Caboto Chronicles is a five-part series tracing a road journey from Toronto to Halifax—along coastlines, through history, and into the question of what it means to follow someone else’s courage across a continent.
There is a particular quality of freedom that only arrives after a long confinement. Not just excitement—something deeper. The feeling that your body has remembered it is allowed to move, and is still slightly surprised by the permission.
It was September 2021. The world had spent eighteen months holding its breath. And we were crossing the Pierre Laporte Bridge out of Quebec City, watching the St. Lawrence grow wide and silver below us, driving toward Cape Breton Island with 1,650 kilometres of Atlantic Canada ahead.
We were not just travelling. We were coming back to ourselves.
And the land, as it turned out, had things to tell us.
Route 132: The Road That Follows the River
Quebec City to Gaspé is not a journey you rush. It asks for something else from you — attention, patience, the willingness to let the landscape change you at its own pace.
We chose Route 132, the road that winds along the St. Lawrence River estuary all the way to the tip of the Gaspé Peninsula. From Bas-Saint-Laurent, through Rimouski, following the curve of the coast as the river slowly becomes something larger than itself.
The part of the peninsula that faces the St. Lawrence is quiet, almost intimate — wide plains, small fishing villages, port towns that have been doing the same thing for three hundred years. The rolling hills between Rivière-du-Loup and Rimouski carry something familiar in their lines. To my Italian eyes, they echo the hills of Abruzzo: the same unhurried rhythm, the same sense that the land has been here long enough to stop proving anything.
And then, after Sainte-Flavie, everything changes.
The coastline curves dramatically as it opens into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The softness disappears. The road climbs, narrows, and reveals a wilder version of itself — high promontories, dense forest pressing to the edge of the cliff, the sea appearing and disappearing around every bend like a secret being slowly told. At Le Voile de la Mariée — the Bride’s Veil waterfall — we stopped, said nothing, and stood in the mist. Some places do not need commentary.
From Mont Saint-Pierre onward, the edge of the Gaspé plateau drops abruptly into the sea. The coastline becomes rocky and untamed, full of sandy inlets and small bays where the waves arrive as if they have crossed the entire Atlantic just to reach this particular shore. Which, in a way, they have.
Murdochville: A Town That Refused Its Own Ending
Just past Anse Pleureuse, we turned inland — off the coast road onto Route 198, the Route du Lac — and came to Murdochville.
Founded in the 1950s as a copper mining town, Murdochville spent decades defined by what it extracted from the earth. When the mine closed, it faced the question every depleted place eventually faces: Who are we now?
The answer it found is still being written. Tourism, outdoor recreation, renewable energy — a wind farm that has become one of the largest in Canada. It is a community that chose reinvention over eulogy. There is something quietly instructive in that. The courage not to be finished.
We arrived in Gaspé in the evening. The hotel where we spent the night is now permanently closed. I can understand why.
Some places hold their energy so tightly that when the people leave, nothing remains to keep the walls standing.
The Road That Carries History in Its Bones
We left Gaspé before the full morning arrived.
Another 640 kilometres. Another seven and a half hours. But the distance felt beside the point once the coastline revealed itself—majestic red cliffs standing like sentinels above the crashing waves, the air thick with salt and something harder to name. The particular quality of freedom, again. The sense that the pandemic’s long stillness was not just behind us in the calendar, but physically receding — shrinking in the rear-view mirror with every kilometre of open coast we gained.
And then we came to St. Georges-de-Malbaie.
You could almost miss it. A small white church against a backdrop of blue, green, and white — the Gulf of St. Lawrence painted in shades you forget are possible until you are standing inside them. Behind the church: a cemetery on a terrace, overlooking the water, where the clay of the Gaspé soil comes up through the grass in shades of amber and rust.
We walked among the headstones, as you do when you are on a pilgrimage and you have not quite admitted it to yourself yet.
We were searching for a name. Cabot.
And we found it.
A single name on a stone, above the gulf, in this wild and beautiful corner of the world. Proof — quiet, unhurried, undeniable — of Giovanni Caboto’s passage, and of the descendants who reached the Gaspé Peninsula and stayed. Who planted themselves here, at the edge of the continent, and called it home.
I have stood in front of many historical markers in my life. Plaques on walls, dates in museums, names on documents behind glass. None of them felt like this. Because this was not an official record. It was a grave. It was a family. It was someone’s great-great-grandmother buried in red earth above the gulf, with no idea she would one day be evidence.
History is not behind glass. It is in the grass.
Chaleur Bay: Where the Gulf Becomes the Atlantic
South of the peninsula, the landscape shifts again — softer now, more golden. A narrow coastal plain of red sand winds along the curves of Chaleur Bay, named by Jacques Cartier for the warmth of its sun and the gentleness of its climate. The kind of place where cod once dried on wooden racks and children grew up with the smell of salt in everything they owned.
The coastal plain stretches from Chandler to Carleton-sur-Mer on the Quebec side, and from Campbellton to Bathurst and east to Miscou Island on the New Brunswick shore. At its widest, it spreads fifty kilometres between the two provinces — a bay that belongs to both and neither, the way beautiful things often do.
Every bend in the road opened another chapter: the Gulf and the Atlantic merging in shifting shades of blue, green, and red. The kind of beauty that does not try to impress you. It simply is.
We arrived in Moncton towards evening — tired in that good, particular way that only comes from having looked at too many extraordinary things in a single day. We stopped for the night at the Wild Rose Inn. Quiet, warm, and still.
Our eyes were full of wonder.
Some journeys, you plan the route. And on some journeys, the route plans you.
The Gaspé Peninsula did not give us postcards. It gave us something more unsettling and more necessary than that: the feeling that this land has been holding stories for five hundred years, quietly, patiently, waiting for someone to walk slowly enough to hear them.
The name on the headstone. The red cliffs at dawn. The white church above the water. The wind turbines on the hill above a town that chose to keep going.
These are not attractions. They are invitations.
If you have ever stood somewhere and felt the past press forward to meet you—not as nostalgia, not as performance, but as a living fact—then you understand what I mean.
This coast is waiting for you to slow down long enough to let it speak.
Next in the Caboto Chronicles: Cape Breton Island—where the Celtic and the Mi’kmaq and the Acadian and the sea have been making something together for longer than any of them remember.
