Guide to the Gaspé Peninsula: Along the St Lawrence

As I write this, America's mad king Donald Trump continues his cruel and needless attacks on Canada, from asinine tariffs to batshit insane threats to make the country the USA's 51st state. Entirely understandably, Canadians are outraged by this act of betrayal from a formerly staunch ally, and I fully support every effort Canada takes to knee the demon Donald Trump in the balls, both metaphorically and literally.

With this context in mind, I'm more motivated than ever to write about the wonderful road trip that my partner and I took last summer along the Gaspé (Gaspésie) Peninsula in Quebec, traveling from Quebec City all the way around to the iconic Percé Rock, on a route following the course of the enormous Saint Lawrence river as it transitions from freshwater to the open Atlantic. Canada is a beautiful, diverse, and interesting country that has been very kind to us on all our travels there: I hope that someday, when the pestilence squatting in the U.S. White House has been removed, that we can be friends again once more.

Here is our brief guide to the Gaspé peninsula.

I was expecting Gaspé to be beautiful. As the northernmost mainland terminus of the Appalachian Mountains, jutting into the open Atlantic ocean, it'd be hard for it not to be. I was also expecting Gaspé to be wild. After all, it's a region bigger than Belgium with a little over 140,000 residents and exactly two roads crossing the peninsula's green central heart, so close to the Far North that a stray polar bear ended up in somebody's yard in 2022.

I was not expecting it to feel very much like we'd somehow been teleported from Northeastern North America to the far Northwest.

On our trip, we drove through a landscape of enormous pine forests, dramatic cliffs tumbling to the sea, impressive mountains, legendary salmon rivers, and atmospherically lonely beaches. We visited four Canadian national parks, saw multiple fin whales at a bracingly close distance from a Zodiac raft, and ate multiple lobster club sandwiches. The weather was almost obnoxiously perfect on every day of our trip in August, other than the massive rain storms we drove through from Boston up to Quebec City. All of Canada's notorious biting insects had mercifully died off, as is typical in late summer. It was perfect.

Gaspé was logistically easy too: even though we were visiting at the absolute peak of tourist season, there were vanishingly few tourists as compared to the crowds that descend on every place on the New England coast in summer. And everything from food to accommodations was far more affordable than anything you'd encounter in Maine or Massachusetts during the summer season, too. We intend to come back.

Here's my guide to the Gaspé Peninsula.

Some Facts about the Gaspé Peninsula

The Mi’kmaq people are the original First Nations inhabitants of the Gaspé area. The origin of the term Gaspé remains shrouded in mystery, but it might been derived from a Mi’kmaq word meaning "land's end." It's possible that the Mi’kmaq people came into contact with Spanish Basque fishermen and whalers well before then (and at least theoretically, even the Norse) but no clear evidence for this exists.

Jacques Cartier first clambered out of a boat and planted a cross on the shores of Gaspé Bay in 1534, marking the first arrival of French colonizers into North America. In other words, Gaspé is where a lot of The Trouble first began.

If you want to see a freaky-ass windmill, you can visit Projet Éole, home to the world's highest vertical-axis wind turbine - built as part of an experimental power plant back in the 1980s. The Gaspé Peninsula has some of the most intact temperate forests in Eastern North America, as well as the only population of caribou south of the Saint Lawrence River.

Yes, They Speak French in Quebec

Almost every time I tell my fellow Americans that I've just got back from Quebec, I'm asked the same question: "Do you have to speak French to get around there?"

No, you don't - though it helps. Most everyone we encountered on the Gaspé Peninsula spoke at least some English. And to further answer the implicit question lurking beneath the explicit question, people were perfectly nice about our unfortunate lack of French. No one chased us out of a cafe with a broom or anything. Sadly, this may have changed in 2025 for totally understandable reasons, thanks to the disgusting actions of Donald Trump and his insane fascist flunkies against our perfectly nice Canadian allies.

Still: do not act like a haughty jerk to people in a French-speaking province if they do not speak English. Not acting like a haughty jerk generally goes a really long way when you're traveling.

I do highly suggest this: learn how to say "Je suis désolé, je ne parle pas français" (I'm sorry, I don't speak French) in a apologetic tone. It's a polite acknowledgement that you don't feel entitled to be wrapped in the warm embrace of English at all times.

Quebec City and Bic National Park

On the first day of our trip, we departed Boston at lunch time and drove through record-breaking rainstorms through the White Mountains and up to Quebec City, an approximately 6 hour or so drive.

We waded a block through soaked and ancient streets to try the excellent tasting menu at Le Clan, a wild-game and local-products oriented restaurant in Quebec City that we both enjoyed very much. We also loved the clubby, wooden interior of the place, juxtaposed with fun contemporary art -it's a place you can comfortable hang out for a while.

As part of the tasting menu, we both got a chance to sample seal meat for the first time, which was served with arctic char (omble chevalier), suvalik (a kind of Inuit fruit salad), seaweed, fish sauce, and smoked cherries - dishes all inspired by the chef's visit to Nunavut to learn more about Inuit cooking and food culture. Seal, as it transpires, tastes a lot like the meat of a cow that's taken up a free-wheeling aquatic lifestyle, not unlike how alligator tastes like fishy chicken. Other stand-out dishes included a delightfully summer-like lobster with fresh peas, and a strawberry sponge cake made to look uncannily like a strawberry you'd consume as a power-up in a video game.

We spent the night at the charmingly historic and extremely central Hotel Clarendon (though most things in Quebec City are charmingly historic) and got started driving along the Saint Lawrence and out of town relatively early the next morning. Navigation was nothing if not easy. We simply cross the bridge from Quebec City, kept the Saint Lawrence on out left, and just kept driving. We were headed for an overnight stay at a frog-themed bed and breakfast (as one does) right outside Bic National Park, about three hours away.

Our first stop was at the Musée maritime du Québec - Capitaine J.E. Bernier, dedicated to naval history and to the legendary Quebecois captain, famous for various naval exploits. After admiring a particularly weird hydrofoil boat, we proceeded to Chez Mag in Kamouraska, an outdoor casse-croute by the river with lots of seating and poutine made with locally caught shrimp, of a tiny and delicate variety. While I'm not sure that poutine and seafood actually go together, I'm glad I tried it.

Past Kamouraska, we drove through a delightfully bucolic late-summer landscape, passing village after village with big silver church spires, rolling hills, and farms so perfect that they'd be right at home in some campaign commercial geared towards The Heartland. We also stopped at the amusingly miniscule Petit Phare lighthouse, which overlooks a wetlands bird reserve and is a nice place to hop out and stretch your legs.

In the little town of Le Bic, I'd booked a room at Le Mange-Grenouille, a bed-and-breakfast with an attached restaurant - all of it decorated in a style I can only adequately describe as Québécois Baroque Vomit, with knick-knacks, regional artifacts, patterned fabrics, and other representative local antiques bristling from every available service. (You will either hate this, or love it. I absolutely loved it).

They put us up in a room with a stellar view overlooking a little cove and the hotel's garden, and I enjoyed sitting out there for a bit looking, unsuccessfully, for seals. They're an animal I appreciate, even if I'm willing to eat them when given the legal opportunity. There was no air conditioning but on this evening, at this particular latitude, we didn't really need it.

We ate at the hotel for dinner, where we consumed locally-caught scallops, morels, and mussels from the interestingly ambitious menu while watching an unexpected lightening storm blow in from across the muscular expanse of the Saint Lawrence river. We could still see the other side of the river, illuminated at times by the electric flashes. I took a mental note to notice when we reached that point on the Saint Lawrence, sometime the next day, when the other bank would no longer be visible, where the river merged fully with the Atlantic Ocean.

The next morning, we checked out of the hotel and drove over to the park for our first bout of real hiking in Quebec. We'd decided against the full tide-dependent 5.4 mile Grand Tour hike (which involves some light rock-climbing), as we had some driving to do later: we did about six miles of hiking along other coastal trails instead. The weather was superb, if a bit breezy, and we wandered through impressively old-feeling pine forest and along almost-empty beaches looking out to the river.

We saw seals flopping moistly up on rocks, and held onto our hats as we considered the impressively imposing cliffs facing out to the water - jagged and raw in a way that reminded me far more of California than Eastern North America. We cut back through the interior of Bic's main forested peninsula and walked up forest staircases and startled a few indignant deer. It was, all things considered, just about a perfect day out.

After Bic, we pointed ourselves in the direction of Sainte-Anne-des-Monts, an approximately 2 hour and 28 minute drive which would take us past the actual generally-accepted start of the Gaspé Peninsula: the town of Matane. We passed the surprisingly good-sized industrial town of Rimouski and entered the pleasantly twee sea-side town of Sainte-Luce, where lines of brightly-colored summer vacation homes looked out onto the approximate place where the river became the ocean.

I opened Google Maps to look for something to eat, and unexpectedly, came across Lobo de Mar - a taco place that actually looked really good.

As we ordered our tacos from the restaurant's tiny beach shack, we began chatting with the owner: a Mexican man who married a local woman and decided to enter the local taco business in the summertime. His food was incredible, featuring tacos made with locally-sourced fish, shrimp, and squid (with peanut chili sauce glaze), excellent al pastor, and even high-quality mezcal brought back from the owner's winter place in Oaxaca, served with salt and slices of orange. It's a wonderful example of my favorite kind of restaurant - run by people far from their point of origin, serving marvelous examples of their culture's food with total confidence to a highly appreciative local population.

It was also nice to be talking with somebody who fully appreciates the culinary and slightly mind-altering properties of extremely hot chile peppers. "We need to start traveling with zip-lock bags of dried ghost peppers" my partner said in a firm tone of voice to me, as we got back in the car.

Our next stop was at Jardins de Métis, a large botanical garden and arts complex located by the sea near the town of Grand-Métis. Founded by the outdoors-minded Canadian aristocrat Elsie Reford in the early 1900s on her private estate, the gardens reverted to public ownership in the 1960s. Reford's old home has been turned into a museum with a focus on her life and art work by local women, and we were very interested in the exhibits on how she spent her days working for women's issues, fishing remote salmon rivers, and terrorizing important men. The gardens themselves feature a lot of interesting native and international plant species, some very cool contemporary art installations and exhibits revolving around futuristic interpretations of outdoor spaces. The on-site restaurant is also supposed to be very good, although we didn't get a chance to try it.

From Jardins de Métis, we drove an hour and 40 minutes farther to Sainte-Anne-des-Monts, the small town that functions as the usual lodging point for visitors to Gaspésie National Park.

We were not exactly spoilt for choice for food, as basically everything closes on Sunday and Monday in this stretch of the Gaspe Peninsula - so we were grateful to come across Pizzeria 132 in Cap-Chat, a small family restaurant on the water that managed to squeeze us in (as everybody else was grappling with the lack of open restaurants that weren't Tim Hortons, too).

We both ordered enormous, delicious club sandwiches with lobster and shrimp in them, and while I'm not totally clear on why the people of the Gaspe Peninsula are such fiends for club sandwiches, I thank them for it.

Gaspésie National Park

Gaspésie National Park is the reason why most people make their way out to Gaspe in the first place - an impressively large, wild reserve that feels like nowhere else I've been in Northeastern North America, home to some of the last surviving old-growth remnants of the vast forests that used to blanket the coasts from here all the way down to New England.

Its boundaries contain Mount Jacques-Cartier, which at 4,170 ft is the highest mountain in the Canadian Appalachians (and part of a sub-range charmingly called the Chic-Choc Mountains): the slopes of this peak are home to a rare and sadly dwindling population of woodland caribou, the only members of their species left south of the Saint Lawrence.

We didn't climb make the 8.2 kilometer trek up Mount Jacques-Cartier this time, both because we needed to make a reservation in advance - you have to use a shuttle to reach the trailheads during the busier summertime months - and because we wanted to explore more areas of the park. Which there a lot of, reachable by a series of often unpaved gravel roads. I advise bringing a car with four-wheel-drive, although we did see a few absolute lunatics traversing winding mountain roads in full-size rental RVs.

We spent our day on a series of short hikes, beginning with a relatively short climb up the Mount Ernest-Laforce Trail, which culminates at a platform offering genuinely majestic views over the enormous green mountains of the Chic-Choc range. We could see no signs of human civilization anywhere, and the silence and enormity of it all reminded me once again, pleasingly, of the sheer scale of the West.

From there, we took a scenic drive westwards through the park in the direction of the short trail at Rivière-Cascapédia, a salmon river that tumbles out of the north end of the long and beautiful Lac Cascapédia (which also offers some very nice looking camp sites, if you're into that kind of thing).

It was on the dirt road passing south of Lac Cascapédia that we came around a corner and found ourselves face-to-face with an adolescent moose, which was still a good deal bigger than a good-sized horse. I was thrilled, even if the moose was, as is traditional for moose, regarding us with an expression that could only be interpreted as halfway between "puzzled" and hostile." While I'd seen moose a few times in places like Utah and Wyoming, I had never been blessed by a majestic-yet-threatening encounter with one of those primordial-looking freaks in Eastern North America (even though we go to Vermont all the time).

The moose began advancing towards our car with its head down, and my partner - prepared for this sort of thing, what with previously living in Vermont - reversed backwards as I quickly rolled the window all the way up. Eventually, the moose decided that we'd been warded off, and slipped back, invisibly, into the forest. It is both unsettling and delightful to consider that in certain forests, a spindly foul-tempered animal that's taller than a truck and is totally capable of killing you could be watching your actions, totally unnoticed, at any time.

Anyway, this is why you drive really slowly with your brights on in this part of the world at night and early in the morning. So you don't catch a stray moose through the skull.

We paused at the Rivière-Cascapédia trailhead to eat a sandwich for lunch, where we ate Subway sandwiches (the only thing open in town) in the remarkably antediluvian-feeling pine forest around us, where stringy white lichens dripped from the trees, little unseen birds yelled at each other from the boughs and bushes, and fresh raspberries grew in profusion from the bushes.

We walked the brief trail to the river in a sort of reverent silence, (snacking on raspberries on the way), and I thought again about how this landscape was about as close as I was ever going to get to seeing what the Northeastern United State's forests looked like before European colonizers barged in to fuck everything up. When we reached the river - a beautiful, shallow stream cutting between green mountains that looked exactly like something you'd see in an overwrought painting - we walked for while among the rocks, enjoying being in genuine wilderness.

Our last stop of the day was at Lac aux Américains, an easy (if somewhat uphill) hike that brings you to a truly majestic view of a glacial basin overlooking an impossibly clear mountain lake. While the trail was somewhat busy, it was still a pleasant walk through deep forest, and we enjoyed lingering for a bit at another almost-impossibly beautiful place.

Back in Sainte Anne that evening, we stopped in for a drink at Microbrasserie Le Malbord, a charming local establishment serving their own interesting craft beers - which even I liked, and I'm ambivalent at best to beer. We decided to stay for dinner, and, as we chatted in abysmal French with the extremely friendly staff, made a satisfying meal out of both hot and cold smoked local salmon, seasoned cheese curds, and locally-produced salami.

Gaspe is generally a remarkably good place to try locally-produced food and drink. It's the kind of place where you can't throw a rock without meeting someone producing some kind of excellent specialty craft food product. Not that you should be throwing rocks at people who specialize in esoteric cheeses.

Forillon National Park

We'd spent a few days focused primarily on pine forests and now, it was time to go bother some whales.

From Sainte Anne, we drove along what was now, 100% no-bullshit The Ocean. We could have driven all along the coast to Forillon, and perhaps that's what we should have done. We decided instead to cut through the lonely interior of the peninsula, on the 198 highway that would take us through Murdochville - a mining town founded in the 1950s, and the only settlement of any note in Gaspe situated away from the coast.

The drive through the mountains was beautiful and incredibly vast, in a way that reminded me more of the vastness of the West's wilderness than anywhere else I've been in Eastern North America. It was also kind of boring, once the novelty factor of being in a vast wilderness within driving distance from Boston wore off. There weren't many places to stop: the view was forest, hills, and more forests, with occasional pullouts for remote fly fishing locations. And while the mining town of Murdochville definitely exists, there aren't any restaurants or other tourist amenities there (unless you're into fly-fishing).

I'd booked us a chalet at Les Chalets Du Parc, comprised of two properties close to the entrance of Forillon National Park itself. These are pleasantly rustic cabins that still have Wifi and warm showers, which is my preferred level of roughing it: there's also outdoor areas for fires, and the property we stayed at had a lovely view over the bay in the direction of the town of Gaspe itself.

For our first night in town, we ate at Brise Bise, which is a friendly brewpub-type place with outdoor seating. It gets popular, so be prepared to wait - or to sit outside, which was pleasant and not too cold, what with the heat lamps. I ordered and enjoyed the rustic-style bouillabaisse, which included scallops, shrimp, and local salmon.

The next morning, we woke up early and headed into the park where we'd catch our whale-watching boat, operated by the Croisières Baie de Gaspé company. They operate both a large boat and a small boat, and I opted for the 12-person Rocher Le Vieux small-boat option, which I suspected would get us closer to the whales. And while whale watching tours are never a sure-thing, in this case, we got very lucky.

Within a few minutes of motoring out past Forillon's impressively dramatic Appalachian cliffs jutting out into the sea, and our very charming guide (who was also the teenage son of the captain) spotted whale spouts on the horizon. Our boat quickly navigated towards the whales, and we were lucky enough to see the enormous bowed back of a fin whale surface just feet away, so close that we could audibly hear the huffing sound of Earth's second-largest animal. Our luck continued to hold: we saw four more fin whales and a few (considerably smaller) Minke whales.

Buoyed by the good spirits that come from seeing whales in the wild - something-something about our shared relationship as denizens of Earth with the inscrutable kings of the deep or something - we drove back towards the park entrance and stopped at a Neapolitan style pizza place we'd spotted the day before. We enjoyed some genuinely very good and quite authentic pizzas with arugula and spicy sausage, then doubled back into the park to do some more walking around the coastline.

We spent the rest of the day hiking around the park, starting with the popular L'Anse-aux-Amérindiens trail, which takes you through the woods and along the coast to the solar-powered lighthouse at Cap-Gaspé. While it's an about 8 kilometer hike (if you decide to go all the way down the cliff's to Land's End), it's largely very flat. You're also allowed to ride bicycles on the gravel trail, which made me wish I'd taken my gravel bike. It's a lovely trail.

We also enjoyed the short but very steep La Chute trail, which takes you down wooden staircases into a lush and antediluvian- feeling gorge that's capped off with a waterfall. This place in particular really reminded me of the northern rainforests of the Pacific Northwest.

That night, we had dinner at Le Seaflower, a truly excellent small cocktail and wine bar and restaurant, owned by a Frenchman-from-France with a genuine passion for coming up with interesting beverages. (He apparently Googled me after I made the booking, as he likes to find out what his customer's deals are before they arrive, and he mentioned my work in drones to me - I did not dare to ask if he'd come across my horrible acts in the field of memes).

We enjoyed small plates featuring homemade terrines and smoked fish, and sampled a cocktail made with Dr Pepper and milk that tasted remarkably like an alcoholic New York egg-cream. The owner will also come up with cocktails made especially for you based on your preference.

The next day, we were headed to Percé- but as it's only an hour away, we had plenty of time to further explore Forillon. We headed to the short and fascinating La Taïga trail from the Penouille parking lot, a 3 kilometer round trip wander that takes you through a unique low-latitude taiga landscape. We largely had the place to ourselves early in the morning, and it was rather magical to wander through the weird sandy and lichen-filled taiga landscape on the sand spit that the trail follows. The area was absolutely filled with tiny, noisy birds, and we saw yet more waterfowl and little guys I was unable to identify when we reached the scenic shoreline, looking out over Gaspé Bay. As we hung out by the beach, we saw seals tooling around in the shallow water near the shore.

Percé

I was warned by a number of people that "it's so touristy in Percé," and we braced ourselves to be shell-shocked by commercial hell after a week in the relative solitude of elsewhere on the Gaspé peninsula.

As it turns out, these rumors were greatly exaggerated.

Far as we could tell, these doomsayers were referring to the fact that Percé, a small town near the tip of the Gaspé peninsula near the impressively stark Percé rock and Bonaventure Island, actually has any noticeable amount of tourism at all. To us, people who regularly have to navigate the hellscape that is Cape Cod in summer while visiting family, it was marvelously quiet - even during our visit during peak season in August.

Indeed, we thought Percé was absolutely delightful. The red rocks that tower over the town reminded me uncannily of the American Southwest, while the coastline itself resembles a more stark and dramatic version of the more southerly New England coastline we're accustomed to. I'd booked us a motel right on the coastline, a smartly-updated place that only takes reservations via phone.

We were able to walk out of our hotel room and right up the boardwalk along the coast that runs alongside the eponymous Percé rock, passing seafood restaurants, art galleries, and breweries. We stopped in to buy a scarf and some stickers at a store run by a local artist's collective: we chatted with the friendly artist running the cash register, who told us about the time someone she knew had been trapped up north in a sailboat while an enraged and hungry polar bear tried to bust in through the door. Ah, nature!

Percé is only an hour away from Gaspe and Forillon National Park, so we spent most of the day we arrived in town poking around Forillon, in the tundra area mentioned above, and at the almost totally empty and interestingly tropical-feeeling beach at Plage de Bridgeville. After we arrived in the late afternoon, we entertained ourselves by getting some excellent ice cream and walking up the hill on the outskirts of town to look at the rock.

For dinner, we had a decadent seafood feast at Restaurant La Maison du Pecheur, where we ate fried cod tongues (delicious!) and a ridiculous platter the size of our head containing lobster, local salmon, cod, scallops, shrimp, mussels, risotto, and probably other things I'm forgetting. All of this cost us approximiately 1/4 of what it would have cost us to eat the same thing in Maine, and it tasted better, because the chefs were in Quebec and not in New England. Interestingly, the restaurant is built into an old hostel and shed where members of the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) used to gather in the late 1960s, and their graffiti has been lovingly preserved on the walls.

The next day, we woke up early-ish and boarded a ferry to take us to the National Park on Bonaventure Island. Various stalls on the main drag in Percé sell these tickets - even during our visit during peak season in August, it didn't seem like there were any concerns about them selling out. Our ferry incorporated a sight-seeing element, winding around Percé rock and the dramatic cliffs of Bonaventure Island, where we saw seals and a startlingly large number of bald eagles perching on the trees above. On Bonaventure, we were all briefly corralled into a waiting area, given a quick orientation talk by the park rangers, and then released to walk the island's trails.

Bonaventure's main attraction is its gannet colony, a screaming and stinking natural wonder that is one of the largest known in the world, with over 51,700 breeding pairs recorded in 2011. (The surrealist writer Andre Breton was a fan of watching the birds, a hobby he enjoyed while staying in Percé and working on the novel Arcane 17).

You reach the gannet colony by means of a pathway crossing the island from the main dock, which was an enjoyable wander through thick pine forests and glorious summer-time wildflower meadows, reaching down to the sea. You will almost certainly hear - and smell - the gannet colony before you reach it, and once you do, you'll find yourself overlooking many thousands of birds engaged in a constant process of gyrating, making weird noises at each other, and puking up fish for their spouses and children. I wonder if that's pretty much what human cities look like to other organisms. Probably.

We enjoyed creeping on the birds (which are totally unbothered by people, wrapped up as they are in their own important gannet activities of screaming, shitting, and territorial neck-fighting), and were also amazed to see that 1. picnic tables exists at the gannet colony and 2. people were actually using them. I think pretty much anywhere on the island, and indeed, on the planet, would be a nicer place to eat your sandwich than in the assault on the senses and on olfactory decency itself that is a super-active gannet colony. But to each their own.

We ambled slowly back to the dock in time to catch a boat back to Percé, which only took about 20 scenic minutes . We stopped for lunch at the Pub Percé restaurant run by the popular Pit Caribou microbrewery company, where we ate Quebec-style lobster sandwiches (fresh and tasty) with excellent garlic fries. We spent the rest of the day ambling around town and looking at the local art galleries and shops, where I resisted buying a plush gannet - a choice I regret - but did get a ridiculous gannet Christmas ornament.

For dinner, I'd booked us in at Maison Black Whale, a French bistro in an historic house in the center of town. We enjoyed a surprisingly refined French meal prepared by a startlingly precocious 19-year-old head chef. My favorite dish was a trout confit with vermouth, squid ink, and cauliflower, as well as the pleasantly bitter endive tart with locally-made coppa. We had a perfect slice of hummingbird cake for dessert.

New Brunswick and Miguasha National Park

We routed ourselves through New Brunswick intentionally, out of curiosity and because I wanted to see the iconic fossils - representative of the earliest phases of the evolution of land-dwelling animals - at Miguasha Provincial Park.

As we crossed the border over Quebec and into New Brunswick, we were enticed with the possibility of buying both bargain-basement sex toys and vapes, but we managed to resist and drove onwards. After stopping for some pretty good barbeque and local beer at Smoke on the Water in Campbellton, we kept heading south towards our primordial destination.

Miguasha Provincial Park's main attraction for non-paleontologist tourists is an excellent museum featuring the fossils found on the crumbling cliffs within the park's borders, including the skeletal remains of Elpistostege watsoni, the first known fish species that first began to evolve bones in its fins comparable to the bones we have in our fingers. This bony innovation was a pivotal first step in the eventual evolution of organisms that would start running around on land.

In other words, this is one of the guys that ensured that we would eventually have to pay taxes and put on pants, and I'm mad at him.

We explored the museum and took a short walk along the trails fanning out from the museum, which take you down to the cliffs and the beach area where you can see the sandstones and shales that occasionally barf out these game-changing paleontological discoveries. We were also followed for a ways through the woods by a remarkably curious teenage red squirrel.

As it turns out, New Brunswick is also one of the potato production capitals of the world. The latter part of our drive from Miguasha to Florenceille-Bristol (near the Maine border) took us through ultra-green farming country and rolling hills, a slightly different variant on the classic heartland-as-fuck vibes of what we'd experienced when driving out of Quebec City. Acadian flags blew in the breeze over many houses, reminding me that this is where the Cajuns who enrich the food and culture of Louisiana came from Louisiana being the state that part of my family hails from, although we're Creole, not Cajun ourselves.

We paused briefly to take a look at the enormous, albeit dry falls at, well, Grand Falls. Even when the water isn't running, it's an impressive gorge, and I was also able to pick up a bag of lobster-flavored Covered Bridge potato chips. We were close to the Maine border, and we stopped for the night at the newly-built Amsterdam Inn and Suites. This hotel was strategically located right next door to the regional Potato World museum, which offers a sampler french fry charcuterie board, though we tragically arrived after it had closed for the evening.

The next morning, we got up early and passed through the border checkpoint into Maine, where the pastoral landscape almost instantly gave way to wilder and less developed landscapes. Indeed, we were barely 10 minutes over the border before we saw a bald eagle ripping bits off of a dead deer. In retrospect, writing this in early 2025 during the grim first months of the second Trump regime, maybe that was a metaphor for something.

We absolutely loved visiting Gaspé, and we hope we can return to Quebec, Gaspé, and perhaps explore the Côte-Nord - the northern side of the St. Lawrence, which we could see for much of our drive - this summer. Although I think we'll be renting a car with Canadian plates, and apologizing profusely to every Canadian we meet along the way. They are good people with a beautiful country. I hope our nations can be friends again when America's rabid fever-dream breaks.

Restaurants

Make reservations when possible in the summer. The good places can fill up.

Many restaurants are closed on Sundays and Mondays. Especially the restaurants in Sainte-Anne-des-Monts. As these are small communities, you may not have a ton of restaurant choices on those days. Plan accordingly to ensure you'll have somewhere to eat.

There are lots of grocery stores with nice products, although prices may be higher than elsewhere in Quebec due to Gaspe's remoteness.

Here's where we ate:

Le Clan, Quebec City.

Chez Mag, Kamouraska.

Lobo De Mar, Sainte-Luce-sur-Mer.

Pizzeria 132, Cap-Chat.

Le Malbord, Sainte-Anne-des-Monts.

Brise Bise, Forillon.

Le Seaflower, Forillon.

La Maison du Pêcheur, Percé

Maison Black Whale Bistro-boutique, Percé.

Pit Caribou, Percé.

Smoke On the Water, Campbellton, New Brunswick.

Hotels

Hotel Clarendon, Québec.

Le Mange-Grenouille, Le Bic.

Hôtel & cie - Sainte-Anne-Des-Monts

Les Chalets Du Parc, Forillon.

Motel Bellevue, Percé.

Amsterdam Inn and Suites, Florenceville Bristol.