We needed to cover some miles if we were ever going to get to Labrador, but first we just had to stop and look at another covered bridge. The road along the St Lawrence north bank is called the Route Des Balenes (whales) and there were a number of places to view them but we decided to leave that sightseeing for the way back.

The St Lawrence river is about twenty miles wide at this point, a two hour trip on the ferry over to places like Rimouski. We've driven the river's south bank a couple of times on our way out to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, but today we were headed to the north country.

The road went through a string of long sprawling seaside villages with some good scenery in between. A lot of the coastline is in private hands, but there were a few rest areas on the top of the cliffs. By evening, we had made it Baie Comeau, the largest place we'd seen all day. The main businesses there seem to be logging, mining, and supplying the hydro dams. We turned north there, following the sign to Terre Nouveau, the French name for Newfoundland and Labrador.

The road was winding between mountains and lakes, really pretty with the tree colours changing.

	Quebec highway 389

There wasn't much traffic and all of it seemed to be going in the other direction and about twice as fast as us! We guessed that most of the traffic was dam workers coming off shift and hurrying home, because we soon came to the Manic 2 dam and power plant. "Manic" seemed a strange name for a dam, but it's short for the Manicouagan River. There are five dams on this river and four on another, the Outardes, and we were passing side roads with signs for Manic 3, Outardes 2, etc. This is where a lot of Quebec's power comes from, and the road was surrounded by power lines at times.

There is not much of anything for the next 600 miles, so camping is very informal. We just pulled off the road into the bushes alongside a lake for the night.

Sunday September 25th

The furnace likes to pick these cold, secluded spots to go wrong. Some of the connectors inside seem to lose contact, after which the furnace fan runs for ten seconds and then shuts down and never stirs again regardless of how cold it gets. The fix is to take the furnace apart, disconnect and then reconnect the wires, after which it will usually work OK, but, of course, this has to be done in the freezing cold, in the middle of the night. Crimping the wires together helps but we still get the problem at least once on every trip.

It was 40 degrees and cloudy when we set off. The road was bumpy but mainly blacktopped and it wound through the mountains with lakes and trees everywhere. We'd see the occasional cabin, but nothing larger until we came to the Manic 5 dam, a great arched dam that filled one end of the valley. The dam has a massive reservoir behind it that stretches north for a hundred miles. There was a motel and gas station for the workers at the dam and we were able to fill up there. We also needed to fill our propane tank but the ladies at the gas station didn't know what propane was. I thought it was my bad French but another customer, a Frenchman, said "If they don't know what it is then it's pretty certain they don't have any".

After climbing the steep hill up the side of the dam, we left the hydro area behind and, from there on, we were on a gravel mining road, most of it quite good. In this higher country, the trees and shrubs around the road had changed colour while the spruce on the mountainsides were their usual dark green, so the road looked like a ribbon of gold stretching ahead of us.

The road ran along the hills above Manicouagan Lake, the reservoir behind the dam. The lake looks very odd on the maps as it's a forty-mile-wide circular lake with a thirty-mile-wide island in the middle. Apparently it's a meteor crater dating back 200 million years and it's now a distinctive landmark that can be recognized from space. Its shape was much harder to see from our level, where it just looked like a large lake with many islands.

We were now seeing more and more colours, with whole mountainsides aglow at times, so there were many stops for picture-taking. I was off looking at a waterfall when Sandie saw a porcupine so large that she thought it was a bear. It cleared off when I came back, but we saw a couple more of normal size before the end of the day.

	Porcupine (1.05)

We were expecting to reach the town of Gagnon soon and, sure enough, the road turned to blacktop and widened to include a median and sidewalks. And then it went back to narrow gravel. No town! We turned around and, sure enough, there had been a town there once, but it had completely disappeared. There had also been a road down to the lake and we followed that and found ourselves at a perfect camping spot on the edge of a deep and dark-looking lake.

We rechecked the map of Quebec and even though it was this year's map it still showed Gagnon as the only town on this section of road. It would have been a nasty shock for someone looking for gas or a motel, as we were a hundred miles north of Manic 5 and over a hundred miles south of Fermont, the next town. It was a quite spooky, isolated spot. I picked a Stephen King movie for that night, all about an isolated island where the people were disappearing. It seemed appropriate as we were alongside this disappeared town, on a dark and silent lake on a black and stormy night.

Not for the first time, I thought back to Sundays in Brighton fifty years ago when Sunday afternoon entertainment meant listening to Take it from Here or the Billy Cotton Band Show. It would have been impossible to imagine what we were doing now.

Monday September 26th

The furnace worked OK. This was just as well, as there was frost on the dock in the morning. In the sunshine the lake looked much more inviting than it had the previous night. I took a walk up to Gagnon to look at the town's ruins, but there weren't any, not even a foundation to be seen. I guessed that the town had been involved in iron mining as the streams had rust stains, but there was no clue as to where it had gone. I found some pieces of a hand-lettered sign which mentioned the Ville de Gagnon, but there were too many words missing.