Baie St. Paul sits on an inlet from the St. Lawrence River, less than 2 hours east of Quebec City. We drove over there one morning to visit Mary (taken after a concert, see below) and Patrick (chopping wood, sadly not feeling well and just getting the work done), our friends and former neighbors from DC. We were up here a few years ago, and since then they’ve built a second house on the property and established themselves more. They use their place up to 6 months every year, and the rest of the time rent it out. We stayed with them 4 days, and it was good.

A very few of many, many examples of sculptures and murals to be seen all over Montreal!

We found our way to a restaurant in Old Town called Modavie, and had a darling lunch with jazz music. From there we realized the only thing to do was to drive up Mont Real, for which Montreal is named. Through curious local neighborhoods beset with one-way streets that led us ever off the beaten track, we found the road up the hill, taking us past a viewpoint facing northwest, around the flat top with walking paths, sports fields, parking lots, and what we thought would be the most wooded area, the very large cemetery, which occupies at least half of the mont. We drove through the cemetery marveling at its size and age. Cemeteries always quiet one’s mood, don’t they? All those women dead in childbirth, all those soldiers cut off young. Lots of mature trees, lots of understory, numerous locals maintaining their relatives’ graves. When trees die, the foresters here leave the snag, good for woodpeckers. Anyway, when we tired of that, we drove back down to the viewpoint. The day was very hazy, and we couldn’t see much except the Olympic stadium, very white against the muted landscape.

Julianne wrote this post, May 2023 Delta Marsh Bird Observatory – DMBO in Thunder Bay, ON. A kind group of volunteers operate mist nets spring and fall, to keep a record of migrants making it to this northern shore of Lake Superior. They are kind to visitors too, allowing me to hold and release this […]

There are a few photos and experiences of our trip in Canada that I haven’t been able to cram into this narrative so far. They don’t fit a narrative. I like the serendipitous, the accidental, the low. Low art, that’s the term I’m searching for. In this post I’m putting a few I couldn’t resist […]