Charlevoix

Last night on our walk around the neighbourhood we met Nicola Vulpe who had noticed the hiatus (pause, break, gap, lacuna, interval, intermission, interlude, interruption, suspension, lull, respite, time out, time off, recess, breather, letup) in my blogging. Sorry about that; I'm getting lazy on these hot summer days and it's time I resumed the narrative.

I didn't finish recording our little holiday in the région touristique de Charlevoix at the beginning of July. The day we landed on the mainland we used the car we'd rented to explore a stretch of the Route du Fleuve so that I could set foot in Les Éboulements, for instance, the village that had looked so appealing on the hillside seen from the Isle aux Coudres, and also so that we could visit the town of Baie-St-Paul, famous for its art galleries.

I remember the places we didn't reach as well, that will attract us back one day, the Hautes Gorges of the Malbaie River, the Domaine Forget where summer concerts take place.

Is it better to make the effort and go to visit the places you conjure up so vividly in your mind's eye, running the risk of disappointment because the reality is never quite as you expect it to be, or to keep your unsullied, imaginary visits intact? (I remember that I used to wonder this when I was young, after seeing the panorama of the snowcapped Bernese Oberland on the distant horizon from a viewpoint in the Swiss canton of Vaud. I wrote a poem about it once, but that is too private for this blog.)

Well, there was a Chocolaterie worth mentioning at Les Éboulements, as well as their lovely (but on that day, hazy) view of the Isle aux Coudres and mountains from the meadows, and in Baie-St-Paul we visited the Contemporary Art Museum to see an exhibition of 120 self-portraits by artists of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, a monster coke bottle made from coke bottle caps and an exhibition of knitted cotton gloves (made by cheap labour in China) sewn together by Lucie Duval and fashioned into haute couture or stuffed and transformed into rabbits. Chris didn't think so much of this, but I found it clever. The rue St-Jean-Baptiste in this town was full of private art galleries, featuring paintings and sculpture by the local artists; we wandered around here, too, before driving on, after a pub supper, up the valley to St-Urbain and then towards the small communities of Notre-Dame-des-Monts and Saint-Aimé-des-Lacs, along the La Route des Montagnes which offered tantalizing views of the Gorges to the northwest: des paysages montagneux époustoufflants! It came as a surprise to finish this spectacular drive to La Malbaie in rather ugly, industrial surroundings, reminding us of the outskirts of Pontypool in Wales.

That evening we experienced a remarkable phenomenon when, having been in the very warm air around the Baie St Paul, we suddenly drove into much cooler conditions, the windscreen misting over alarmingly fast. Sea fog was coming in again, insinuating itself along the cliffs and up the estuaries, blanketing all of our bay at Ste-Irénée and lowering the temperature to 12º while in Quebec, Montreal and Ottawa, so we gather, it remained in the high 30ºs with smog advisories in effect. Hearing about this, I learned a new word: canicule, heat-wave.