The dedicated Cuthbert follower last found us arriving back at the St Lawrence in Quebec province having completed the long, remote and fabulously featureless Trans-Labrador Highway. It was the end of September, the US border showed no sign of opening anytime soon and we’d have bet our last bottle of Pinot Noir that we’d be spending another winter in Canada. But for the autumn, we still had lots to see in Quebec and Ontario…
Bordering on the ridiculous
Before we get into the Quebec/Ontario travel stuff, if you’re not following US border shenanigans (we know… it’s not top of the list of everyone’s concerns right now) allow us to inform and educate. The White House policy for ages has been that the foreigner who flies into USA from Canada for non-essential travel is fine and dandy. However, the foreigner who wants to drive across the land border from Canada for non-essential travel would inflict plague and pestilence across the Union and is therefore not allowed.
The bonkers result is that Canadian snow-birds have for two winters now, been handing their vehicles to commercial transporters at the border, taking a 10 minute helicopter ‘sight-seeing’ flight to USA, picking-up their vehicle on the other side and driving on south to the sunshine. All totally above-board and legal. Why they could not drive their own vehicle into the USA is a mystery, but greater minds than ours thought this thing up. We could have done the helicopter-trick too, but at a total cost of around $CAN3,500 (yes, you read that right) we’d rather stay in Canada and explore the marvellous provinces of Quebec and Ontario.
What’s the plan?
Let’s go back to us arriving at Baie Comeau on the St Lawrence Seaway where we took a few days to chill-out after several days of solid driving. Once again, that age-old pesky question popped its head above the parapet: ‘What’s the plan?’. Sigh. Yet again… we had no real plan. After a bit of pondering, we formulated the ‘Tale of Three Cities’. Three great Canadian cities in a row.
If we’re honest, we’re not actually great fans of ‘the city’; they generally have little to attract us as overlanders. But we do like to think that we see all aspects of any country we visit, so we try to spend a bit of time in cities, even if only to moan afterwards about how over-crowded, difficult to park and expensive they are 😉.
As we headed south to City No.1, autumn (okay… fall if you’re a local) was really starting to get underway. We’d been told to expect great things of this season and Quebec did not disappoint! All around us leaves turned to a spectacular array of shades. City parks, hillsides, country lanes… around every corner was a scene of riotous reds, oranges, yellows, greens.
Ye Olde Quebec
City No.1 on our eastern Canada metropolis-tour was Quebec City. Now… the truly historic city is a rare thing in North America. On this continent, cities are mostly 20th Century creations. But in Quebec City we find a real gem. It’s a real historic town with atmospheric cobbled streets and properly old buildings (not like other places in North America where so-called ‘historic’ buildings are less ancient than many tins of food in Europe 😉).
Quebec City has not just the odd government building or tourist attraction with a historic-style façade, but genuine old homes, taverns, city walls, fortifications. Wonderful to wander around and a sense of history we had missed since Mexico. What with the ye olde worlde atmosphere and the dominant French language, the recently descended alien would be forgiven for thinking he had landed in Europe.
We found a great place to park-up Cuthbert withing walking distance of the old town and main attractions (this we find is often a determining factor as to whether we end up enjoying our time in a city or not) and thoroughly enjoyed a week or so exploring. The weather was so unseasonably warm that we could even have dinner outside in street cafes… in October… in Canada. How about that, eh?
Moving on, we did a de-tour slightly south of the Seaway around the Eastern Townships area. Wowser. Here is where those autumn leaves really put on the grand spectacular show! The cute but slightly touristy towns like Magog and North Hatley were worth a quick stop, but we rather preferred the country drives between them.
Montreal
Our City No.2 is Montreal. A vast, sprawling megalopolis, we couldn’t find anywhere central to park-up. It’s impossible to consider covering this city on foot, so we reverted for the first time in ages to our old friend, Uber. In defence of Montreal, it is a very cool happening city. It has a bit of a historic centre, great shopping/cafes and a nicely developed waterfront. It’s not an unpleasant place as far as major cities go, but it’s a classic example of why exploring these kinds of cities really doesn’t suit our lifestyle. We spent a couple of days there and met some very cool fellow overlanders Michael and Melanie (see @hygge_tramp) then moved swiftly-on.
Just south of Montreal is the provincial border into English-speaking Ontario. Quebec, you are fabulous. We had an amazing time and have many reasons to love you. Certainly, no trip to Canada is complete without seeing the province’s marvellous attractions. But we’d be lying if we said weren’t just a teeny bit relieved to get back to easy communications. I was spectacularly bad at French pronunciation in school. Now 40 years later from behind a covid-mask, I’m not even that good. Call us lazy overlanders… we should absolutely make more effort to learn local language.
Tyred-out
One of the reasons we pushed on south was to collect some new tyres from Michelin in Cornwall, Ontario. Yes, Cuthbert’s old shoes had lasted well (we get around 40-45,000km from each) but with winter coming, it’s time for new ones. In Canada, like several other countries, the Michelin XZL tyre is designated as ‘military spec’ and therefore not routinely available to buy. But Michelin has provided great assistance to us in several countries. They have shipped the tyres in from Europe and cleared them specially for us.
The route southwards from Cornwall goes through a pretty and (relatively) historic area of Canada. It was once settled by the Americans who, having been loyal to the Crown, fled across the St Lawrence River from the USA when America gained independence. The impact of this remains evident in the pretty colonial towns, particularly Kingston (did you know it was once the capital of Canada?)
Toronto
Toronto is our City No.3, with a character totally different from Montreal and Quebec. It’s super-cool and super-modern. We found a great place to park-up in the centre for a few days and celebrated our wedding anniversary with dinner in the revolving restaurant at the top of the CN Tower. Toronto has great museums, shopping and some very cool street-art too.
In our tour around the mid-Ontario area we were lucky enough to catch-up with some old friends. First our lovely ship-mate friend Juli, who we met a few years ago crewing on a yacht through the Panama Canal. Also, friends Steve and Suzanne (with their super-cute boys Gus and Toby) who we hadn’t seen since our time in Doha eight years ago. Thanks to them all for wonderful hospitality.
The Final Falls
At some point in time, whilst we were enjoying the charms of Ontario and wondering where to head for winter, a lightning-bolt suddenly shot out of the blue from the White House. Holy Moly… the USA would be opening its Canadian land border in early November. After 20 months of ‘Nope, don’t even think about it…’, Uncle Sam changed his tune to ‘Howdy stranger… come on in!’ Game-changer! Just goes to show, you need to stay flexible with this overlanding malarkey.
Details were sketchy at first. Was the border fully opening, or just allowing Canadians to cross (a critical point if you’re stuck in Canada but not Canadian!)? What would the vaccination requirements be? We held our breath for a few days wondering whether it meant we could finally leave. Eventually all came clear… yes, on Monday 8th November 2021 the USA would open its borders to all vaccinated nationalities. Yeaahy!
Well, there was nothing else to do but press on and see that last bit of fabulous Canada! From Toronto it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to the world-class tourist attraction of Niagara Falls. We’ve seen many a waterfall on our travels, but this one is obviously right up-there as one of the best. Many tourists go to Niagara, tick the ‘Falls box’, and move swiftly on. But the area has many other attractions and we ended-up staying around a week, doing walks in the gorge, visiting Fort George and the nearby cutesie town of Niagara-on-the-Lake.
Finally, we ended our time in Canada with a ‘most southerly point’ box-tick. Point Pelee, near the town of Windsor and the US border crossing into Detroit, is the most southerly point on mainland Canada. We’d been to the most easterly and westerly points of Canada, and we had been to the most northerly point that we could drive (limited to the NWT border due to Covid). So we’re guilty of the odd bit of box-ticking and couldn’t miss ticking-off the most-southerly-point box too.
One last thing…
The Grand Opening Day of the border approached with a massive media fanfare in Canada. So many Canadians were champing-at-the-bit to get across and mega-queues were predicted. We decided that after so long in Canada, we could wait for the palaver to die down. But shortly before the big day arrived… uh-oh! Marcus felt Cuthbert’s clutch slipping ☹. Bugger.
The original clutch has done almost 260,000 km, so it’s not wholly unexpected for it to conk-out. But it’s all about timing, isn’t it? As luck would have it… we just happened to find a spare clutch lurking in our gubbins-box (okay, the real story is that we’ve been carrying a spare clutch for over five years because some Daily 4×4 drivers in Australia reported getting only 25,000km out of theirs!!! We’ve done over 10 times that distance 😮).
A few new tools for the job were needed: a trolley jack just happened to be on special offer in Canadian Tire that day… lucky, eh! And a transmission adapter for it came by on-line order within a couple of days. Marcus could then just take out the gearbox, pop-in the new clutch and off we go, right?? Ha, ha, ha.
If you’re familiar with such an operation, you’ll be wiping the laughter tears from your eyes by now. There is no ‘just take out the gear-box and pop-in the new clutch’… it’s a real monster of a job, especially when done in a truck-stop carpark. But after 10 hours under the truck, with just a moderate amount of swearing and cursing, he did it. All on his own. Super-proud that over 8 years and 260,000 kms of overlanding, there hasn’t been one thing that Marcus hasn’t been able to fix on Cuthbert.
The end of an era
So here we are at the end of an era! Canada… standby for a serious bit of gushing praise here! The extraordinary beauty of the scenery, wildlife and ecology is breath-taking. The people have been extremely friendly, and we have never felt anything less than warmly welcome. We cannot overstate how wonderful our time here has been and how lucky we feel to have been here for the pandemic. We have been vaccinated here and we felt covid-safe with reasonable precautions taken almost everywhere we went.
The country was kind enough to extend our visas twice and we have spent far more time exploring and understanding this amazing country than we would otherwise have done. What was originally meant to be a few weeks transit to Alaska turned into 20 months and 49,399km of touring the whole country (punctuated by a bit of stay-where-you-are lock-down time) and we loved every one of the 618 days. Thankyou Canada, we’ll miss you!
Click here for detailed route map of 49,399 km across Canada. Click here for the full Canada Blog of our 618 days overlanding the country.
Next installment will come to you from the good ol’ US of A!! 😊