Following the St. Lawrence River: “Further up and further in.”

We drove right past Montreal and Quebec.  We really “should” have turned off the Trans-Canada and gone into these cities to see historical sites I have been reading about for years.  Except, well, neither of us wanted to ‘do a city’ yet.  We love city life, but cities don’t kindle imagination the same way as the surprise of smaller towns and the beauteous unrolling of fields and woods, river and sky outside out car windows.  I bet people who live in rural areas like to take their breaks in a city when they get the chance…

Anyway, we were on an adventure to see who we are when we are away from Regular and Responsible; we were interested in doing what we wanted to do instead of doing the logical thing. And what we wanted to see was what was around the next corner.

"Welcome, in the Lion's name. Come further up and further in."  (CS Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader)

This evolved into our itinerary. “Let’s drive too much and get to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and see those places we have been talking about for so long. It will be a lot of work to drive that far, but after we do that, we will feel calmer and we can swing back through the cities on the way home.” 

Two days later we were at Rivière du Loup (established in 1673!), a beautiful town in Quebec, right on the St. Lawrence. The next step from there would be to turn to the east and cut across New Brunswick to Nova Scotia and beyond.

By then, we were impressed at three specific things, never before contemplated by us, about the St. Lawrence River.

1. It’s HUGE!  It’s very wide - and the further we drove the wider it was getting. The river flows from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and then into the Atlantic.  And the Gulf of St. Lawrence?  It’s 1/3 the size of the Gulf of Mexico but much deeper in most of it. 

2. As we drove northeast from Quebec and the river was getting wider, the hills and mountains - which are called the Laurentians - on the north side of the river were distant and blue.  I had never heard of the Laurentians in my life, they were beyond gorgeous.

3. The clouds! Cool air and the deep cold river mix with Atlantic air and water currents to somehow create constant rolling, billowing clouds. There were cloudless days, too, but most of our trip seemed to be spent under gigantic and velvety-looking puffs of spectacular clouds.