Yesterday we had a beautiful drive along the St. Laurence River through lush, green farmland and pine forests. We pulled into Annie’s Camping where I immediately got my laundry done. This is a very family friendly campground with a children’s playground and pool, badminton court, volleyball court, soccer field, bocce ball and horseshoes plus plenty of biking trails and forest hikes plus access to the river.
Today we shared rides and caravanned to the Reford Gardens. In the mid-1800’s Sir George Stephen, founder of the Canadian Pacific Railway, built a fishing lodge in this area because of the abundant salmon fishing and hunting. His niece, Elsie Reford, loved to visit to fish and to go horseback riding. Through the years Stephen added on to the lodge, built fishing pools and other improvements and when he could no longer visit it, he gave the property to Elsie. Elsie's doctor advised her to slow down due to ill health at the age of 47, so she came here and began gardening, starting with vegetables and a few flowers. But she found her artistic talents were in horticulture and the gardens grew and expanded. She loved the challenge of growing plants that were not native to this part of the world. The blue poppy is one of those plants. Today the Quebec Provence owns the property and maintains the over 4,000 plants in various gardens, many kept as Elsie would have kept them.
On the advice of our waitress at lunch the other day we traveled to nearby Sainte Flavie to eat lobster rolls at her favorite spot, Chez Roger. Luckily a customer who spoke English was able to help us order as the restaurant staff only spoke French.
As we entered the town of Ste. Flavie we stopped at Galerie d’Art where amazing concrete people lined the sidewalk and followed each other out into the river. A few were even floating on rafts. But not only were there concrete people, the restaurant and B&B were highly decorated on the outside with mosaics, concrete heads and other artwork. Very pretty. 
I insisted that we go inside to see the gift shop and art gallery. There we found another piece of artwork for our home which we think will look stunning over our fireplace. And we got to buy it directly from the artist himself, Guillaume Gagnon.
Another 10 km down the road was the 2nd tallest lighthouse in all of Canada. Of course, we had to climb the 138 steps to take in the magnificent views. We could have toured a submarine but chose not to. On the way back we stopped in a small village on the river where we saw more carved art pieces and a lovely church and graveyard.
We expect to see more quaint villages as we travel on towards the town of Gaspé tomorrow.
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