St. Flavie 3, Quebec, Canada

After breakfast we drove into Rimouski, which is a bigger town than St. Flavie – our intent was to drive around and see what we could find.  We found a couple of things.  We finally found the submarine we saw billboards for but that’s a trip for another day.  We ended up at a farmers market and found people who we could talk with and enjoyed many samples at the different booths.

On the drive to the market we stumbled upon the public library (bibliotheque publique) and decided to check out and see if we could get a temporary library card and check out some movies to watch in our trailer on a rainy day (tomorrow).  Well there were two problems with that plan – we don’t speak French – and – we’d have to come back into town to return the movies.  We did find a very large coffee table book with 100 years of the best photographs from National Geographic – fortunately all the pictures were in English but the description for each picture was in French – we used the translation app on our phones to read the description for the photographs we were interested in.  It’s a cool app – you place the phone over the French words and it translates them to English.

After we left the library we stopped at a Tim Horton’s and split a sandwich and had a coffee and soda.  Tim Horton’s is like a Starbucks with one just about on every corner. From there we came upon the kite surfers.  WOW was that something else to watch.  It is a really athletic sport – I talked to one of the guys as he was coming out of the water and asked him how long it would take to do what everyone out there was doing.  He said maybe 2 years if you practiced a lot.  He said most people start out learning on the snow which is easier because there are no waves.  Just harder landings and you can get dragged a little bit if you’re not careful.

After watching we headed back to St. Flavie and thought we’d stop in at a local winery and do some tasting.  This winery specializes in wine made with honey which is really “meade.” Meade is a drink from Old England – it is an alcoholic beverage created by fermenting honey with water, sometimes with various fruits, spices, grains, or hops.    They have their own vineyard, orchards and their own bees.  And in their tasting room they have 15 to 20 different products other than their award winning wine.  We didn’t taste anything that we couldn’t live without but we enjoyed the experience.   PRC

Another beautiful sunset… And it looks like we will be seeing many more after this RV Park.

The weather here is unpredictable. The weather app on my phone makes predictions but they don’t always come true. Today was supposed to be cloudy with some rain like yesterday, but that was not the case.  The app did not predict the howling wind that lasted most of the night. It was still windy this morning but sunny and a bit chilly. Hardly a cloud in the sky.  It’s supposed to rain tomorrow. We’ll see…

It was another relaxing day. We didn’t sleep in as late as yesterday. After breakfast we drove into Rimouski.  We thought we would look for a library and check their selection of DVD’s. We found one  which happened to be right next to a Farmer’s Market. We sampled some of the products including cheese, olives, smoked salmon and jerky. It was interesting but we were a little nervous to leave as we were probably in a no-parking zone. It was hard to tell as we couldn’t translate the signs.

We did go to the nice municipal library. I began to feel more out of my element. There’s usually someone that can speak a little bit of English but not here. Tourists don’t usually hang out at libraries. We decided not to look for a DVD as we’d have to sign up for a card. I don’t know if they would issue us a card although Peter is a Canadian citizen but not a resident of Rimouski.  Besides we might not find any movies in English.

We then drove around the town of Rimouski, not looking for anything in particular. As usual there were many pretty city parks and the views of the St. Lawrence River were lovely.

Peter spotted some kites over the water so we went to check them out.  At the end of the kites were surfers.  I’d never seen kite surfing before. It was fun to watch. Peter took a video of course.

We stopped at a winery on the way home – Vieux Moulin.  The wine was not made from grapes, but honey like meade. We  sampled several of the honey wines which were pleasant but not enough to purchase a bottle. The pic above in front of the winery is dedicated to my sister Bonnie.

After our meanderings, we returned “home” to our travel trailer, the “Buen Camino.” Peter grilled steaks – we chose to be carnivores tonight.

Our schedule tomorrow will depend on the weather.

Bonne Nuit.   JY