Peter Egan Tours Québec’s Fabled Gaspé Peninsula–FROM THE ARCHIVES

It was an Olympian entrance into the old French Canadian city of Trois-Rivières on the St. Lawrence River. Thunder clapped and lightning struck hills on both sides of the highway. But as we followed signs for the Centre Ville, the clouds parted and the sun came out, bathing the tall church steeples and the slate roofs on the old stone houses in soft evening light.

We turned left near the river on a street called the Chemin du Roy.

“What does that mean?” Barb asked over my shoulder as we paused at a stop sign.

“It means ‘Way of the King’,” I replied.

“I thought ‘king’ was spelled r-o-i in French.”

“It is,” I replied authoritatively, “but in this case they are referring to Roy Rogers, King of the Cowboys. French-Canadians love Westerns. They consider Dale Evans to be their queen.”

This would not be the last time my masterful command of college French came in handy on this trip. In fact it was a college course, taken 36 years ago, that prompted this trip in the first place.

It was all Dr. Loudon’s fault.

Loudon was my freshman Geology 101 professor at the University of Wisconsin, a guy who might have been the prototype for Indiana Jones. He taught college in the winter, but in the summer he was a highly paid oil geologist who worked for Sun Oil and traveled all over the world in search of this vital black fluid. He’d canoed down the Yukon River, paddled into the jungles of British Honduras and flown his own float plane into the wilds of northern Canada. And he had the Kodachrome slides to prove it.

In one of his lectures, he showed us images of rock formations on the shoreline of Québec’s Gaspé Peninsula, that lobster claw of land that follows the St. Lawrence River northeast and juts out into the Atlantic. His pictures showed a rustic land of sweeping coastal roads, lonely stone cottages and small fishing villages that looked like something from Brittany or the north coast of Scotland. The people, he said, spoke only French and were descended from the earliest European settlers in North America.

I was stunned.

Here was a chance to exercise your pathetic French skills and visit a place that looked like Europe without actually buying an airline ticket and flying to Europe–something this starving student couldn’t begin to afford. And you could ride there on your motorcycle!

My roommate, Pat Donnelly, was equally thunderstruck by the irrefutable logic of this concept.

So in the autumn of 1968 we loaded our two motorcycles (mine a Honda CB160, Pat's a Honda 305 Dream) and headed for the Gaspé. Barb, who was then my girlfriend, knitted me a warm scarf to take along. I still have it.

Pat and I rode for days in the cold autumn Canadian rain–with no raingear, because that wouldn’t look cool–and slept on the ground in a leaky tent. We made it as far as Montreal before we ran out of time, money, calories and body heat simultaneously, and had to turn around. We arrived home in Wisconsin like prodigal sons: wet, cold and broke.

No Gaspé Peninsula. A failed quest.

And all these years, I have nursed an unfulfilled desire to see the place, partly out of curiosity and partly out of revenge on the past, to let the other shoe drop, as it were.

So when Barb and I were looking for a touring destination last summer, I said, “Let’s go see the Gaspé Peninsula. Limber up our rusty French, see Québec, eat some seafood in small fishing villages and come down through New England on our way home.”

Barb looked at the map and said, “Wow! It’s way out there! That’s a long way to ride...”

I nodded and said nothing. Now, as back in 1968, I didn’t want Truth to interfere with Destiny.

We loaded up our BMW R1150RT and on a hot, sultry Wednesday morn headed north into threatening skies toward upper Michigan and the Canadian border at Sault Ste. Marie.

By lunchtime that first day, four equipment failures had occurred.

First, we discovered that the stock BMW seat that felt so good in the showroom was almost unbearably uncomfortable after four hours in the saddle. By noon, we were both standing up on the pegs every few minutes.

Barb made me stop at a Wal-Mart, where she bought a small child's pillow festooned with stars and moons and planets. It looked like artwork from The Little Prince. Very cosmic.

Then it started to pour and I discovered that my trusty old Gore-Tex touring jacket–perhaps a victim of one too many washings–had suddenly decided to soak up water like a sponge. Also, my plastic rain pants leaked in the crotch. So did Barb’s. We looked like poster children for incontinence. Backtracking to Nick’s BMW near Green Bay, we Mastercharged about $200 worth of new raingear.

Suitably pillowed and waterproofed, we thrummed up the Lake Michigan coastline as far as Manistique, and then hit Canada the next morning, crossing the bridge at Sault Ste. Marie. The border crossing was friendly and easy, a far cry from the one Donnelly and I had endured in 1968. Fearing the endemic draft desertion, drug culture and motorcycle hooliganism of Sixties Youth, the border authorities had run us through the mill, checking our police records, patting us down, pawing through our duffel bags and sniffing our toothpaste.

No such trouble this time. We are old and respectable. We have hard luggage, credit cards and bifocals. It’s hell not being a threat to anyone.

On Canada’s Highway 17, we soon discovered a pleasant fact. Canadians drive like bats out of hell. Their roads are seriously under-posted (90 kph, or about 55 mph, even on four-lane segments), but no one pays any attention. They all go 70 to 90 mph, speeding along politely without aggression, keeping right except to pass. And you never see a cop. Pure heaven.

We made it through the north woods and lakes to Mattawa that night, a pretty little town on the steep banks of the Ottawa River. Our view from the Valois Motel could have been a painting from the 19th-century Hudson River School, except for the satellite dish and the oil-head Beemer with ABS in the foreground.

Early daylight found us descending the river valley on winding scenic roads through Pembroke. I looked for a place called Wright’s Cabins, where Pat and I had pooled our dwindling money for a cabin one night so we could avoid shivering to death in our soggy sleeping bags. Old Mrs. Wright had made us tea, dried our clothes and brought extra blankets. A miraculous find, fondly remembered. But now I couldn’t locate the place. It was either bypassed with the new four-lane around Pembroke or buried under a shopping center. Everything looked different. Time marches on, while memory simplifies and condenses. Also, brain cells are killed off by tequila.

Barb and I cruised through Ottawa and then up the freeway to Montreal, where we hit rush hour. Montreal has a beautiful old city center, but the surrounding suburbs are what I call a Ruined Zone. Too much traffic, too many people, houses, franchises, malls and car dealerships. You look around and say, “Lord, get me out of here.”

We zoomed northeast on increasingly more rustic two-lane roads along the St. Lawrence and soon found ourselves in Trois-Rivières, a picturesque city that is still human in its size and scope. Motoring straight into the old downtown on the Chemin du Roy (Rogers), we found a beautiful B&B called the Auberge-Gite de Fleurvil, right on the river.

Barb checked on a room while I waited outside, fearing rejection. We were wet and dirty. The owner, a Monsieur Yves Adams, came out, shook my hand enthusiastically and directed me to park our bike in the family garage, next to his Harley Springer Softail. He had a copy of Hog Tales on the antique coffee table in the living room.

Sometimes you stop for the night and drive right into the dead center of Nirvana. Other times, the bear eats your tent.

We walked around town in the evening, and suddenly everything was very French–menus, signs and architecture. The houses in Trois-Rivières are right out of France, a curious mixture of ungainly proportions, wrought-iron porch railings and metal roofs of bright red or green. As in Paris, all old architecture is charming, while nearly everything modern is hideous beyond all comprehension, as if two different races of humans had inhabited the country, before and after WWII.

Cruising up the St. Lawrence on the river road the next morning, we began to see a lot of touring motorcycles and bicycles. Things were getting more scenic and vacationish by the mile.

Using our proven method of following signs that say Centre Ville, we rode steeply uphill into the lovely old city of Québec, which was originally built as a mountaintop fortress to protect French Canada from the ambitions of British, Indian and Yankee marauders. It was here, on a high plateau called the Plains of Abraham that the British under Wolfe defeated Montcalm's French forces and ended France's power in North America.

If the battle had gone the other way, people in Winnipeg would be eating snails and drinking decent wine at this very moment. Both Montcalm and Wolfe were killed in this battle, incidentally, and never saw the outcome of their struggle.

Old Québec is a wonderful city, full of great restaurants, charming old hotels, narrow streets and sidewalk cafés–a Paris in miniature, easily walked. I was right in my suspicion that Donnelly and I could have visited Europe right here in North America. Too bad we never made it.

On the other hand, we couldn’t have afforded it anyway. Cities–even beautiful ones–can be hostile to young people without money. When Pat and I left for Canada in 1968, we each had $60 to last us for two weeks. Québec would have eaten us alive. We’d still be there, washing dishes.

Barb and I, however, had a paid-up credit card, so we checked into the Hotel Le Clos Saint-Louis, parked our bike in the courtyard and chatted with our friendly concierge, who said she used to tour all over Canada on a Gold Wing. You have to love a country where hotel managers don’t stare sullenly at the bugs on your jacket while you check in.

Climbing the narrow stairs to our antique-rich second-story room, we kicked back to wait for photographer Brian Blades to join us for dinner. He was supposed to fly in from California and call us when he got to the hotel.

At 7:30 in the evening, Brian still hadn’t called, so we phoned California to find out when his flight was arriving. His wife, Wendy, answered and said, “I’ll let him tell you. He’s standing right here.”

“Hi, Brian,” I said. “I guess this means you’ll be late for dinner.”

“I couldn’t get a Saturday flight,” he said, “so I’m taking the red-eye. I’ll be there tomorrow around noon.”

I was secretly delighted because this gave Barb and me a leisurely morning to look around Québec City and enjoy Sunday breakfast at an outdoor café, where the chairs were a lot better than our BMW seat and there was no helmet buffeting.

We met Brian at the airport, where he snagged a rental SUV the size of Idaho and followed us up the highway into the fabled and much-imagined Gaspé Peninsula.

I’d made it at last.

For the first few miles, however, this was not the cliff-hanging shore road I’d expected, but rather a busy highway through rolling farm country. It was still quite populated until we got to Rimouski, where the road narrowed and finally began dipping in and out of small villages and harbors on the shoreline. The St. Lawrence River starts out narrow at Québec (which means “a narrowing of waters” in Iroquois) and gets wider, like an opening funnel, as you head toward the Atlantic. By the time you get to Cap-Chat, the opposite shore has disappeared.

It was Cartier who first charted this shore, in 1534, looking for that elusive western route to the Far East. Europeans were desperate for a way to bypass the steep trade markup imposed by Islamic potentates. An urge that persists to this day, as anyone filling up at a gas station will tell you.

In the U.S., I’d been keeping track of our mileage, which was always between 48 and 50 mpg on the big Beemer, regardless of speed. In Canada, trying to figure out mileage using liters and kilometers proved difficult for a person of my math skills, so I gave up computing our mpg at every gas station and ate a Butterfinger instead.

From 5 to 6 p.m. we started scanning the small coastal towns for a motel and finally lucked out at a place north of Rimouski, called the Auberge Marée Douce (Hotel of the Gentle Sea). Yet another discovery, a nice old hotel with big porches and quaint cottages on a hillside overlooking the coast. At night the place was lit up like a Mandarin palace, and it had a fine dining room with excellent food.

Funny how the French preoccupation with good cuisine made the transition to the New World and is still in force, more than 300 years later. I always wonder why the English never noticed all this highly edible stuff, right across the Channel. Or north of Maine and east of Toronto.

Incidentally, the couple who ran this hotel, Marguerite and Fernand, spoke very little English, so we got a chance to exercise our rusty language skills. You don’t need a lot of French in Québec Province, but it helps to know a few common phrases, such as “Have you a bottle of absinthe and two glasses?” or, “The shaft of my blue umbrella is afflicted with doleful malfunctionings.”

As we headed up the coast in the morning, the road was alive with touring motorcycles, mostly bearing Québec provincial plates. A loop around the Gaspé Peninsula seems a popular getaway for Canadians, just as circling Lake Superior is for Midwesterners. And I would say that 85 percent of the bikes you see touring now are big V-Twin baggers–Harley Road Kings and their imitative Japanese brethren. Black beanie crash helmets rule.

The central spine of the Gaspé Peninsula is a heavily forested mountain ridge, and as you go northeast the foliage changes from central Eastern to North Woods and it starts looking like Sgt. Preston or Nelson Eddy country. There are few internal roads on the peninsula, but at St. Anne de Monts we turned inland to see the Parc de Conservation de la Gaspésie, a camping and hiking area in the mountains.

Alas, we had no hiking boots or tent, so after lunch at a costly and strangely sterile little hotel complex in the park, we headed back down a scenic valley full of sweeping roads and turned right. As we headed east along the shore, the towns got more remote, the coastline prettier and the road curvier. The place was beginning to look like Doc Loudon’s old Kodachromes.

Late in the afternoon, the road began to turn southeast along the cliffs and I realized we were suddenly at the farthest end of the peninsula. My odometer said we were exactly 1900 miles from Wisconsin. Twice as far east as Donnelly and I had gone with our little Hondas. At Montreal, we were only halfway here. What were we thinking back then?

And even now, as we stopped at a scenic lookout to gaze at the Atlantic, Barb said, “It feels like we’re a long way from home…”

Truly, as you turn away from the St. Lawrence and along the Atlantic cliffs, the ocean suddenly looks vast, with nothing but Europe out there somewhere. Even the road feels lonelier, and there’s less traffic and tourism. The roller-coaster pavement makes steep climbs and descents, sweeping down on the coast and briefly inland at small bays, like California’s Big Sur. The curves are all sweepers–no scorch-the-edge-off-your-tires stuff. Everything can be taken at 70 mph. Symphonic riding, with the cymbal crashing of waves.

With the sun setting, we finally turned into Gaspé Bay, where Cartier first set foot on North America, 471 years ago. We looked around the slightly seedy (but lively and jumpin’) town of Gaspé and found an old, partly restored hotel called La Maison William Wakeham at the edge of town. The place was still being renovated but had Norman architecture and a beautiful wood-paneled lobby and dining room (closed Mondays, wouldn’t you know).

After dinner at a good local restaurant called the Café des Artistes, we returned to our hotel, where I think we were the only guests. As we made our way through the silent, dimly lit lobby, Barb said it felt slightly creepy, like a scene from The Shining, so I thoughtfully resisted the temptation to shout, "Here's Johnny!" as we entered our room.

In the morning we found a man wandering around the lobby, inspecting the place. He was a French-Canadian named Jacques who had rented one wing of this hotel 40 years ago as a family dwelling and had returned to look around. He told us he now worked for a government agency that promotes Gaspé development. I asked him how the economy was doing.

The fishing industry, he said, was essentially dead, what with the near extinction of cod from overfishing. “But we’re doing okay with tourism,” he said. “Still, the peninsula is big and far from any urban center. Far flung. It’s a commitment to come here.”

I nodded. “I tried to come here 36 years ago myself and didn’t make it. It was too far.”

As we rode away I was troubled by a recurrent thought. Everywhere we go now, the traditional local economy is half-ruined by some environmental meltdown, but there’s always said to be tourist or real estate money coming in from “the outside.” I worry about shrinkage of the outside.

We crossed the York River and swept down a coast studded with lighthouses to the tourist town of Percé, so named because it has a huge Gibraltar-like rock off the coast with a hole pierced in it by waves. Just off the coast sits Bonaventure Island, famous as a sanctuary for thousands of wild seabirds and no good place to sit down.

Percé is a beautiful spot, with lots of seaside motels, restaurants with porches on the ocean, gift shops, etc., but it was absolutely swarming with tourists. We had lunch on a sun deck and then left before terminal claustrophobia uncorked my penchant for sudden violence. As we crawled out of town in bumper-to-bumper traffic through a sea of pedestrians, I turned to Barb and said, “Never underestimate the power of a rock with a hole in it. Erode it, and they will come.”

We rounded the peninsula and headed back west along Chaleur Bay into increasing population, prosperity and farming along the shore. More meadows and fields, less forest. The coastline was still pretty, but the wild part of the Gaspé was behind us.

It had taken us three days to round the peninsula, and our last stop for the night was in Carleton. We stayed at the Hotel Baie Bleue, a clean, modern place with an upstairs dining room overlooking the bay, where we sat down to the best seafood stew I’ve ever had. Every tour has its Meal of the Trip, and this was it. After dinner we said goodbye to Brian, who was getting up early to head back around the peninsula for Quebéc City and home.

Barb and I left early in the morning, too, rolling down into the forests of New Brunswick on Highway 17 through pockets of ghostly morning fog. Suddenly the signs were in English again. We crossed into Maine at Van Buren and began a wonderful backroad journey diagonally across New England, upstate New York and western Pennsylvania.

We passed Maine’s Mt. Katahdin, the state’s highest peak, and then spent three days crossing the White Mountains, Green Mountains, Adirondacks and Alleghenies, winding through one lovely old colonial town after another, across stone bridges, around white-painted churches and pausing to explore Revolutionary War cemeteries, Fort Ticonderoga and Watkins Glen.

Riding pleasure? For endless curves and sportbike roads, this was the best part of the trip. The northeastern U.S. doesn’t have the exotic French flavor or the lonely, edge-of-the-world atmosphere of the outer Gaspé, but it’s great riding in a setting of deep antiquity and charm.

Maybe this is where Pat and I should have gone. It was closer to home, cheaper to get to and had more curves. We also understood the language and the money.

But that wasn’t the point, really.

Back on that first motorcycle trip, we wanted desperately to go somewhere else, somewhere that didn't look or feel or sound like the place we lived. We were driven onward by those exotic Kodachromes, images of ocean and fishing villages, of stone huts and slate roofs, of a place where people spoke French and had menus filled with things that were new and hard to pronounce. We had to go there.

Or at least try.

And now, 36 years later, on the last day of our tour, Barb and I found ourselves in a fast-food joint along the Indiana Toll Road, making tracks for home and drinking iced tea to rehydrate ourselves from the suddenly crushing Midwestern summer heat.

Barb looked tired. She’d come a long way–4000 miles in 12 days of riding without a day off–while sitting on that cosmic little Wal-Mart pillow with nary a word of complaint. She gazed out the tinted window at the passing traffic and said, “Well, was the Gaspé Peninsula what you expected?”

I thought about it and shook my head. “No,” I said. “It’s not as poor and remote as I pictured. It’s greener, more vast and mountainous. Still rustic and beautiful, but more prosperous and complex. Also, much farther away. From our place, it’s like going to California and back.”

Barb nodded. Apparently she’d noticed.

As we rode toward home I pondered Barb’s question further and realized that no place I’d ever been turned out to be exactly as I’d imagined it while sitting at home. Not Vietnam, Paris, Katmandu or Yellowstone Park. Nothing is ever what you expect. Maybe that’s why we travel.