Right now ...

... I'm sitting in a dingy motel room in Baie Comeau, a town that was built in the 1930s to handle the timber and subsequently the paper trade relating to all of the forests and so on around here. At that time it was effectively the farthest north-eastern town in Quebec - they hadn't yet discovered the iron ore and aluminium that led to the creation of Sept-Iles further up the coast.

What's interesting is that they have a rail link from here to Quebec, would you believe? There's just about 10km of track on this side of the river to handle all of the paper traffic from the mill and then a rail ferry takes it across to Matane on the south shore of the St Lawrence from where it's shipped by rail to Quebec. There's quite a bit of sea traffic too - there's two huge freighters anchored in the bay waiting to get in while a third, the Australiaborg, owned by a Dutch shipping company, is currently being loaded at the dockside.

I'm not complaining about my motel room either - it's only cost me $49 so I'm happy with that, and it's nicely positioned for tomorrow when I head off into the interior. The Labrador Trail, Highway 389, starts just about 1km from my door and I'll be on that tomorrow.

Talking of railways, sometime tomorrow I'll be encountering the railway line that runs from Sept Iles up to Labrador City and all of the iron and aluminium lines in the interior. It might mean nothing to you at the moment but if you have ever read The Land God Gave to Cain by Hammond Egges, then this is the line that they were building all throughout the story, so it has some kind of literary interest.

I was actually here at about 14:30 today so you are probably wondering why I didn't press on. The fact is that the next motel once I hit the Labrador Highway is 213km away at Manic 5 and the route planner that I downloaded before I went says that it ought to take me all of 8 hours to do it. It's an unpaved dirt road with many bends and three long single-track bridges. I reckon I ought to plan a full day to do that and if I do get ahead of myself I can drive on to Fermont, just another 150 or so kms further on. There's a few places to stop there as well.

But on the way here I caught up with something that I had been meaning to do for a while. Back in 2001 I came up this way on my way to see my niece in New Brunswick and I passed over the Saguenay River on the ferry that crosses here. But when I arrived there it was dark and in the morning it was freezing cold so I didn't gat to hang around too much.

And so one of the things I wanted to do was to come back and photograph it properly in the daylight.

Mind you there was a bitter freezing wind that made it quite uncomfortable but at least there was sunlight. Knowing my luck, I was half-expecting it to be raining.