Espresso • lunch • dinner

After our long hike yesterday, we didn't do much today. But, that's how we spend most of our holidays!

Since the Hôtel Ile de France was closed today, we couldn't get our morning espresso until nearly 10am, which borders on disaster for us! Nonetheless, we finally got our espresso and then purchased a few supplies for a picnic lunch that we had decided to have and eventually walked down toward the harbour. We had planned to walk around to the south side of the harbour for our lunch, but found a nice bench near the Yacht Club and had our lunch there.

A walk on the wild side

We hiked through some of the lovely Saint-Pierre countryside today, covering the Anse à Henry and the Cap à l'Aigle trails that are to the north and east of the town of Saint-Pierre. It was a beautiful day for hiking - we were on the trail for about five hours.

We walked about 35 minutes from our residence to the trail head and then set out on the well-marked Anse à Henry trail, which runs basically straight north until you run out of land at Grand Colombier. Then we turned east and south along the spectacular Cap à l'Aigle trail (which is poorly marked), as we slowly worked our way back to the town of Saint-Pierre.

A ferry, a farewell and a festival

We spent the early part of the day with Susan's parents and their travelling companions (Susan's sister and her husband - Erika and Graham), before seeing them off on the Atlantic Jet.

There are also some short videos available from our visit to Saint-Pierre. They are shot with our camera and are available at Google Video. When the video starts, we highly recommend that it be played in the Original Size, which can be selected with the Down Arrow key in the lower right of the video screen. Google Video compresses our original when uploaded, which means that what is called Original Size is of similar quality to our original, but is actually smaller!

Our original AVI videos are available for download at MediaMax. Be aware that some of these are very large files. But, they do show you the original video - original size and quality.

Surpise in Saint-Pierre

We arrived in Saint-Pierre shortly after midnight and checked into our accommodation, Résidence Les Iris. We have a very comfortable apartment with a large bedroom containing two beds: one queen, one single. The other main room contains a dining table, desk (with high speed Internet connection), and mini-kitchen with sink, refrigerator, microwave oven, kettle, coffee maker, toaster and two burner stovetop.

Because we came in so late the night before, we had breakfast at Les Iris: yogourt, coffee, and deliciously fresh croissants and pain au chocolat.

We spent most of the day trying not to run into Susan's parents while doing some exploring and putting in some supplies! Lunch was at the brasserie in l'Hôtel Ile de France - we both had salade d'endive terre et mer (saumon et canard fumé), washed down with a demi pichet du vin rouge and accompanied by very acceptable bread.

Then came the big moment ... we arrived at the restaurant La Voilerie at about 7:20pm. Erika, Graham, Murray and Jean were already seated at their table for four ... M and J with their backs to the door. We walked up behind them and said "Happy Anniversary ... mind if we join you?" Dad said later that he wasn't surprised by the anniversay wishes but did wonder why perfect strangers would want to join them for dinner!

It was a wonderfully enjoyable evening. We started dinner with feuilleté de chêvre followed by magret de canard avec ses pommes et sauce Calvados for Susan and brochette de crevettes et coquilles St. Jacques avec sauce hollandaise for Steve. This was accompanied by a very nice Bordeaux and followed by a delicious cake which consisted of raspberries, several layers of light pastry and cream.

Everyone had a marvelous time and it was well worth the effort getting there for the occasion!