Arrived at Forillon National Campground, Gaspe, QC

Well, I made it to Petit Gaspe campground in Parc National Forillon, Gaspe, QC.  558 miles; arrived at 1pm.  I have a nice long pull-thru site; primitive with no water or electric, but gravel and fairly flat. 

Although the campground is full, the sites are spread out so you don’t feel like a sardine.  Here is the view from front and side of my coach ..

We had a gentle rain for about an hour this afternoon; very pleasant.  We have since had that same gentle rain about 3 times.  It doesn’t last long, maybe an hour or two each day at different times.

I’m glad I didn’t try to make the drive here in one day because the second half was a little more stressful than the first half.  I was told there were hills, however the grades ranged from 8% to 15% (I’ve never seen 14% and 15% grades before!) on, of course, a winding road.  The view was very picturesque the entire way with the coastline and the hills and the quaint villages, but the view from the top of the 14% and 15% grades was magnificent.  Too bad I was a little too busy to take a picture!

After a while, when the grade was “only” 8% I thought to myself … no big deal.  LOL

There are more than 25 peaks of 1,000 M or above, including Mont Jacques-Cartier, the second highest peak in Quebec.

The Gaspe Peninsula covers 30,340 km, roughly about the size of Belgium.  It is bordered to the North by the St Lawrence, to the South by Chaleur Bay and the East by the Gulf of St. Lawrence.  It is divided into five natural areas:  The Coast, Land’s End (where I am), The Bay, The Valley (I didn’t get there sadly), and Haute-Gaspesie.

All along the highways are these beautiful purple flowers growing wild.  I have to find out what they are.  They were growing along the Trans Canada highway as well. Altho the pinkish/purple is the predominate color I see for this flower, I have seen small groupings of a dark purple and several times larger groups of yellow.

I had no traffic; very few cars going my direction.  I didn’t have any in front of me, but there were a couple bringing up my rear from time to time.  I saw several people going to breakfast, but the parking lots at the churches were pretty empty.  Lots of motorcycles on the road too.

I finally had to put the GPS on mute.  After I heard “winding road ahead,” “right curve ahead,” “steep downgrade ahead,” “left curve ahead,” “left curve ahead,’ “steep grade ahead,” “right curve ahead” for the 1,000^th time, I’d had enough.  You would think it would give up after a while.  Ha ha.  I know when I’m sitting at a long signal, the blinker “tick” noise stops; you would think they could silence the GPS the same way.

I did get 9.5 mpg on the first half of the drive.  Yeah!  That’s about 2 mpg more than I usually get; yet another indication, in my new life that I need to slow down.  Of course, the inclines on the second half of the drive sucked that average down to an even 9.0 mpg. The usual highway speed limit in Canada is 90 (that’s 56 mph to us Americans); sometimes, on the Trans Canada highway you can go 100 (65 mph), but that’s apparently the fastest you can drive here, and it doesn’t happen often.

The rest stops were fairly frequently; they were all on the “shore” side of the highway. They afforded great views and some of them even allowed camping.  If you are coming west on Hwy. 132, there were places you could just pull up to the shore and have a picnic.  

I did not get to stop at the Rimouski lighthouse.  You can go to the top (about 160 steps I’m told).  There are a lot of things I would like to stop and see and side roads I would take if I were not pulling the Jeep.  The challenge with where I go is not the coach; it’s pretty maneuverable.  It is not being able to back up with the tow should I need to, and it adds almost 20ft to my length, that creates the hesitation (my total length is 57ft).  The trade off with a toad is it’s very limiting where you can go while it’s hooked up, but very freeing after you have parked for the night; you can take off and go anywhere you want (with much better gas mileage!).  Sometimes I will park the coach in a Walmart or other such lot and go explore in the Jeep but there was nothing big enough to hold the coach along the 132 highway.  I am going to back-track a little tomorrow and take some pictures.  I need to set up a dash-cam, because it is impossible to take pictures when you’re alone.

I did try taking a few tho ….

Canadian drivers are still a source of fascination for me.  Besides tailgating, they pass on the solid double yellow lines, passing when on-coming traffic is visible and has to move over to avoid collision, and when they come back in the lane they about take your front bumper off.