Gaspé to St. Anne des Monts

We had a good breakfast at the Adam’s Motel restaurant and got a fairly early start on

Somewhere between Gaspé and Farillon National Park 

another weather friendly morning.  The motel is close to the highway so we were able to leave the city quite quickly.
Just a word about my preconceived notions about the Gaspé Peninsula. I’m not aware of the basis for these preconceptions but I had pictured it as mostly flat with some hills and populated by a few folks living in tiny villages.

And there are, of course,  lots of small villages but there are also cities like Rimouski and Gaspé which are bustling places with lots of traffic and fast driving Québecers.

At Farillon National Park

And the topography I, obviously, had completely wrong. I had no idea, for example, that the northeastern tip of the Appalachian mountain chain extends from the south eastern USA to the Gaspé Peninsula and beyond, even to the Scottish Highlands, apparently.

Boardwalk at Forillon National Park

And, while these mountain are only a shadow of their former height due to erosion over a few hundred thousand years, some are still pretty high - Mount Jacques-Cartier in the Chic Choc’s,  for example, reaches 1,268 m.

First Lighthouse - note sure exactly where.

But onward.

Not long after leaving Gaspé we stopped at Forillon National Park at the far eastern end of the Gaspé Peninsula. Near the Park entrance and information centre there is a fairly extensive, very sturdy looking board walk. We decided to see how far this easy walk would take us and about 20 minutes later we were at the end. This is a large park with many kilometres of excellent walking/hiking trails but for many reason we are, unfortunately, not really able to make use of them, so we terminated our walk at the end of the boardwalk and returned to the parking lot.

As we hadn’t identified additional specific locations to visit, the remainder of our journey to St. Anne des Monts was punctuated by lots of stops at places where we hoped to find yet the perfect spectacular view and photo opportunity. The photo above on the left was made at what we thought might be place for lunch combined with a nice view. But the gazebo and the general area were not really very attractive so after this photo we moved on.

One of the towns mentioned below.

I think it worth saying that, while the trip was terrific and I certainly enjoyed it, it turned out, from a photography point of view, to be less rewarding than I had hoped. The weather was a major contributing factor with lots of rain and cloud in the early days.

Passing through...

Also, driving and hoping to find excellent views is tricky as so many of the “ones that got away” did so because they appear suddenly and fleetingly as we pass at 80 km/hr or so and there was no place to stop in any case.

On some roads there was little traffic so it was possible to stop and back up or turn around and reasonably safely pull off onto the shoulder long enough to make a quick photo or two but not really time to think it through carefully.  Another difficulty is presented by the time of day during which we are on the move - mostly during hours in which the light is not the best for good photos. Not excuses, just observations.

Second Lighthouse, not sure of the location.

During our Cabot Trail drive we were promised, by signs, that we would at some point come to a lighthouse, but we never did find one. On the Gaspé route, however, though there were no signs announcing lighthouse  we actually came across 3 of them.

As we had left Clifton Park on May 2 we have now been on the road about 20 days so, as you can imagine, note taking is less precise and the blur of time and places tend to make it difficult to match the photos with the exact location. 

We know that we visited Rivière au Renard and the towns of Saint Maurice-de-l’Echouerie, L’Anse-à-Valleau and Grande Vallée but which of the photos here were made near which of these places we can’t be completely certain. And, in the end, it probably doesn’t really matter.

We were there and enjoyed seeing everyone of them. The small villages nestled down in valleys at the water’s edge (obviously for practical reasons) all presented a lovely romantic image to passers by like us.
At this point we are still travelling through a pretty mountainous area so, as you can see in a couple of the photos, we often had a view from well above the villages.  One of the things you may also have noted in a couple of photos is that in each village, seemingly no matter how small, there is a fairly prominent church with steeple visible from afar.

The mountainous topography continues on to St. Anne des Monts, as indicated by the name, but before we reached St. Anne the road made its way out to the edge of the mountains and down very close to the shore, so the drive and the views along the ocean were much different from earlier images.

I have included a few images made from along the shore, one which shows a gathering of Gannets and we are both quite sure that the group of Gannets was near Riviere la Madeleine.

Around 4 pm we arrived in St. Anne des Monts and the Hotel&Cie, an unusual name but it was a nice motel and all arrangements were in order.

A cluster of Gannets

This was our most expensive place so far, partly because their fee for the dog was $35 per night! Again, by far the most expensive dog fee.


One night there so not time for two increasingly weary travellers to do much more than rest for tomorrow’s drive to Notre Dame de Neiges and the Motel Trois Pistales where we found ourselves in the most spartan of accommodations so far.