Traveling St Pierre and Miquelon, New France. Atlantic North America.

24 August 2019 (Cont’d)

(On the way to St Pierre and Miquelon, France.)

Not Larry and I headed to Fortune, Newfoundland, to catch the SPM Ferry. I was very excited as it would be taking us to St Pierre and Miquelon in New France. France! The USA is not the only country that Canada shares a border with; France is also right next to Canada. No, not Quebec… France! Yes, really. There are islands just off the east coast of mainland Canada in between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia that are actually owned by France. What? Yea, I know. It seems like I just let out a big secret… 

It was $215 Canadian for Not Larry and I to get on the ferry from Fortune, Newfoundland to St Pierre and Miquelon. The islands are actually located closer to mainland Canada than the Newfoundland provincial capital of St. John’s, but the islands of St Pierre and Miquelon are actually France. Never heard of this before? Do not fret. I had been to 90-some countries before I arrived in Signal Hill in St John’s, Newfoundland, where I noticed a map on the wall that showed a small group is islands to the west of where I was standing in Canada that were listed as ‘France’. Still skeptical? Yes, it is really true; France and European living is just a short 90 minute ferry ride from Newfoundland in the direction of Nova Scotia. And, every country in the world except for France and Canada needs a passport to enter St Pierre and Miquelon. So what do you need to enter St Pierre if you are from Canada? Just a piece of government identification. Your driver’s license will do. Traveling to St Pierre and Miquelon is like traveling between Canada and the US pre-2007.

[su_box title=”FYI” box_color=”#ed0841″ title_color=”#cad3f4″ radius=”1″]We recommend finding a place close to Fortune to park your vehicle. Leaving it with the ferry parking in Fortune will cost you $17/day. Yikes! Also, get your hands on some Euros as the ferry does not take Canadian dollars or Credit Cards. Feeling sea-sick and want a water but do not have any Euros? You had better be very nice to the very French-looking man running the snack-bar![/su_box]

Just 30km from Newfoundland, Canada, and 4,700 of them from Paris, we ferried into St Pierre and checked into a little piece of France in North America. A really happy drug-sniffing dog seemed to be checking if we had illegally brought over any legal Canadian marijuana. That made me ponder how much of a hassle Canada’s new pot laws are for the rest of the world who still wants to shame smokers!

Arriving in St Pierre is probably the most excited I have been to visit a new place in a couple of years. It has truly been a long time since I was this excited about anywhere. Here we were on this strange little island that is still owned by France, somewhere among the waves of what is widely considered to exculsively be Atlantic Canada. I even told the French immigration man how excited I was after he took my license to check me in. How did this place come to be? And why is this self-governing territorial overseas collectivity of France is a secret in the rest of the world? What if Newfoundland had not joined Canada in 1949? Would these islands of France that were right next to a British island of Newfoundland off the east coast of Canada be more famous? Has the fact that Newfoundland becoming a part of Canada overshadowed St Pierre and Miquelon because Canada’s giant mass basically absorbs them? With so many questions and so much to think about, no wonder I was so excited!

[su_note note_color=”#dc1738″ text_color=”#f1effc”]Not Larry thinks she has a plan where we will rent bicycles while we are on the island. I asked her if she can do a wheelie. She said she can not. An un-wheelie-able potential biking partner wants to rent bikes? I am not so sure about that…[/su_note]

Once we exited the ferry terminal, we ended up in a liquor store and made a couple of friends. One of the friends would direct us to a bar called the Rustique. Things were moving along rather quickly. Not Larry and I sat in the little bar where she drank red wine and I drank a local Miqu’Ale La Rousse beer. Miqu’Ale La Rousse is some of the best beer I had tried in years. It tasted so good that I had two more in a very short period while I smoked a cigar in the back terrace of the bar. The beer from this small island series of 6,000 people is said to have recently placed 3^rd in a beer competition that took place in France. High accolades!

A long-haired man named Stephane befriended us. He told us that there have been five deportations of the French from this island over their history compared to the three that the Acadians have suffered. He said the French went to France or places in the Caribbean such as Martinique during the deportations and then came back again. In the days of shipping while the British-owned Newfoundland was trading cod to British-owned Jamaica for Screech rum, St Pierre was doing the same with French-owned Guadalupe, Martinique and St. Martin. I had always wondered why Jamaican made Screech rum was a big deal in Newfoundland and how that came to be. After speaking with Stephane, Not Larry and I talked about Newfoundland Screech and how it suddenly made a little more sense. Screech is tied to sea-tides of trade between former colonies of Britian. It is a similar shipping parallel that the empire of France had with St Pierre, Newfoundland’s next door neighbour, and St. Pierre’s trade with their French brethren in the Caribbean islands. Interesting.

[su_note note_color=”#dc1738″ text_color=”#f1effc”]Stephane told us that France supplies something akin to an isolation pay to people of this islands as his wife is a teacher here, but if she took a job in France instead, the result would be a pay-cut of 40-45% to her wage here in St. Pierre. Fascinating.[/su_note]

Not Larry and I headed for dinner. Restaurants in St Pierre require a reservation as there is barely enough seating for the local people and the tourists. We met an American from Maine in a restaurant who told us my similar story of how he was just driving around Newfoundland and noticed the French islands on a map and decided  to come. He seemed to be a rarity as for the most part there are few people on the islands we met who were not French in some way.

After we found a place to feed us and had to settle on fresh sushi from the ocean, Not Larry and I headed to our bed and breakfast. It was 22:00 at that time and the lady who owns the B + B was not around. There were others at the B + B, but only other tenants who did not have a solution to our non-housing problem. So Not Larry and I headed back to the center of town to try to find a hotel…

Every hotel was booked full, but a very sweet Frenchman named Ivan who ran a front desk at one of the hotels spent about 20 minutes calling every place on St Pierre that he could think of. Ivan was not giving up for us and eventually found a lady who said she would take us in. Before calling her number, Ivan had said it was his last resort of his last resorts to call. But success was found at last! The price would be €120 a night. It was expensive, but it was not outside on a park-bench and life always seems to have a way of working out.

[su_note note_color=”#dc1738″ text_color=”#f1effc”]Through out the ordeal, I was never concerned that we were not going to find a place to stay. The bulk of humanity is inherently good and people take care of people. In a worst-case scenario, Not Larry and I would have befriended the bar-patrons and someone would have eventually given us a couch to nap on.[/su_note] 

It was a 15 minute walk to the house we would stay in, but the lady had to make up a room for us in her house, so Ivan called a cab to arrive in 30 minutes to take us to the new found B + B. Not Larry and I went back to the Rustique for a beer to enjoy the time. I was wearing my cowboy hat and Not Larry was wearing her cowgirl boots. When we left the bar to catch our cab, Not Larry rode me like a horse while we passed the seated bar crowd who yelled out ‘Yee-Haw’ at her. It was hilarious. Our €7 cab took us to the house of a lady named Yves who showed us to our room. As Not Larry and I were crawling into the bed she said to me, “I rode my cowboy out of the bar. I felt like a babe again.”

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25 August.
Not Larry and I got up at 09:30, showered, and Yves made us breakfast with a baguette and a croissant. That was a picture-perfect French-ness of breakfast on these French islands. Yves’ husband offered to drive us back to the center of town, but Not Larry and I wanted to walk to feel the town out. We stopped at Robert’s Hotel where we managed to get a room for the following two evenings at €118/night. It is expensive in St Pierre, but it is also France and the prices are very European.

And speaking of Europe, the electrical sockets are all European, so you are going to need a converter if you are coming from North America! Since St Pierre and Miquelon are France, even the license plates on the cars are European Union plates with a French familiar ‘F’ on the left-hand side and a French flag flies outside of government buildings. St Pierre feels French, in a way that is France rather than Quebecois. The only overlap I could notice between St. Pierre and Quebec was that my same 14 words of French work in both places. It is a French atmosphere in food and wine, added by the skinny locals rolling their cigarettes by hand.

[su_note note_color=”#dc1738″ text_color=”#f1effc”]Generally, people of St Pierre have told us that they use Montreal, St. John’s and Halifax as major cities, but everyone has spent time in France. Of the older couples we have spoken with, the general consensus is that two of their three children remain in France where they go to for university and usually one of their offspring returns to St Pierre after some time abroad. However, we also met locals who studied in Montreal and in New Brunswick, though they usually return to the islands after their education in Canada. Earlier while at breakfast, I asked Yves where children are born. She said they are born here in St Pierre in the hospital, but if there are complications they go to St. John’s, Newfoundland. She told Not Larry and I that, “Many Canadian-born babies are here.”[/su_note]

Not Larry and I took the €6 ferry to ‘île aux Marins for the afternoon. It is an island that is only about a kilometer away St Pierre. We left an island (Newfoundland) to go to an island (St Pierre) and went to an island (‘île aux Marins) once we got there. The translation of ‘île aux Marins is The Island of Sailors and it is very well preserved historical island. Everything is painted, is being restored, and looks fresh. This summer is only the second summer that the ferry has been running daily from Newfoundland to St Pierre, and it seems that these islands are preparing for the tourists to influx.

After a beer, wine, and biscuits on the island, Not Larry and I caught the return ferry from ‘île aux Marins back to St Pierre. Stephane, who we met last night, was on the ferry as well. He had a small bag of snails that he had picked from the rocks which he said he planned to eat for dinner. How very French!

[su_box title=”Orphan Slaves” box_color=”#ed0841″ title_color=”#cad3f4″ radius=”1″]
European fishing has been taking place here for centuries and St Pierre was eventually founded in 1814, officially. The sailors needed worker to help with drying the fish on gravel on the shores, so orphans were sent over from France for the summer seasons to work. Work was hard and pay was lousy. From a sign at ‘île aux Marins:
‘When the weather got nice, poor children from Normandy of Brittany (aged 12 to 15) came to the island to dry cod before it was shipped to the West Indies and metropolitan France.
For three months, from June to September, day after day, the children worked on the drying grounds where they laid the cod. Fourteen hours a day, they repeated the same actions under pitiless foremen who demanded output and efficiency. They also had to keep up the drying grounds by getting rid of weeds that could lead to rotting fish.
The ‘graviers’ underwent physical and moral suffering, with hardly enough to eat and their salary was like their life: a misery.
Laws were implemented and in 1851 ‘A days work was limited to 8 hours by those under 14 and 12 hours for those between 14 and 16.[/su_box]

Not Larry and I walked around St Pierre. The people of the island are extremely happy in these modern times. No one walks past without saying, “Bonjour.” Someone is always laughing a hearty French laugh and the environment is great. These are really nice people. We ended up in a bar called Txetxo (pronounced ‘Che-Cho’) that is still a smoking bar with friendly locals puffing on cigarettes and playing fantastic French music on the jukebox. The scene was like something out of a movie and we were made to feel at home. We had a couple of drinks, went for dinner near our hotel, and the made our way back to Txetxo where we spent our evening. The bar is the nickname of the owner, a former sailor, who the local patrons described to us as the father figure of all who enter his bar. Txetxo himself is an older, stern looking man who strong in gaze and the way he shakes a hand. I showed him my sticker and he asked me about, “Sasquatchewan” which made really me laugh. Txetxo speaks French and Spanish, so we used Spanish to communicate as he never seemed to care for learning English and in a moment of distraction he charmingly took Not Larry away from me for a dance to the old French music loudly playing.

The ambiance in the bar was great, and Josiane, and older lady behind the bar, took care of Not Larry and I. When I could think of words in French, I said silly things in their language to Josiane and made her laugh when she would serve our drinks, teasing her when I could come up with words. A sleek looking older French lady in a dress and high heels took Not Larry and I to dance. She was telling Not Larry, “You are beautiful,” through Google Translate. When a French version of ‘Never Ending Song of Love’ came on the jukebox, the lady and I drunkenly sang the song to each other, her version in French and mine in English. The evening was a lot of fun.

The night got late and Txetxo closed the bar, turned out the neon signs and locked us in to finish our drinks. That stern man would turn out to be a softie who kept on telling people outside of the bar that it was closed. But then he would open the door for the outsiders to have one last drink when his preference was to just go to bed himself. 

Txetxo wanted to be tough, but that seems to just be the physical presentation of a very nice man whose kindness keeps on letting his appearance down.  

[su_note note_color=”#dc1738″ text_color=”#f1effc”]A couple of English speaking guys arrived in the bar. They told us that they are bringing rocks into the harbour from New Brunswick. Not Larry and I had seen semi-trucks with giant rocks on their trailers being hauled through town. When we asked why they are hauling foreign rock from another country across the ocean to an island that is a giant rock, the rock-sailors told us that the rock here on the island of St Pierre is not as hard as that which they were bringing in from New Brunswick. Harder boulders, worthy of thousands of gallons of diesel to bring them over the ocean to a foreign country and haul it on semi-trucks across the island to build a harbor, are being supplied. That must be awesomely hard rock to necessitate that cost. Crazy.[/su_note].

As Not Larry and I got back to the hotel she went to collect the key from the front desk. The man running the front desk was confused as our main key was not there for our room #121 and he reluctantly gave her their extra key. When she got to the room and opened the door, it was quite a surprise to her as there was a man with long hair sitting on our toilet with the bathroom door opened. When she asked the stranger what he was doing, he said, “They gave me the wrong key downstairs, but I had to shit so bad that I just used your toilet.”

The situation seemed to be a new-first for everyone involved.

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26 August
Not Larry and I slept in late and bounced the bed through the late morning and early afternoon. Vacation living! Eventually we got outside and went to rent bicycles for the day from a store close to the Tourist Information Centre. The cost was €30 for two bikes for 24 hours. I asked the man renting the bikes, “Do we need locks for these?” He laughed at me and said, “No… This is St Pierre…” There is very little crime on the island. If someone stole a bike here, the man running the store would probably just see it cruising by in time anyhow. He might even decide to tell the local police-man.

[su_pullquote]A bicycle is three times faster than walking![/su_pullquote]It turned out that it was fun to cruise around the town even if Not Larry could not wheelie! We did a test and a bicycle is three times as fast at a normal ride as a walk is at a normal speed. I liked cruising around with a baguette in my bike-basket as we collected beer and picnic groceries from the little stores in town. The whole experience just seemed to feel so cool. I found something called ‘bière de spruce’ (spruce-beer), a local drink stored in old plastic Perrier bottles with old caps put back on them, and sold that was in local supermarkets. Bière de spruce is alcohol free, but has a fermented taste that is somewhere between, “I like this particular sip” and “I do not think I want anymore of that for the rest of my life.” Bière de spruce is a real mix of emotions with every swallow.

I am now no longer a stranger to root-beer, birch-beer, ginger-beer, spruce-beer, and or any product that I cross that simply has the word ‘beer’ on the label…

In the evening, Not Larry and I went out for dinner, and then returned to smokey Txetxo bar for a drink to say goodbye to our friends. Everyone was happy to see us come through the door. It was nice to feel so loved in a foreign place. Txetxo gave Not Larry back her seal-skin bracelet that he found on the floor of the bar last night. We met some locals, including Domino who told us, “This is the biggest town of France in North America. There is a story that a man in Cornerbrook, Newfoundland, told his girl, ‘If you marry me, I will take you to France.’ He brought her here to St Pierre!” {Insert hearty French laugh at this moment!}

We were given hugs and kisses by the bar staff when we left. It felt like Not Larry and I were their favorite patrons they have had in weeks. Not Larry and I rode our bikes to an open movie outside with footage of the fishing industry here in St Pierre and in Newfoundland in the early 1970s. The outside seating was nearly full with locals, but Not Larry and I were tired and we headed home early. We are played out.

[su_box title=”Deep thoughts…” box_color=”#ed0841″ title_color=”#cad3f4″ radius=”1″]Why is douche a French thing? Were the French the first to think of this idea? Is that why it has a French name? Are the French ashamed that douche is associated with The French? Were the French ahead of the curve? I have never actually heard of anyone that used douche in my life and there have only been fun-making references made to it. Is douche a thing of the past or do people need to live in France for douche to be a norm? So many questions…[/su_box]

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27 August

[su_note note_color=”#dc1738″ text_color=”#f1effc”]
The islands of St Pierre and Miquelon has been taken plenty of times. Here is a list of hand-changes.
– 1536 – France – Jaques Cartier stops in St Pierre.
– 1713 – England – Given to the British in the Treaty of Uterect at the end of the Spanish War. The French population goes to Louisbourg, Nova Scotia.
– 1763 – France – France loses Canada in the Seven Years War but gets St Pierre and Miquelon in the Treaty of Paris. St. Pierre is repopulated with 350 colonists from Nova Scotia.
– 1778 – England – During the American War for Independence the British attack St Pierre and take the island. 1,250 inhabitants deported to France.
– 1783 – France – In the Treaty of Versailles, France regains the island and 1,200 of the deported inhabitants return.
– 1793 – England – The British attack St Pierre during the French Revolution. 1502 French colonists are sent to France and the United States.
– 1802 – France – The Treaty of Amiens gives the archipelago back to the French.
– 1803 – England – The British take St Pierre and deport 220 men from the French colony.
– 1814 – France – The Treaty of Paris gives the islands back to France.
– 1815 – England – Before the French as able to get back to St Pierre, because of the return of Napoleon, the British re-take the islands.
– 1815 – France – A second Treaty of Paris returns the islands to the French and restores the islands to their 1792 status.

What a battle over a couple of small islands! The British take, like jerks. The French await treaties for a polite return.[/su_note]

I set an alarm for 07:02, got up, wrote in my journal, and then went back to sleep until 09:30. Not Larry woke up, we had a session, we had showers, we packed up, we checked out of the Robert’s Hotel.

Our plans for a picnic and a bike tour of the island of St Pierre were ruined because it was raining and it was sails-full windy. We still went out into it on our bikes and had fun but we were only biking to take part in indoor fun once we found businesses to enter. We stopped at the heritage museum for an hour to learn about how things came to be on St Pierre. I learned the above information about the changes of hands of St Pierre and Miquelon. However, this was my favorite thing I learned from a sign in The Musée Héritage Museum…

[su_box title=”Liquor Times” box_color=”#ed0841″ title_color=”#cad3f4″ radius=”1″]When Prohibition was declared in the United States in 1920, the Saint-Pierre et Miquelon economy drastically changed. Smuggling became virtually the main source of income. Those who invested in the declining fishery turned their back on the sea, and became agents for big smuggling interests off the eastern coast of the United States. Fishermen became warehousemen. Canadian Prohibition law did not prohibit the manufacture of liquor as long as it was exported to a country that did not prohibit its importation. American smugglers soon found that Montreal exporters could ship their products to France (namely Saint-Pierre), to be then reshipped to the United States by sleek low rum-running boats, capable of speeding away from coastal patrol vessels.
Canadian companies began to set up offices in Saint-Pierre, and agents working in the import-export liquor trade soon occupied the town. People quickly encountered problems to storing all the incoming liquor, so every available building (basements of houses, commercial establishments…) was filled with alcohol crates. New specially-built concrete warehouses were constructed near the harbor and in the town.
One by-product of the Prohibition era was a new source of building materials. Liquor would be shipped to Saint-Pierre in wooden cases. These cases would make too much noise when they were offloaded by the rum-runners. Therefore, bottles of alcohol were repacked in jute sacks in order to cushion the sound. Exporters in Saint-Pierre and Miquelon would have thousands of available empty liquor crates. Some of them were used for home heating, others for construction (shingles, clapboards, wall sheathing, even wainscoting). Many Saint-Pierre and Miquelon houses are dateable thanks to their liquor crate materials.[/su_box]

Not Larry and I rode out bikes around town and I bought 24-pack of Miq’Ale La Rousse beer to take back with us across Canada. Miq’Ale La Rousse is the best new beer I have tried in years. We bought other vatiations of beer around town and cruised with beer and baguettes in my bike-basket. We even had a baguette duel by some cannons (which is perhaps what the French were up to themselves while the English were stealing their island with real weapons through the 18th and 19th centuries). In our baguette duel, Not Larry broke hers first and ultimately lost the battle. I politely allowed her to have her baguette back.

Neither of us wanted to leave St Pierre. Not Larry and I would like a week there. The idea of heading back to Canada is not very appealing right now. The French are just so great, and so happy. There is something about the locals here with how warm and funny they are. As we were having a picnic, a man on a bicycle rode by and said, “Bon appetit, huh huh huh!” The hearty French laugh is so awesome. In the English speaking part of the world, no one would ride by someone on a bike and wish them a good meal. The English world it too uptight to be that friendly.

[su_note note_color=”#e6123d” text_color=”#ffffff”]As Not Larry and I were having our picnic table lunch, a couple came walking past us and I could overhear the girl say, “Yes, I think it’s him.” I did not know them so I assumed it was mistaken identity. The couple approached Not Larry and I, but they were looking at me. They asked, “You are staying at the Robert Hotel right?” Yep. “You are the guy who wrote that book?” I am! …Earlier in the day, I had left a Traveling Through North Korea book on the table in the lounge area. Every time we would walk past the book, it would be shifted, so people were obviously looking at it. I told the man that he was the first person to recognize me on the street. It was awesome. He wanted a book from me! That was cool! I felt like a celebrity![/su_note]

It was time to head back to Newfoundland. Begrudgingly, Not Larry and I got our luggage, left our bikes in the bike-stand by the store where we rented them, got our ferry ticket, checked out of France, got seats on the boat and headed back to Canada. See you later wonderful France and awesome humans of St Pierre and Miquelon. 

The swells were huge and seas were rough to get back to Fortune, Newfoundland. When I went to get Not Larry some water, I could almost levitate when the boat would throw me in the air as I was walking. It was crazy. People were holding vomit bags, firmly. Not Larry had to put her head on my lap to keep from getting sick. We arrived back on Canadian soil, but some of the passengers were very pale.  

When we went to clear Canadian immigration, Not Larry got an older Newfoundland man who barely batted an eye at her and just asked for her license. The lady I got wanted a birth certificate with my driver’s license if I did not have a passport. I told her I did not have one. She told me to make sure I had one next time. She sent me though and we were back in Canada. Just like that.

As I came out of the immigration door to officially step foot onto Newfoundland, parking attendant was asking Not Larry if we were in lot #1 or lot #2. Then the man caught my eyes and said, “Oh, I know who you are. I recognize him from his hat. You are in Lot #1.” Then the lady driving us in the shuttle-van to take us to Beatrice the Bendix Motorhome was the same lady who was driving the shuttle-van three days ago. Not Larry and I had a full freezer full of cod fish in Beatrice and right before we left for St. Pierre and the pilot light blew out in the wind just as we were about to head to the ferry. The shuttle-van lady said to Not Larry and I, “You’re that couple with the motorhome. I recognize the fella in the hat. I checked to see if your pilot-flame was still working yesterday for your fridge. I know how you felt about your poor cod.” Cute. We had been a little worried about fish melting in our fridge while we were gone, losing the fish, and perma-stinking Beatrice forever. But, the people of the SPM Ferries were awesomely attentive!

What a great little vacation! France…just a short ferry ride from Newfoundland!

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For the fun video of St Pierre and Miquelon, click here:

 

 

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A few more photos of Traveling St Pierre and Miquelon, New France. Atlantic North America: