Hello Everyone,

Some of you may have been wondering why I haven’t been posting lately, well I’ve been on a 7 day trip to the Gaspesie region of Quebec.

My girlfriend and I left Ottawa on Friday night at midnight and 15 hours later of straight driving, we arrived at our final destination of Perce around 5pm on Saturday.

We toured around the area for the next couple days, seeing the sights, going for a couple hikes, people watching, talking with local artists and of course looking at the famous perce rock.

On Tuesday we started our trek home. We took the south coast home to see the other side of the penninsula. This was a nice drive, nice small quaint towns and very friendly people.

I did however get laughed at a tim hortons when I asked for an “extra large double-double” (prounced dew-bleh). Oh well, at least I was trying to speak french 🙂

We also stopped at a cool MicMac Indian store and bought some native crafts, then we continued our journey home by driving through New Brunswick. There are some weird weird places out in the far reaches of Quebec and New Brunswick, such as strip clubs that are in what look to be houses, as well as tattoo shops that are also located in trailers. Pretty interesting stuff. Don’t think I’d stop by someones trailer for a tattoo way out in the middle of nowhere, but I guess some people would.

By now it was Tuesday evening, and we had driven about 800 kilometers, so I decided it was time for us to stop at the closest hotel we saw. We stopped at a somewhat nice hotel with a nice little restaurant and bar inside of it. It was nice to have a good sit down meal before hitting the hay for the next 7 hours of our trip the next day. When we got our first hotel room, we found the room had not been cleaned since the previous guests, so we asked if they would give us another room, they had no smoking rooms left – what! – but it was alright because the lady let us smoke in the non smoking room since it was their screw up. Score one for us!

The next day we began our trek back to Ottawa, this part of the journey wasn’t very exciting as we were driving through the interior of Quebec, so all we saw were trees and other cars.

We did happen to drive through one of the coolest named towns I’ve ever been to though – St Louis du HA! HA! – not kidding, that was actually the name of the town, including the exclamation marks!

After passing through Quebec city, we were hit by a crazy storm. I was honestly afraid that the truck we were in was going to be flipped by the wind. Not a word of a lie, we had hail, rain, and what must have been 120km/h winds all at the same time, for about 15 minutes. All of the cars and trucks on the highway were pulled over with their flashers on, it was quite a site to see. I even lowered my window so I could stick my face out into the fury that was upon us, but the winds were so strong the rain felt like miniuature pellets hitting my face at 300 feet per second. It was one of the coolest storms I had ever been in.

That’s pretty much it from our crazy trip, all said and done we put 3200 kilometers on the car, put about 300$ of gas into it.