Now this is more like it!

©2014 Lydia Hinshaw

View from our motel room's porch at Saint-Yvon

Our campsite at Métis

 TROIS PISTOLES, QC -- After two days of unrelenting rain Saturday and Sunday, we woke up Monday morning to a perfect day.

 We wound up in a motel again Sunday night, after traveling until almost dark in the hopes that the rain would quit so we could camp.  No luck.

 But the 12-room motel we stumbled into sat on a high bluff overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence.  We were the only guests.  In addition to our comfortable room, there was a breakfast room where we could prepare food and coffee.

 During the weekend, when it was pouring, we'd passed by a number of campgrounds we'd love to have checked into if the weather had been better.  Monday, in the sunshine, we found ourselves traveling through an area where the choices were limited.  Although our campground directory listed a number of campgrounds, the last wonderful one turned up at noon, and we didn't want to stop that early.

 Plus, we didn't know that would be the last beautiful one for hours.  One campground in our directory looked like a grassy parking lot, or a pasture, without a tree in sight.  The next had carefully cultivated trees lined up in military ranks, a campground suburbia with no one manning the front desk and no prices posted.

 We were about ready to settle for a motel again.

 And then, in Métis, we discovered a campground that was not in the directory, and there may be reasons for that.  The owner accepted $22 in cash for the site in the second picture.  We filled out no paperwork. No rules were posted. Our fire-pit was stuffed with trash.  There was no potable water on the property.  And the rest rooms and showers were unisex:  One room, three toilet stalls, three showers. 

 The maintenance man explained to me, in garbled French, that we shouldn't use one of the toilets because it has been broken for more than a year and he can't figure out how to fix it.  Then he gave me an unintelligible description of all the things it does, and all the remedies he's tried.   At least I think that's what he was saying.  It didn't seem to have occurred to him, or his boss, to put an out-of-order sign on the stall door.  

 The view made up for the idiosynchracies.  We watched giant ships in the distance, headed up the Gulf toward Montreal.  Closer to shore, with binoculars, we could see seals playing among the rocks that appear at low tide.  One of the owner's two cats came down and sunned herself on our picnic table for a while, leaving when she realized we weren't going to feed her.

 We also got all our wet stuff dried out, and returned the interior of the Magic Bus to a more organized condition, which won't last, but still has to be done regularly.

 It was an adventure that ended well.