On the Road to Métis I: Lévis to Kamouraska
22 August 2011I first heard of the Reford Gardens a decade ago, when director Alexander Reford – who is the author of several books, some of them on the gardens – was in Montreal for the Salon du livre de Montréal. The story he had to tell intrigued me, as did the remoteness of the property at the gateway to the Gaspé, but the journey was long, and I had a festival of my own to run, so it is only now that I have made it out to Grand-Métis to see for myself.
It does not have to take days of travelling. The Gardens are 580 kilometers from Montreal, and some people make the journey by car in six hours, which means staying on Highway 20 for as long as that lasts. I recommend a slower pace, on and off Route 132, and in this and the next two posts I will tell you about a few spots, on that road, where you can find not only good coffee but some of the best meals in Quebec.
From summers spent at Murray Bay as a student,
I know the north shore of the St. Lawrence as far east as Tadoussac, but I had
never explored the south shore east of Quebec City. I suggest leaving
Route 20 for Route 132 after you’ve passed the junction with Route 73 at the Pierre-Laporte Bridge.
You might be interested in a good coffee after three hours on the highway, and you might know from experience that good coffee is not always easy to find. If so, you will be keeping your eyes peeled for the kind of establishment that might have an espresso machine and someone who knows how to use it. If you head north, towards the river, you’ll come across the inviting Café la mosaïque (132, rue St-Louis, Lévis). From there, you should move further downhill, closer to the water, and turn right onto rue Saint-Joseph, one of the finest streets of old Quebec homes still in existence. There’s a magnificent view of Quebec City across the river.
You can easily make it to Montmagny for the night. The Manoir des Érables (220, boul. Taché Est Montmagny) serves a good dinner and an excellent breakfast. You will pass through wood-sculpture capital Saint-Jean-Port-Joli and wend your way north-east along the Route des Navigateurs that stretches 190 km from La Pocatière through the Bas Saint-Laurent.
The road leaves the river at this point and heads inland across a remarkable flat landscape with silos clustered around the pimple-shaped hills. The light is beautiful, the landscape breathtaking as you curve around to Kamouraska, and the air salty when you step out of the car.
Kamouraska convent, about 1909, now the Musée régional de Kamouraska
(Musée régional de Kamouraska)
(Musée régional de Kamouraska)
Drawn to Kamouraska by the
stormy, wonderful novel of that name by Anne Hébert, I imagined that the little
Musée régional de Kamouraska
(entrance $7) housed in the old convent school – and quiet even on an August
day when the village is full of tourists – might have some information on that
subject.
And it does. There’s a photograph
of a young and luminous Anne Hébert upstairs, a (very) short excerpt from her
novel, and an explanation of how it happened that she spent so much time in
Kamouraska when she was growing up: she was related to the Taché family, as documented
in an exhibit of the Taché family tree.
Mathilde Massé, the first francophone Canadian woman to qualify as a doctor
(Société historique du Côte-sud)
(Société historique du Côte-sud)