A grey day around Rimouski

Down the hill to St-Fabien-sur-Mer

On Monday, June 30th, we spent the morning in Rimouski, where it rained on us as we walked along the Promenade de la Mer with its ship-like lookout points and its tide towers, and back and forth along the Rue St. Germain Est / Ouest, which has quite stylish shops, including well stocked stationery suppliers and bookshops. We noticed an EV charging station in the parking lot and the public conveniences were impressively modern and clean. This is a forward thinking municipality. Then after lunch, when the clouds started to lift a little, we drove west of Rimouski to the Parc National du Bic, taking the hill from Saint-Fabien down to Saint-Fabien-sur-Mer, the tiny location of an annual music festival, where there are holiday cottages. It looked idyllic, but fairly deserted. Parking at an entrance to the Parc National du Bic we realised it would cost a fee to walk there, and there were plenty of blackflies about, so we just sat on the beach for a few minutes instead, under massive cliffs.

The shore at St.-Fabien-sur-Mer

Parc National du Bic scenery, with orographic clouds

 

One of the three foxes

The clouds began to lift as we drove slowly back towards Rimouski and we veered off the road again to gaze at the marshes and the islands: wonderful, watery views. Chris was impressed by the orographic clouds! In the reeds we spotted a fox (or vixen?) and then two more foxes, maybe the cubs of the other one, busy hunting for food. A local gentleman came up and talked to us, showing us the pack of photos he carried in his jacket pocket. It turned out he was a pilot too, who in his heyday had landed a biplane on this small strip of land. He lived by the water's edge, not fazed by the occasional floods that wash into his downstairs rooms.

The submarine with visitor, for scale

Tipping the museum building

The other side of Rimouski, at the Pointe au Père, a no-longer-used submarine is tethered; we stopped there as well, to take photos for our grandsons. You can have a guided tour inside it, as we did in September 2009. There's also a museum about the wrecked Empress of Ireland, and an historic lighthouse with flying buttresses and associated buildings. We took a look at the exhibition inside the Fog Alarm Shed. Lighthouses were extremely important along this treacherous coast in the days before GPS and modern depth sounding equipment, so had to be well manned and maintained.

Back in Ste. Flavie at the end of the day, we drank local beers from the Rose des Vents (Compass Rose), a recommendable fish and chips restaurant. We'd eaten there the evening before, as well.