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Route of the Navigators

Highway 132 runs through Lower Canada’s history Highway 132 hugs the eastern shore of the St. Lawrence River, from Quebec City to the Gaspé Peninsula.
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On the Route of the Navigators, the river remains on your side.

Highway 132 runs through Lower Canada’s history

Highway 132 hugs the eastern shore of the St. Lawrence River, from Quebec City to the Gaspé Peninsula.

Follow this secondary road — the Route of the Navigators — and you’ll revel in the unending vistas and unimpeded foreshore of rocky coves and picturesque villages.

Though the wider landscape is mostly rural, all along the route you find small inns, some with exceptional restaurants, museums that celebrate the sea, artisan villages, and parish churches open daily to visitors.

Most of the route, marked with a blue nautical symbol, is within the Bas-Saint-Laurent (Lower St. Lawrence) region. A reward at the end of the 250-kilometre drive, just inside the Gaspé, are the Reford Gardens, where more than 3,000 native and exotic plants bloom June to October.

Outside Quebec City, I exited Highway 20 to L'Islet-Sur-Mer, the first of dozens of hamlets that have produced seamen, ship-builders and fishers over the centuries. Wood-carvers, too, I discovered at Saint-Jean Port-Joli, with almost every driveway and lawn filled with rough-hewn sculptures.

At the village of Saint-Denis-de-la-Bouteillerie I toured the rambling red-roofed house owned in the 1800s by Jean-Charles Chapais, a tea-totaling merchant who steered Lower Canada into Confederation.

Then I hit Kamouraska, a lush agricultural basin of long narrow fields that run to the river, reminiscent of the early French seigneurial land-holding system.

"In 1759, the English landed two miles from here and burnt everything —200 farmhouses and buildings, but they spared our church," said Guy Drapeau as he stood among his wood-and-wire eel-traps near the edge of the river.

Along with this church, I admired, in the village of Kamouraska, a chateau-like courthouse, now a museum, and the seafarers' cottages that line the low-lying riverbank.

While my map told me the eastward-flowing St. Lawrence remains a river for hundreds of kilometres, it was beginning to look like an ocean. "It's not quite the river and it's not quite the sea — we call it 'la mer' here," Drapeau said.

I stayed at the Auberge des Aboiteaux (the latter word an old French term for a type of dyke built in the area). This four-room B&B near Saint-André-de-Kamouraska overlooks a bright green pasture, with “la mer” in the distance.

While the owner worked magic in the kitchen — a dinner of grilled goat cheese heaped with olives and “filet of lamb Kamouraska,” followed by a sorbet of raspberry and chocolate — her husband handled the fully-booked dining room.

After a fine sleep, I headed out early to Le Manoir Seigneurial Fraser, located where Route 132 skirts the city of Rivière-du-Loup. Residents of this historic city have worked tirelessly to transform the home of Seigneur William Fraser, its founder, into a gorgeous Victorian mansion-museum, reflective of aristocratic life here in the 1800s.

Then it was on to Trois Pistoles and the Parc de L'Aventure Basque en Amérique, a museum of a different kind. While this playful facility celebrates the Basque whalers who sailed into the St. Lawrence as early as 1584, it's also a tribute to the independence-minded “Basque nation” of present-day Spain.

Enter politics. I began to notice the blue-and-white fleur-de-lis, flying above homes and businesses, and the absence of the red maple-leaf (except on the post office). I later learned that this is Bloc country. Yet despite the occasional grimace when I admitted I don't speak French, most locals were friendly.

Sovereigntist Normand Tremblay (the 40-foot flagpole with the Quebec flag, outside his Vieux Moulin museum near Sainte-Flavie, was the give-away) showed me his collection of furniture, tools and weapons from the pre-conquest era, then chuckled when I queried his political views.

I spent that night in the tourism region called Bicb— an exotic pocket of small hotels, attractive B&Bs ("gites" in Quebec), roadside eateries, outdoor recreation and wildlife viewing.

The Parc National du Bic is a 33-square-kilometre marine reserve that takes in islets, shoals, headlands and a tidal inlet of unspeakable loveliness. From a window seat in the dining room of the Auberge du Mange-Grenouille in the village of Bic, I watched the mud-bottomed estuary fill with water, as a huge sunset went down over the river.

Upstairs, in a luxury guest room right out of Madame Bovary, a collection of 18 th -century French plays lay on the bedside table, open to “Oedipe” by Voltaire.

Continuing north, I bypassed Rimouski but stopped at Pointe-au-Père to admire the lighthouse, among the tallest in Canada and a National Historic Site.

At the Musée de la Mer, part of the site, I watched a movie about the sinking of the Empress of Ireland on a foggy night here in 1914 with the loss of more than 1,000 lives — one of the great tragedies of Canadian history.

Soon after Pointe-au-Père, Highway 132 slips into the Gaspé peninsula. From a base in the town of Mont-Joli, it’s an easy excursion to a series of historic seaside resorts, some first settled by Anglophones two centuries ago, that include Sainte-Luce, Les Bolles, Baie-des-Sables and Métis-sur-Mer.

At Grand-Métis, I had the good fortune to run into Alexander Reford, the great-grandson of the creator of the Métis (or Reford) Gardens between 1926 and 1959. Born into the family that built the CPR, Elsie Stephen Reford, independently and by trial-and-error, turned a tough and barren landscape into a charming, iconoclastic garden.

Today, the younger Reford, a writer and historian, oversees this contemporary garden of international renown. People come from around the world to see its famous blue poppies, as well as gentians and lilies. And you can walk through the gardens right down to the bank of the ever-widening St. Lawrence River.

IF YOU GO:

For more on the Bas St. Laurent, visit www.bonjourquebec.com. The Pointe-au-Père lighthouse and Musée de la Mer are at www.parkscanada.gc.ca. For the Reford Gardens (Jardins de Métis), go to www.jardinsmetis.com.