Eastern Canada 2017 - Day 3 / Île-Bonaventure-et-du-Rocher-Percé National Park & Percé

KM driven: about 460, I forget the exact number but it’s close enough.

Steps taken: 10 066…. thanks to a few extra laps around the hotel room! I HAD to get it over 10K.

I had trouble sleeping last night. Out hotel in Gaspé was great, nothing to complain about, but I was awake as of 4:45AM and could not get back to sleep. The up side of this is that we hit the road nice and early and got some beautiful early morning pictures with the sun still low in the sky.

Our first stop was Percé to see the famous rock and visit the bird sanctuary at the Île-Bonaventure-et-du-Rocher-Percé National Park. We got to Percé early enough to have a nice non-fast-food breakfast and make the 9AM ferry over to the island.

Look at my plate, doesn’t it look like a serving of sunshine?

We didn’t realize that the ferry to the island included a trip to the rock and then sailed all the way around the island. This took over an hour and so we decided we’d seen enough of what we wanted to see and disembarking for a hike would have eaten up too many hours of our precious time.

The cruise was great, no regrets. It was just enough.

We were back on the road by 10:30 and reached our next destination for the day a little after 2:30. (lunch and coffee stops were forgetable and not worth mentioning)

Miguasha National Park is a UNESCO sight renowned for the large number of fossils discovered in the surrounding cliffs. We first went for a short hike on the beach and around the grounds…

I call this the “Starship Enterprise Mushroom” (it was so perfect! it irritates me that the picture is a little blurry).

This is as close to the waves on the beach as I was willing to get!

After our hike, we went into the exposition center to see the fossils. They were all interesting, but this one captured my imagination the most – I love it!

All in all, we spent a little over 2 hours here and then hit the road for Bathurst in New Brunswick to check into our hotel.

New Brunswick is in another time zone so we lost an hour crossing the boarder from Quebec.

Nice hotel. We’ll be very comfortable tonight. Dinner was a non-descript Pub recommended by the receptionist. It was pretty ordinary but I orderd onion dip for a stater so it’s a good thing for Frank that this room as 2 Queen beds! ha!

Good night!

Eastern Canada 2017 - Day 2 / Parc Forillon & Gaspé

KM driven: 453

Steps taken: 13 748

YAHOO! another day where I got all my steps! I’m so pleased! I really didn’t think this would be acheivable on a road trip.

Because we were not driving on a highway, the comparitavely small distance between Rimouski-Gaspé and Rimouski-Montreal took us the same amount of time. 5½-ish hours.

Still, the views along Route 132 were great and we enjoyed the drive emensly. We actually had to remind ourselved to stop, get out of the car and take some pictures!

We stoped twice to get out of the car and strecth out, once at Gros Morne:

And then again at Pointe à la Renommée to see the lighthouse and the very first Marconi station in Canada:

We stoped for a fast food lunch…  very Jetson’s!

And then finaly our ‘official’ destination: Parc National Forillon to do some hiking.

We were plesantly surprised to discover that admission was free thanks to Canada’s bicentenial… we laughed at the fact that we “finaly made a buck on Canada One Fifty” HA!

We hiked to “Land’s End”, it was about 2 hours and well worth the effort; the views were spectacular! It was a great afternoon.  I am having a hard time narrowing down the pictures, so I present you with an huge amount to hopefully enjoy… or at best, scroll past a little slower than usual!

We saw a porcupine along the way! So cute!!

But it was the views that had me gaping… just gorgeous!

And of couse… a lighthouse!!

After this, we drove to our hotel in Gaspé… very cute, reminds me of a seaside motel!

Our intention was to explore the local eateries for supper - turns out there were 2. Tim Hortons (so was not going to happen) and this place, Brise Bise.

We gave it a try… like we had a choice… and thankfully it was great! We lucked out too, we got the last table available!

We went for a little walk after supper, then back to the hotel to crash early and prepare for tomorrow’s adventures.

Here’s a look at Parc Forillon from Gaspé

and of course…   a flower picture!!

Good night!

Eastern Canada 2017 - Day 1 / Parc Bic & Rimouski

KM driven: 560

Steps taken: 15 254

We’re off to a good start! When planning this road trip, my biggest worry was: will we just be in car all day?? Well, day 1 showed me that getting my steps in can still be done! My usual daily target is 12 500 and I was convinced I would never hit it when on a road trip… WRONG!

Today we went for a 2-hour hike in Parc Bic and then checked into our hotel in Rimouski and had dinner in a pub nearby. Not much to say about Rimouski, we’re basically jusy here to sleep so we are not really exploring the area.

Our time in Parc National du Bic was great! Here are some wonderful images of our time spent there.

We came across some HUGE mushrooms! Biggest I have ever seen!! I tried to get my hand in one to give an idea of scale… not sure it worked!

We also one one snake but I didn’t get a picture… took me too long to recover from the shock!