On our way

I'm posting this from the desk of a nicely furnished, spacious bedroom in a Gîte (Le Fleurvil) at Trois Rivières, altogether a pleasant surprise. As you see, our lodging even has a wireless connection. Despite having come only a short distance from Ottawa we've had a very good day.

I'll try to be succinct and shall be leaving out the photos and some of the links till we get back home, so bear with me if there are obvious omissions and baffling references in this journey log.

We took off at noon, after trying to dry some of the gear that had been rained on, using PTN as a clothes horse. Then while Chris was making his pre-flight checks I talked to a lady who was also being flown towards Newfoundland, only she had come all the way from Vancouver (via Oshkosh) which makes our trip insignificant in comparison. She and her husband are in an RV-7, a homebuilt, faster aircraft. I also said hello to three people called John, one of whom was an ex-RFC instructor, now flying for Voyageur in Greenland. He said he wasn't the only ex-RFC instructor in that airline; there were currently nine of them.

With an enticing view downstream over the Ottawa River, the first direction we took was straight to the 'Mirabel' VOR (YMX), staying low at 3000ft because of the cloud bases, Chris showing me some precision flying so that we went exactly over the beacon which I could see quite clearly. It was just beyond the Lac des 16 Iles which I didn't have time to check to see if the namer had got it right. From there, on to Trois Rivières without much of a change of heading, the last 10 minutes of this through rain, though the runway we landed on was still dry. It already felt quite unlike Ottawa with every other pilot announcing his whereabouts in French: "On garde position ... on décole piste 05..."

Debated over lunch where to fly next if anywhere. Lunch was a splendid three course meal with coffee for $8 at a window table in the airport restaurant. Recommended! You can watch nervous parachutists climbing into the aircraft that will take them up for their first jump (for $250). After a chat to Flight Services, we chose to stay on the ground till tomorrow morning, and the lady at the desk suggested this gîte for us. It's in a peaceful corner of downtown, on the rue des Ursulines, a reference to the nuns who landed here in 1697, the school and convent they founded still going strong at the other end of this short street. Fine buildings, that we've walked past several times now, and beyond them the old convent gardens leading to the water's edge where we've been sitting, watching the container ships go by and imagining the "apple boats" that used to tie up here to supply the townspeople with fruit. There's also an interesting boat moored, the FCG Smith, a government-owned catamaran that does ultrasonic depth surveying up and down the river by means of booms that swing out from its sides like wings.

We ended the day in a most relaxed way, sharing fajitas at Los Cactos on the rue des Forges and drinking glasses of "white" beer. I had a swim in the pool here too; I love swimming out of doors with flowers around me and seagulls overhead, especially when I can also see the great river gliding by just the other side of the fence at the bottom of the garden.