And so having left Godbout, I now really am travelling into uncharted territory. I'm back on Highway 138 heading ever eastwards along a road upon which I've never travelled before, away from wherever it is that I know.

And so the first question, which I'm sure that you are all dying to know, is "what's the road like?". The answer to that is that

1. it's modern
2. it's fast
3. it's carved through rock
4. I don't expect that it will stay like this

What else would you like to know?

While I was about to tell you something else about the road, I was distracted by yet another quite beautiful lake. It's at round about kilometre 831 and it's called le Lac au Rat Musqué - in other words, "Muskrat Lake".

I'd love to know how it is that some of these lakes and other natural landmarks earned their European names, and (more importantly)what their native names might have been.

So yes, what was it that I was going to tell you? Ohh Yes! About the road. Built in 1965 it was. Before that, there wasn't anything and all goods came in by sea.

I said on a previous page that this would be the kind of road upon which you could have enormous amounts of fun on a big old single-cylinder long-stroke motorcycle. And my opinion is being reinforced the further along the road that I travel.

You can see what I mean by looking at the view from round by kilometre-marker 837 just here. It would be just like being on an old roller-coaster, especially if your motorcycle had a rigid rear end or a sprung hub.

And not only that - a motorcycle would be a sight easier to park at the side of the road to take photos without disrupting the traffic.

Just after kilometre-marker 838 (you can see that I'm making an enormous amount of rapid progress) I come to another stop, because I seem to have found a beautiful lake with beautiful houses and a beautiful setting, here at the side of the road.

It's called Lac Blanc - the White Lake - and you can see how it obtained its name because even though we are in early May and we are having all of this beautiful weather, it's still frozen over.

And how!

And as an aside - we are at kilometre-marker 838 just here. I'm intrigued to know what will happen when we arrive at kilometre-marker 1000, as we surely will (unless I'm eaten by a bear or fall in through an ice-hole or something).

Will we have a cabaret with dancing girls? Will we have drinks handed out like at a Marathon (and blimey! It feels like a Marathon!)? Will we be given souvenir pennants and tee-shirts?

Wait and see.

We'll definitely pass kilometre-marker 1000, but Highway 138 will eventually come to a shuddering halt in the middle of nowhere.

And if you look in this phoro you'll see the reason why.

Right over there in the background, you can just about make out the Canadian Shield - the Bouclier Canadien (if this isn't enough of the Canadian Shield). That eventually comes right down to the water's edge and that is that.

They've chiseled a road out as far as it is possible to go for the moment but now they are confronted by 40 kilometres where it's just not possible to do anything at all, apparently.

They are building the road down westwards from Blanc Sablon and that sector is gradually being extended bit by bit. In a wild fit of optimism, that sector of road is even labelled "Highway 138", but the two ends are not going to join up in my lifetime, nor in the lifetime of anyone else reading this rubbish either.

Cynics amongst the population of the eastern North Shore have noted that the population that is isolated from the road network of the rest of Quebec is nothing but First-Nation Canadians and English-speaking descendants from Newfoundland fishing communities.

I was on a ship out in the Gulf of St Lawrence on one occasion chatting to a girl from one of the Anglophone communities out there. She was telling me that the 6000 or so people who live along the coast out there, who call themselves "Coasters" by the way, consider themselves to be living on what they call the "Forgotten Coast".

With the Province of Quebec's policy of "Francais first, Francais second and Francais last", the Coasters see the efforts that the Provincial Government is making as nothing more than token gestures.

Furthermore, they believe that had it been a Francophone population that was isolated like this, much more would be done much more quickly.

I, of course, can't comment on that.

Nevertheless, it has always seemed strange to me that with these isolated foreign-speaking communities out there in which Quebec seems to have no interest, Quebec wants to hang on to them politically.

These regions are geographically, physically, linguistically and historically connected to the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador, and it makes much more sense for them to have their affairs handled from L'Anse au Loup than Havre St. Pierre or even the city of Quebec.

Indeed, prior to the Agreement of 1927 (which as far as I know, the Province of Quebec has still not ratified), the Forgotten Coast was considered to be part of the "Coasts of Labrador".

But then of course, any good psychiatrist could give you an explanation for the attitude of the Province of Quebec towards the Coasters of the Forgotten Coast.

Leaving aside the polemic for a while, I do have to say that comments such as the above are not restricted to the more extreme members of the community. In August 2014 it was reported that no less a person than the mayor of Blanc Sablon, Armand Joncas, had launched a campaign to transfer his town, the largest on the Lower North Shore, from Quebec to Labrador.

He gave as his reasons "a lack of a continuous road network to Quebec, isolation and lack of interest from the Quebec government and close logistics and cultural identity with the people of Labrador"

And when a person like this and a town like that make a formal demand to secede, then you know that they have given up any hope that negotiation will produce a result.

I for one will be interested to see how the Quebec authorities, for all of their own much-vaunted demands for secession, respond to this initiative.

When we met that tunnel on a previous page, I remember asking whatever next might we encounter on our voyage.

One thing that do I like to do when I'm on my travels is to go to look at lighthouses, and so when I saw a road that was signed up as Le Chemin du Vieux Phare, or "Old Lighthouse Lane" then, yes, that has to be something worth visiting.

And so, off I went.

I came by here again in early October 2016 and stopped along the lane to take a photograph of the vegetation. Autumn had been a long time coming this year, but here it is at last and the leaves have started to turn. And quite dramatically too.

These are absolutely beautiful and sum up exactly why I like to be in Canada at this time of the year. There can?t be anywhere else in the whole wide world that is as beautiful as this.

Even the mosses are changing colour too.

A few miles further on down the road we come to ... well, I don't know if you would call it a village ... of Pointe des Monts, and here there is a little church. It's the Chapel of St Augustin and dates from 1898.

When the Euopeans came to settle here, they found that there was a settlement of Innu (known by the French as Montagnais) already here. There was originally no church for them and religious services took place on a kind of ad hoc basis, but following a petition to the church from Victor Fafard, the lighthouse keeper at the time, the chapel was constructed.

However, the local Innu dispersed not long afterwards and so the chapel served the fishing families who lived round the area. They too had dispersed by the time that World War I had started, and the chapel fell into decay. It has however been restored a couple of times since then.

There is a restaurant-cum-cafe that I had noticed just across the road from the Chapel and I do have to admit that when I was here that late Sunday afternoon in early October, I could have done some very considerable damage to a large mug of coffee..

I wandered over there but, as you are probably expecting, the place was closed up. As I have said before ... "and you'll say again" - ed ... this Canadian idea of just a 10-week summer season isn't half getting on my wick.

Nowadays with more and more retired people with good pensions and big mobile homes with heating, they could run a decent tourist season for much longer than that with a decent amount of publicity and marketing.

All along the coast and round about in this area is an old Innu trail that these days is called the Sentier de Charlotte. It runs from the chapel down to where there was a well-known Innu settlement that has been investigated by archaeologists and historians.

Unfortunately we had a little change of plan here, due to the fact that as I'm not too well (this is early October 2016) I crashed out instead. And crashed out good and proper. Being "away with the fairies" had nothing on this.

And when I returned to the land of the living, the light was going rapidly. Walking around on the rocks by the seashore was clearly out of the question.

And seeing as how we were talking about the Innu ... "well, one of us was" - ed ... another thing that I noticed during my visit here in 2016 was this tipi - or is it a teepee? Or a wigwam?

In actual fact it is actually a tipi, and we have seen quite a few of these before, one that I recall vividly when we were at Goose Bay in Labrador last year although that one wasn't a real or traditional tipi.

The presence of this tipi makes me associate the area with the Innu people even today. It seems that not all of them moved away at the turn of the 20th Century.

However, I am moving away because I have other fish to fry while I'm down here.

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