Posted from Sept Iles

It's a far cry from last night's accommodation. Chris says we're in the sleaziest hotel he's every stayed at. Never mind, we have a bed and another Internet connection and the girl said they sprayed the room very thoroughly with perfume to get rid of the smell, as they had no chambre non-fumeur to spare for us. Outside the window, which can be opened, is a view of a flat roof and a cracked wall. The tiles in the bathroom are cracked and wobbly as well. It's also not costing us very much to stay here ($67 including taxes) and we're right by the waterfront where we have just watched the sun set and the factories on the islands across the bay lighting up with many little lights. There's not a breath of wind so the water is silky. Two tankers are anchored just off shore.

Sitting in the Parc Portuaire at Trois Rivières last night and at breakfast this morning with a view of the St Lawrence through the window I imagined La Vérendrye (b. 1685) staring at the river as a small boy and wondering where it came from. "I'll find out one day," he must have thought. When he grew up he discovered the Rocky Mountains. We have been following the River in the other direction today. The weather improved so that we could file IFR to Baie Comeau, with the option of modifying this plan in the air and diverting to Forestville (CYFE). As we took off we saw a couple of white birds on the field that we couldn't identify, looked like herons.

Climbing to 7000ft we briefly entered cloud just before Quebec, after which we were Over The Top on a white cloud carpet and could see that the weather was clearing ahead of us, which was lovely, the sky over the river soon clear of cloud. Once over the Baie St Paul, the clouds inland broke up too, giving us wonderful views of the Isle aux Coudres, of Charlevoix airport and La Malbaie by the shore. Chris promptly cancelled IFR and filed a VFR plan from the air, now aiming for Forestville, CYFE, 45 minutes away. At this point I wrote in my notebook "absolutely gorgeous view ahead" of the whale watching cruise boats at the mouth of the Saguenay and the ferry taking the cars across to the continuation of the road that runs east-west, Highway 138. We then saw a pilotship leaving the side of a container ship and speeding back to shore in the Baie des Escoumins. This is where the Flottbek dropped our pilot last year.

It was a funny sort of afternoon. Forestville airport is a good place to land in that it's "adjacent" to the town, so that lunch can be just a short walk down the road, but there's tight security in Forestville. Even the cemetery is kept under lock and key. We locked ourselves in the airport building while using the washrooms. Meanwhile a police helicopter hovered in, unable to park because PTN was in the way being fuelled. Chris, wanting to help push, gesticulated wildly through the windows shouting "let me out" (but not in French). The usual way for pilots to get through the barrier is by phoning 001 (repeatedly) to speak to a remote operator who then checks your call sign to see if you're a real pilot and if you pass the test unlocks it for you so that it slides open. To stretch our legs we walked down a steep hill towards the Rimouski ferry terminal as far as a hydro station where river water was turbined through huge pipes before tumbling voluminously into the sea. Then a long hot climb back to the airport where (after we'd got through the gate) Chris could phone Flight Services from a phone that hung on the wall. Although the sky over Forestville was clear blue all day, the FSS was reporting "significant thunderstorms between Baie Comeau and Sept Iles" which meant that we then had to wait another couple of hours before going any further. We roamed round the streets again and sat in a cool and shady bar watching an American dog show on the TV, thinking that the judges might have had more fun judging the dog owners than the dogs.

Finally at 16:51 we were up again on our second leg of the day, triumphantly heading towards Sept Iles (where we landed at 18:31), because the thunderstorms were reported to be dissipating in the cool of the late afternoon. It's a good job we were able to leave Forestville when we did because from Thursday onwards it's going to be closed for three days for the sake of drag-racing on the field. Our views from the air on this leg were really tremendous, black clouds with heavy rain to the north, a line of white clouds far away on the southern bank of what was now the St Lawrence Gulf, not the St Lawrence River any more, little rocky bays under the wheel on my side and on Chris' side, glaciated chasms and shining lakes. In the end the seven isles appeared very faintly on the horizon. Chris did a straight in approach to runway 09 across the bay and the city, landing smoothly on the centreline.