Windsurfers at La Pocatière

Our detour to Île d’Orléans had been time-consuming, but I hated to leave Quebec without another painting. At La Pocatière, I stopped to paint the sun setting over the St. Lawrence estuary. Even this far upriver, the St. Lawrence is vast enough that there are beluga whale nurseries. At that moment, there were also two men windsurfing in the stiff wind.

The Bas-Saint-Laurent is a beautiful area and so is the St. John River Valley, where we stopped for the night. This is awfully close to my home country. In fact, a right turn and we could have been home for lunch. In many ways, that knowledge was the hardest thing we’d encountered so far.

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In 2016, my daughter Mary and I set off across Alaska and Canada on a Great White North Adventure, which you can read about starting here. We arrived in Anchorage at the beginning of September and got home in mid-October. In between, we visited every province but PEI (been there, done that), and Yukon Territory. In retrospect, it might have made more sense to do this during the summer, since Alaska and Canada threw a mess of strange weather at us.