Wednesday, October 1/2008

Breakfast and we're off.  This is our easy day, so we've slotted in a visit with Libby Toop, a fourth cousin I've never met, and her husband Ron.  Through the Perth area villages, so mellow after the raw angularity of the west, and past farmland nearly to the village of Toledo, where the Toops live in a house that has been in Ron's family for a hundred and sixty years.  It's opposite a cemetery where his ancestors have resided for even longer.  A lovely meeting in a room full of books.  Libby does have Manning ancestry, though it's back a bit, but even better she has years worth of knowledge of the Loyalists families that travelled with them through New York, Vermont, and Quebec, as well as southern Ontario.  We have to tear ourselves away at noon because it's still more than six hours drive to St Etienne, north of Trois Rivieres.

We take the Queensway through Ottawa but miss the trans Canada exit.  Must be poorly labelled, as we've done it before, though not recently enough to remember the mistake in time.  But we decide to go with it and take the older route along the Ottawa River, lovely and no longer, but not four lane.  Cross the river at Hawksbury and Don's directions work well, so we follow the north shore of the St. Lawrence to Trois Rivieres and take the Shawinigan route north to St Etienne.  It's a far better highway than it deserves to be, the Shawinigan route, not long but a royal road north to former Prime Minister Chretien's old seat.

Dinner with Don and Patty and a sampling of the local beers.  And the treat of the French language  pre-election leadership debate from a Quebec vantage point.  Dion and Duceppe are at home in the language, of course, but the French of the others is surprisingly good - surprisingly to me at least.  There's a fairly comfortable feeling to the round table format.  Less comfortable for Harper, perhaps, but then I have an admitted bias.