The benefits of staying put

 ... at Sainte-Flavie.

On the Wednesday of our flying trip, after some consideration, we decided not to fly. The weather was fine. We could have returned to our plane and taken off up the coast to Ste-Anne-des-Monts, or across the peninsula to Bonaventure, or for a short hop to Rimouski, to walk around one of those places, but we were both feeling either too lazy or too content that day to make such an effort. The option of spending a whole day just relaxing by the immediate shore was more appealing.

Rest and simplicity is often the best choice to make, so I find. Are we getting old?

So we walked along the shore in one direction in the morning, dabbling in the rockpools, gazing at the watery blue horizon from the benches, and in the other direction in the afternoon. Back and forth again in the evening. We bought lunch from the fish 'n chips van and supper at the restaurant at M. Gagnon's Centre d'Art. 

 

I read the information boards on the waterfront telling of the grandes marées of 2010, the high tides in a December storm that destroyed several houses near the shore, and visited the Galérie d'Art du Vieux Presbytère, next to the church that included an exhibition of posters by an artist of international repute, Sébastien Thibault who lives further up the coast in Matane. One symbolic image was for a series of concerts at the Pierre-Boulez Saal in Berlin:

 

 

 

At the end of the day we sat on the pier with the local anglers and the francophone tourists (francophone in all but two cases), watching the sun go down. 

 

That easy programme did us the world of good.

Seen under shallow water

On the pier at Ste.-Flavie

On each evening that we spent in Sainte-Flavie we observed the villagers of our generation coming out to socialize at sunset. Here are some of them sitting together at the village end of the pier, a really happy bunch of friends. They burst into song a few moments after I took this photo.