First email, June 12, 2006 
On the Road to Manicouagan Crater
We are preparing to take a trip to Quebec, leaving this Friday (June 16, 2006, webmaster's note) to visit the Manicouagan Crater. This crater was formed some 200 million years ago and still leaves a significant scar on the surface of the year. The crater is 43 miles in diameter.
Our plan is to leave this Friday driving up through Central Maine spending a night or two in New Sweden, Maine. A town formed some 125 years ago by 51 Swedish immigrants that had been invited by the state of Maine to settle in the northern portion of the state. They eventually settled three towns.
From there we cross into Canada at Fort Kent, the northern most Maine city proceeding to Mantane, Quebec located on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River. We’ll spend the night here
Our pan is to leave our Bounder in the campground and cross the river in our Honda CRV landing in Baie-Comeau. The river is, surprising to me, 40 miles wide and a two hour trip. There is virtually nothing north of Baie-Comeau so we’ll be filling up with Gas and Tim Horton’s.
We plan to take the early ferry over and the late ferry back, in between squeezing in a 400 mile ride to the crater. From the pictures I’ve seen there’s not much but wilderness until you reach the Crater. The only true civilization is a huge hydro facility located at the south end of the Crater
We plan to take a side trip to Eastport on our way home if time permits, virtually the most eastern point in the U.S. outside of Alaska. Eastport is an old haunt of our, pre Bounder.
We will be home on June 22nd.
For all our Bounder friends we have discovered a new hobby, geocaching. When we returned home our daughter in law showed us a small plastic box hidden at the base of a tree near their home. People stop by every so often and open it, sign their name and take a small gift, leaving one in its place. We went on-line to www.Geocaching.com and entered our zip code finding there are 100’s of caches around us and some 300,000 in the world in 221 countries. We bought a handheld GPS from Garmin, an Etrex Legend, a rather powerful 5.3 ounce device that can tell you exactly where you are on the surface of the earth, a neat device even if you don’t geocache ($122 from Wal-Mart).
A neat part of geo caching is that they frequently take you to neat places you might not find on your own. Today we found our first cache along a walking trail that parallels the Taylor River in our home town of Hampton. We’ve lived here for some 20 years and did not know the trail existed.
We choose a rather easy one for our first hunt, a ½ hour each way, finding the cache in an area along the river where beavers had felled a number of fair sized trees. Each cache has an associated clue and this one was ‘overwhelmed by beavers’.
Some of the caches require a kayak, others scuba equipment.
We think this might be fun on this year’s around the country trip.
Take care,
Norm and Ginny
June 15-June 22, 2006
We left early Friday morning and drove up the Maine Turnpike, I 95 some 300 miles to Holton, Me. Northern Maine is brilliantly green this year; the roads have little traffic, an occasional browsing deer and two dead Moose. In the last two years their have been over 2,000 auto/Moose and 10,000 auto/deer collisions in Maine.
We stayed at My Brother’s Place, just off exit 302, beautiful, manicured grassy sites, with wireless. Flowers everywhere, even blooming dahlias and mine are just popping out of the ground.
Houlton is a charming town with an old fashioned town square surrounded by well maintained brick buildings. The center of the town has beautiful tree lined streets with many multi-colored Victorian homes.
From Holton we followed route 1 north to New Sweden, ME, a truly no-where small Maine town. The town is the home of the original Swedish colony in ME and will be celebrating their 125th anniversary next weekend. From there we crossed the border at Van Buren, ME and headed through New Brunswick to the shores of the might St. Lawrence River taking Trans Canadian 2/185. Reaching the river we drove west on Route 132 to Trois de Pistoles (I believe three rivers in French). It was neat driving along extending our meager French by reading signs.
There was virtually no traffic on 132 though numerous members of the Surete. We camped for the might in Trois de Pistoles Plage Campground. Plage means beach and we’re on it overlooking the River. Interestingly we arrived at low tide, and low it was, much greater than the ocean tides at Hampton. Of course the train tracks are less than a mile away and we can hear an occasional train while watching an ocean tanker or container ship motor up the river.
Trips of this sort really strike a cord with me. I love the quiet, beauty and isolation of these kinds of places.
The last time I came to the Gaspe I was 11 or 12, on a family vacation. I still have memories of the trip, the beautiful, large stone churches even in the smallest of towns, the bee hive bread ovens in the front yards of most homes, the cod drying on racks on the side of the road. The cod and ovens are gone. The front yards have been replaced by well manicured lawns, yet the beautiful coastal scenery still abounds, though a river it’s certainly ocean like with large tidal changes and small waves. The roads are vastly improved, though the old coastal road still exists and is still fun to drive, today we drove about 60 miles north from our campground in Mantane, checking out all the small towns.
Though two senators to our south are fighting to prevent windmills in view of Massachusetts wealthier, more liberal citizens, the Gaspe is loaded with windmills. We can see a dozen of these beautiful, silent structures from our campground, and on a Honda trip north of Matane today we saw a site with some 60 windmills one a vertical mill some 180 meters high. Anyone who believes a traditional, carbon dioxide, power generating station is more beautiful than 60 windmills has never seen these windmills. Politicians, on the environment, talk more than act for the environment.
Below is a picture of the experimental vertical axis windmill, some 38 stories tall. The more traditional windmill seems to have won out.
We are in another campground over looking the ocean, a property of many campgrounds since the main road, rt. 132 is typically within 100 yards of the seaway. As witnessed by the windmills there’s a continuous breeze befuddling bugs.
We caught the ferry from Matane at 5:30 am Monday morning for our trip to the crater, sunrise is 4:30 so it wasn’t too difficult. The ferry is actually an ice breaker, for winter conditions, taking a combination of trucks and cars, probably holding 60 vehicles on a two hour trip. The ferry has airline seating, a cafeteria and ESPN’s Sportscenter to boot though in French. We are amazed how well we deal with this French environment, I suspect we’re learning a couple 100 words every day just from reading signs. We bought a dictionary and have great fun with a second language.
We landed in Godbout for you mappers just across from Matane and drove up river on route 138 to Baie Comeau. We refueled ourselves at a Tim Horton’s, the Dunkin Donuts of Canada, and started up Route 389 into the woods of Canada. I mean woods and lakes and rivers practically just as the Indians trooped through them centuries ago. There’s not much to see but nature, a lake with a cabin or two, a few side dirt roads and an occasional S.O.S. phone along the road, one about every 75 kilometers.
There are a couple of fuel stops along the road, managed typically by some isolationist women who cooks pies by the half dozen for the many, mostly male workers along the route. Most of the workers are employeed by Hydro Quebec, who manage a series of dams that lead from the crater. This is no ordinary paved road, 8-10 percent grades are common and 18% grades are rare but there. The largest Dam is Manic Five some 214 kilometers from Baie Comeau. It is the largest buttress, multiple arch dam in the world, some 76 stories high and a mile wide.
The above picture is of Manic 5 from the 18% grade dirt road that heads north to Fermont, Quebec, a company mining town. Note the warning sign for the road below.
We reached the dam, parked just below it and ate the lunch we had brought. We had another two hours and decided to continue on further north. Once past the dam the road becomes dirt and stays dirt almost to the Labrador border, another 300 Km.
The road begins near the dam with a sinuous 18 degree grade, actually it was scary to look at but the Honda, in a light rain pulled itself to the top. We proceeded north for an hour until we were just shy of the 51st parallel.
For those of you who don’t know that’s 7 degrees north of Portsmouth. Of course we’ve been much further north in our travels but believe me this is beyond rural.
I know this is a long On the Road, it’s a measure of how much we loved this trip.
Love to all,
Norm and Ginny
Home of the Kangaroo Races!
Return to the Dam Yankees Home Page
