Illustrate Your Travels with Postage Stamps

 

We are really looking forward to the days we will spend with Judith. She is an unconditional nature lover, top trekker and we can expect a lot of fun together while she guide us around the beautiful settings of her house.  She has two beautiful dogs, Inouk & Mozart, and it will be a delight to take long walks in the colorful nearby nested forest. That will definitely keep us in good shape.

 

We gotta beware though, because it is not unusual to spot bears, deers and mooses in the nearby forest surrounding Lac des Commissaires. Our cameras will be ready, but I am pretty sure you will see me running away for my life, rather than tempting to take snapshots, if I do encounter with one of these beautiful creatures…Yikes!

 

 

It’s great to be outdoors, breathing bowls of fresh air while contemplating nature’s beauty reflecting upon so many lovely lakes and rivers.

Even though we were not given the opportunity to photograph a moose, or a bear ( thank God! ) as pictured in the stamps above, we did encounter white-tailed deers on the roadside.

 

 

To savour a moment in history, while traveling up north on Road 155, along the banks of the Bostonnais river, (the river is called the Bostonnais after one of the original white settlers that came from Boston, USA ), we stopped at the Ducharme and Thiffault covered bridges, only eight kilometers apart, which were both build in 1946 to join the two sides of the village and meet the requirements of the times

 

From the approximate 1,000 covered bridges that existed at one point in time in the province of Quebec, only 91 were still in existence in 1997. It was critical that something be done to preserve them! Under popular pressure, the provincial government finally got involved and the covered bridges are now under the responsibility of the Department of Transportation.

On the topic of covered bridges, Canada Post depicted the New Brunswick’s Hartland 1,282 feet long covered bridge on a 45c commemorative 1995 stamp series featuring canadian bridges. It is known as the “kissing bridge”.

The Kissing Bridge

Hartland Covered Bridge - New Brunswick, Canada

The longest covered bridge in the world in Hartland, New Brunswick, Canada an is a kissing bridge. This is a legend, which developed during the years when this covered structure was used mainly by horses and wagons.

This was of so much concern to the general public that there was great opposition when they talked of covering the bridge.  Sermons were even preached on how a covered bridge would destroy the morals of the young citizens.  Their concerns were heard, but not heeded and the bridge was covered.

It is said that young men trained their horses to stop about half way across the bridge.  The horse would wait until the couple shared a couple of kisses and then it would continue to the other side of the bridge.

Today, you can see many couples going to the bridge to share a kiss and receive the special feeling of their love with the spirit of the grand old bridge. We are certain that the bridge’s spirit will look favourable on these couples.

A good example of this was in September 1993, when Charmaine Laffoley and David Hunt of Toronto became the first couple to be married on the bridge

 

The colorful title given to our trip was inspired by our reading of Kenneth White’s book: The Blue Road , in which he relates his own travel in the area in the 1980′s, along similar roads. Once he reached Natashquan, instead of coming back south as far as we did, Kenneth White came back to Sept-Iles, and from there embarked on a train going north to the Labrador region, thus realizing a chilhood’s dream. We will follow his labradorian trail in our next adventure, “Quebec 2″.   

Stay tuned for “Traveling our “Blue Road” on the northern shore of the St Lawrence River – Part 2” as we go Whale Watching!

In October 2010, Canada Post issued a $10 definitive stamp depicting a blue whale, the biggest creature on earth.

Blue Whale (Le rorqual bleu) on Canadian stamps - Pane of 2

“This is both the biggest stamp and highest stamp denomination Canada Post ever produced” said Alain Leduc, Manager of Stamp Design and Production at Canada Post. “We thought this made a fitting tribute to the largest creature in the animal kingdom”. He explains that he looked to prior issues in the Canadian Wildlife series to determine the size. “Since the largest stamp before it was the grizzly bear, we decided to double its length.”

Source: Details Volume XIX No4 Canada Post

 

Happy storytelling and stamp collecting!

Talk soon,

Janice

 

Your Topical Stamp Collecting Queen

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