Baie St. Paul

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.

Geologically the bay is interesting, having been created by a meteor strike eons ago, before glaciation and the appearance of the St. Lawrence. It sits in an eroded bowl that was the crater, which is cut across by the river, and if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know; it would just seem pleasant that the hills provide skiing in winter, the favorite sport around here.

Baie St. Paul at dawn, from Patrick and Mary’s, June 5, 2023. The tide is in, so the bay is shining, and the St. Lawrence River is visible beyond. You can make out the east end of Ile-aux-Coudres beyond the trees, far right. We thought the clouds might indicate smoke from wildfires, but no, it seems they were rain clouds.

Baie St. Paul itself is an arts center, full of artists, galleries, and a small museum. The museum wasn’t open yet - the season hasn’t begun - and we have too much stuff as it is, but we did meet her friend Denise Pelletier, who makes beautiful work in acrylic (click on her name to see her website).

Our best adventure was a visit to Ils-aux-Coudres, just off-shore from town in the St. Lawrence. This large island is notable, in my mind anyway, for music and geology. Did you know that slate is the most common sedimentary rock in the world? Ile-aux-Coudres is composed entirely of slate, and the beach offers great examples. Over thousands of millenia it has been pushed up and tilted, eroded and rounded and turned into fragments.

As for the music, we had the great good fortune to run across an open-air concert connected with the Havre Musical Hotel, which seems to arrange concerts nearly every day. Since we parked at the end of the road and the beach was right there, it was easy to walk along and come to the band shell. Several dozen people were sitting on the grass and listening to a Beatles tribute band. This turned into a sing-and-dance-along with the final piece - “All You Need Is Love” - almost everyone got up and joined in. Lovely in the open sunshine! Sadly the video Mary made is in iCloud, and we are Android. I can’t seem to figure out how to get it in here. Let’s make do with a photo of the band shell after the event was over.

Public Art in Montreal