En Route to Quebec City – St. Antoine and St. Ours

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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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Montreal, Quebec

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We spent  July 15 in Montreal.  Steve and Cathy had a rental car so we went into Vieux Montreal for the day and explored the old town on foot visiting the Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours (Our Lady of Good Help) chapel.  This chapel is often called the Sailors’ Church.  It was built in 1771 over the ruins of an earlier chapel.  Lynn was very taken with the  light fixtures shaped like Spanish galleons, container ships, etc.  We also visited a very cool archeological museum built upon the excavated foundations of the original settlement of Montreal. 

Of course,  we ate lunch at an outdoor café and Lynn had one of her  French favorites - moules frite (mussels and french fries).

We strolled through many different parks and neighborhoods including Chinatown and a great gallery district.

During the summer, Montreal has endless street fairs and we strolled through a couple of them as well as many parks and plazas.

 

 

That evening we met friends of Cathy and Steve’s for dinner where we had another French favorite (steak frite) and topped the  evening off by watching an amazing fireworks display in the harbor.  Montreal goes all out in the summer and there is a general mood of celebration throughout the city. 

The only damper to the day was the endless hassle of returning the rental car to the airport and taking a cab back to the marina. A trip that should have taken about 45 minutes took twice as long because only one bridge was open one way due to construction and the fireworks traffic.  We had had a very long day – it was almost 2 a.m. before we tumbled, exhausted,  into bed! But all in all, we had a fantastic day in marvelous Montreal!

Chambly Canal, Quebec

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We had one of our loveliest days on July 14 traveling along the Chambly Canal and through a series of nine locks.

 

The Chambly Canal runs 10 miles downstream along the Richelieu River connecting the towns of St. Jean de Richelieu and Chambly.    Each lock is very small – only 21 feet wide and 100 feet long.  We traveled on a Tuesday and the river was very quiet so we never had to share a lock with another boat.

At each approach to a lock, we were greeting by friendly lockkeepers and beautiful flowers lining the park-like settings.   It was most interesting to see that each lock is still operated by hand cranks. Once we were secured in the lock, the lockkeeper turned the crank to open the gates and again to close them when we were through.  We talked with  many friendly and curious  people as we passed through the locks.

We did have one small mishap.  Though the day was sunny and clear, it was quite windy.  As we approached one of these narrow locks, our boat was blown sideways and our stern bumper rail nicked the bulkhead of the lock.  The lockkeeper was required to complete an incident report though the damage to our boat and their bulkhead was minimal. Fortunately, no real harm was done and we continued on our merry way!

The last locks were different in that they were in quick succession, like a staircase of three locks.  We entered the first, tied up to the side of the lock, turned off the engine, the lock drained, we left the lock and immediately motored about 20 feet  to the next one and repeated the process two more times.  As soon as we exited the third one, we entered the Chambly Basin, a beautiful round bay at the top of the canal. 

 

We stayed at Marina de Chambly for two nights as our friends, Steve and Cathy were flying in from Sacramento and we planned to spend some time in Montreal just 45 minutes away by car. 

The marina was adjacent to the last lock and the cute little town of Chambly was around the corner.  Once again, the Canadians take great pride in their gardens.  The flowers were just spectacular!

We spent some time shopping and re-provisioning the boat for our guests’ arrival.

Steve and Cathy arrived late that evening and we prepared for making the most of our next day in Montreal.

St. Paul de Ile-aux-Noix, Quebec

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We crossed the border into Canada on Sunday July 12!  It was a beautiful day and a short two hour cruise.  We were on the Richelieu River which Lake Champlain flows into.  The countryside is changing.  The mountains of Lake Champlain and the Hudson have receded. The Quebec countryside is a flatter farming landscape punctuated by many small villages.   

Just about a mile from our marina we crossed the border and a mile further up was the stop for Canadian customs.  Instead of our having to call in and dock at customs, customs came to us!  A boat with three customs officers rafted onto our boat and one of them came aboard.  He was very polite, asked the perfunctory questions and proceeded to look throughout our boat including opening cabinets!  The three main questions he asked were:  are you carrying firearms (no), what’s our itinerary and when do we plan to leave (cruising up the St. Lawrence to Gaspe’ and around New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia until the end of August), and how much alcohol do you have on board (34 cans of beer, 10  bottles of wine and 5 bottles of liquor).  Although our “ship’s store” exceeded the stated limits,  he made no comment and we passed the inspection! 

As we proceeded down river, we were amazed by the number of  boats that were on the waterway.  Motor boats of all sizes were buzzing around us the entire time.  Quite different from the preponderance of sailboats we saw on Lake Champlain!  There were also a few unusual specimens.

We stopped at St. Paul de Ile-aux-Noix because it had five marinas and we wanted to get some more work done on the boat. It was also described as being somewhat akin to Fort Lauderdale with numerous canals lining the coast.

 

At the Gosselin Marina we met a very interesting guy named Michel who was working there and who took great interest in helping us.  He and his girlfriend have traveled extensively on the catamaran that he built and in three weeks they are leaving for their home in Florida and eventually to sail and live in Martinique for awhile.  It’s amazing how many Canadians we met who have homes in Florida!  We invited Michel and Nathalie onto our boat as they were interested to see a trawler up close. We had a lovely time exchanging stories – maybe we’ll see them when we return to Florida. 

St. Paul is really a tiny village but our new friends recommended a wonderful restaurant owned by a woman from Alsace.  Although it was not open on Sunday night, we went there for breakfast the next morning and had an amazingly delicious Alsatian breakfast in a perfectly charming little space.

By the time we finished our boat repairs and chores which included adding new windshield wiper blades, replacing the A/C main breaker panel switch, putting in a new shower head, cleaning the heads, and stocking up on new safety supplies it was too late to move to our next stop.  Instead,  we finished up the day by eating a very early dinner at the same restaurant where we had breakfast  (having skipped lunch).

We returned to the boat and hung our Canadian courtesy flag and did some more trip planning.  We will be heading north on the Chambly Canal through all nine locks  bound for a marina in the town of Chambly.