Autumn

We’re in our final week here, and I’m getting all the feels about leaving. At some point, I hope to be able to figure out how to articulate some of these thoughts. However, at the moment, things are quite busy with getting things packed up and organized, so it may have to wait a bit.

I had one last adventure with our Québécois friends (the same folks who gave us that generous welcome gift back in June). They took me on an Autumn tour of the Laurentides.

The weather has shifted cold: when I got off the métro at Montmorency station to meet them, it was 3C (around 37ºF), and the day barely broke 9C (around 48ºF).

We started at a “pick-your-own” pumpkin farm near Saint-Eustache, where families took tractor rides and gathered their own pumpkins from the fields or stands. It was a three-day weekend (Canadian Thanksgiving is on the 2nd Monday in October), so whole families were out enjoying the day out.

From there we went to an orchard where they had a live band, apple picking, cider tasting, and huge Thanksgiving crowds. In addition to catering to apple-picking day-trippers, this facility makes a variety of products including jellies, ice-cider (a strong, sweet, apple-cider), gin, and more.

In the picture below, if you look very, very closely, there’s a tiny white building near the horizon on the right. That’s the tower of the Olympic Stadium in Montréal, 30-plus kilometers away.

We stopped at an apparently closed sugar shack/reception hall/party facility along the highway so Newton (the poodle) could have a romp and we could look at the intense fall colors there. The clouds opened up for a while, and the leaves blazed in the direct sunlight.

We didn’t stay long, but proceeded on to Saint-Placide, a small town overlooking the Ottawa river (the Ottawa is a tributary to the St. Lawrence that joins it at the westernmost tip of the island of Montréal). The style of the buildings in this area were more British than French, square and made of brick, and many have distinctive metal gambrel roofs which I somehow failed to photograph. In Saint-Placide, there’s a nice park at the riverbank with a boat-landing, wide lawns, a gazebo, and views across the river to Ontario.

We continued up the Rivière du Nord, a tributary to the Ottawa River, going through small towns and passing a field filled with ice-fishing sheds in storage until the winter. After the town of Saint-André-d’Argenteuil, we reached Carillon, where the Ottawa River is dammed for a hydroelectric project. It’s also the site of historical locks and the old collection house, from the days when the locks were of military and trade significance. Today, the canal built for the old locks is still used by pleasure-craft when the weather is good to reach a new, improved lock.

We continued a short ways along a levy and past the dam to Brownsburg, site of a picturesque church from the 1830s.

We backtracked along the river, and cut in to Lachute, where we stopped for lunch, before turning north and heading into the hills.

We passed through rolling farmland and sections of forest. The crops that I could identify were broccoli (or something related) and corn. Evidently, there is summer corn for people, but the autumnal corn is for animal feed.

From here, we left the lowlands and started into the mountains. My hosts explained that we had been spending all of our time thus far in the St. Lawrence Lowlands, but were now coming up onto the Canadian Shield, which is an area of extremely old, very hard rock. There’s not a lot of soil, but there’s enough to support pine, maple, and aspen forests.

We started passing lakes and tarns, and the forest was thicker. There were small towns, and I was told that a lot of the small houses were owned by people from Montréal who would come up in Summer to escape the heat or in Winter to go skiing.

We went through some of the resort towns in the area, Morin Heights and Saint-Sauveur. There were big Thanksgiving crowds along the streets, at the bistros, bars, and boutiques. In the winter, these are ski towns, and from the highway we could see the ski slopes, which were lined with brilliant aspen.

It’s funny. I felt like I was snapping pictures continuously through the expedition, but I guess after lunchtime I slowed way down. None of these capture what some of the roads looked like for mile after mile, where the blazing reds and fiery golds contrasted with the dark, nearly black pines.

It was a stunningly beautiful day!