We couldn’t have had a more beautiful day traveling from Chambly on our way to Quebec City on July 17. We expected to take two days for this trip so we built in time to visit yet another charming town along the way.
The villages we passed continued to lure us. Our original plan was to stop mid-way at St. Charles-sur-Richelieu but it didn’t look quite as appealing up close. So we went a little further to St. Antoine-sur-Richelieu. Note that this portion of the trip is along the Richelieu River). What a charming village St. Antoine is! We docked at the town dock and walked along the main road exploring our surroundings.
One of the first things we fell in love with was a perfectly lovely chateau and B&B composed of several buildings and incredible gardens.
The only sound was the singing that wafted from a second story gathering. It sounded like a small chorus or a very talented family celebrating one of their member’s birthday!
The architecture was quite unique and we saw traces of the gingerbread type trim on other houses throughout the town.
Just down the street we came upon a small art museum in another historic house – this one filled with an exhibit from a local artist. Very colorful landscapes and portraits of stylized women.
All the houses in town seemed to have been built in the 1800’s and they each outdid the next with their colorful paint jobs, lush flower gardens and creative gingerbread trim.
We found a charming restaurant that wasn’t open at the time we were there - too bad!
We passed the local library and then just a block or two down passed two book exchange boxes located on the villagers’ front yards. Apparently this is a very literate town.
We reluctantly left St. Antoine bound for our stop for the night – St. Ours. Here we traversed the last of the locks for this part of our journey. These were by far the easiest locks we’ve encountered. All we had to do was tie up to a floating dock so we hardly felt the effect of the lock lowering us to our final descent. Before we realized it, we were done!
We traveled just a couple of hundred feet to our dock alongside of the park that surrounded the canal.
We strolled around the grounds and planned to eat dinner on the nearby picnic table. But the flies had other ideas so we ate dinner on board and went to bed early after our late night in Montreal!
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