And now that my memory card reader seems to be working . ..

... I can show you some more pictures of the Gaspe Peninsula to make you realise just how beautiful it is and how happy I would be to stay on here. In fact I'm still here now despite my words of yesterday as I missed the 17:00 ferry by a mile.

That was mostly because I spent a nice hour or two wandering around the town of Gaspe and then I went off down to the headland for a nosy and I was still there at 13:00. One claim to fame of Gaspe Bay is that it was fortified as a base for the Royal Navy if the UK fell to the Germans in 1940 and not only is there a fort in the hills to protect the harbour, it also still has its guns. And after a bit of a clamber and a hike across the cliffs I managed to track it down. And yes, its guns are still there.

I couldn't get down to the Point though - it was late and too far to go on foot.

Now followers of my outpourings will know that I wrote some stuff about the coffin ships - the sailing ships that took the Irish to the New World in the wake of the potato famine in the late 1840s. I mentioned the cholera that they endured and there was also the starvation on board ship if supplies ran out as well as countless other sufferings. But one suffering that must always have been on their minds was the risk of shipwreck and I went to visit the site of the shipwreck of one such coffin ship of 1847 that ran aground just off Gaspe Point. It's pretty much largely forgotten now, being isolated in the middle of a huge new road system (such as would be huge out here) and the monument to the 187 immigrants lost and the communal grave of the 84 whose bodies were recovered is nevertheless pretty poignant.

You might remember me talking about Marconi and his bouncing of messages across the Atlantic. Of course once they reached land at Cape Race they would need to be bounced by shore stations and we saw one of those on the coast of Labrador. The next one further down is on the north shore of the Gaspe Peninsula and after trekking about 6kms down a dirt track that would be a match for the bad ones of Labrador and then descending 150 metres to the shoreline I managed to find the remains of that as well.

And so I'm still on the Gaspe - in a motel in Matane. It's Thursday tomorrow so there's only one ferry and that's at 08:00 so that's a 06:00 alarm call. I won't be up for long. And if I can't get a place on that then I shall have to drive down the south bank of the St Lawrence and head for Quebec City that way. I can't afford the time to wait until Friday to get across.