Park which is a favourite kayaking and windsurfing area. They actually regulate the number of people on the river on any given day, so you need to make a reservation. We just had our PB&J sandwich in the parking lot, took a couple of photos and headed on our way again.

As we approached Rimouski on the St. Lawrence River we hit rain. And we drove through rain – and I mean RAIN – for the next three hours. At times we could barely see the vehicle in front of us.

The rain finally stopped when we were about 80 km from Montmagny and we had a nice drive through some small towns all the way to our hotel.

So, short blog today, which I expected since we had quite a lot of driving to do and not a lot of time for long stops; not that were were any heritage spots or museums to tour anyway. Tomorrow is a shorter day. We only have to go to Berthierville about 2 1/2 hours down the St. Lawrence. We have been on this section of road three times and have stopped at any places that are of interest, which may mean a very short blog tomorrow – or none at all.