Most people who look up the Gaspesie see a photograph of a rock with a hole in it and assume the whole peninsula is a coastline. It is not. It is a block of mountains, the northern end of the Appalachians, that runs out into salt water and drops. The road goes around the block because there is no sensible way through it. What that means in practice is that you spend nine days circling a wilderness you can see from the car and only enter twice on purpose.
The second thing the photographs leave out is the emptiness of the north shore. Between Sainte Anne des Monts and the tip at Cap Gaspe there are perhaps nine villages, most of them one street wide, laid between the cliff and the water with no room to spare. Houses stand end on to the sea. Fishing is not a theme here, it is what the harbors still do, though the cod moratorium of 1992 took most of it away and never gave it back. The wharves that look picturesque are half empty for that reason, and the people who stayed will tell you so without being asked.
Third: it is cold longer than you expect. The Gulf of St Lawrence sits at 41 to 48 degrees Fahrenheit through most of the season, and the wind comes off it. Julys inland have run into the low eighties, but the coast road on the same afternoon has been thirty degrees cooler with fog to the roofline. Bring the jacket you would take to Maine in April and use it in August.
- The week in one sentence
- Nine nights in six village inns and one mountain lodge, two of them for three nights at a time, moved between by rental car you drive yourself, with luggage staying in the trunk and carried in by hand each evening.
- Why this and not the next one
- This is a driving trip, not a flying one. From Boston it is 700 miles to the start of the loop, from Montreal 550, and most people take two days to reach it. The road surface is fine, the shoulders are not, and moose stand on it after dusk. Beds are village inns of eight to twenty rooms, plus one lodge above 2,000 feet with shared bathrooms on the corridor. The road around the interior mountains closes with snow, so the season runs from the first week of June to the second week of October. From $1,920 per person, two sharing.
- Inside the figure
- Nine nights of beds with breakfast in six inns and one mountain lodge; the compact rental car with unlimited mileage and the cross-border insurance endorsement; the national park entry passes for the peninsula's two parks; the boat crossing and landing fee for the gannet island; one guided walk with a park naturalist on the mountain plateau; four dinners at the inns that sit too far from a village to eat elsewhere; a paper road book with the loop marked, the passing places named and the fuel stops flagged, since cell coverage fails for long stretches; and the written figure priced against your actual dates before anything is confirmed.
- Outside it, and what that runs to
- Getting yourself to Quebec City or Montreal to collect the car, which is the largest single cost most people meet; fuel for roughly 900 miles of driving, near $180 at Quebec pump prices; the five dinners not listed above, running $28 to $55 a head in the villages; all lunches, which are usually a bakery and cost under $15; the second driver fee of $14 a day if two of you want to share the wheel; the whale watching boat at $95 per person, which is optional and which the sea cancels perhaps one day in five; alcohol; tips; and any change to a booked inn once the deposit reaches it, which the inns keep.
- Reasons to book something else
- Do not reserve this if you will not drive. There is no train around the loop and the bus runs twice a week. Expect four to five hours at the wheel on the three moving days, on a two lane road with no passing lanes and loaded logging trucks in both directions. The gannet island means 400 steps down a cliff face and the same 400 back up, with no other route off the headland. The mountain plateau walk is six miles with 1,400 feet of climb and no shelter on it. If either of those is beyond you, half the reason to come is closed.
What the mountain block does to the weather on the road
The interior is the Chic Chocs, and the high ground there holds above 3,700 feet at Mont Jacques Cartier. That is enough elevation, this far north, to hold an arctic-alpine plateau on the summits, which is why a herd of woodland caribou has survived on top when it has vanished from everywhere else south of the St Lawrence. The herd is small and shrinking, a few dozen animals, and the plateau closes to walkers until late June each year so they can calve undisturbed. That closure is not negotiable and the office will not pretend otherwise when it falls across your dates.
The mountains also split the record. Over the last several seasons the north coast has run cool and gray, with fog banks that come in without warning and sit for a day; the Baie des Chaleurs on the south side, sheltered by the whole mass of the peninsula, has run warmer and drier and has had swimmable water in late July, around 68 degrees. Nobody promises this and nothing here is a forecast. It is what the seasons have been, and the practical use of knowing it is that you plan the interior days for the south half of the trip when the north is socked in.
A driving day here is short in miles and long in hours. Sixty miles takes two hours because the road drops into every cove and climbs out again, and because you stop. There is no way to rush it and no reason to try. The moving days on this itinerary are set at four to five hours behind the wheel, which leaves the rest of the day for the reason you came.
Reserve this if you would rather drive than be driven
This suits people who want their own car and their own hours, who are content to eat where the village eats, and who will accept that two of the nine nights are in a lodge with a bathroom down the hall because there is nothing else at that altitude. It suits two people sharing the driving better than one person doing all of it. It suits anyone who finds a half empty fishing harbor more interesting than a resort, and it does not suit anyone who wants a pool.
It also suits people who read French badly or not at all but are willing to try. Outside the two larger towns, service in English is uneven. In the inns it is usually fine. In a hardware store in Riviere au Renard, less so. That is a fact about the place, not a complaint about it.
The same twenty-four trips are printed in five orders. This one sits in a different place in each, and none of the five positions is a judgement about it.
- Hours in the air
- 2 of 24 at no flight. The whole order
- Miles walked a day
- 8 of 24 at 5 miles. The whole order
- Per cent decided in advance
- 1 of 24 at 28 per cent. The whole order
- From, per person
- 1 of 24 at $1,920. The whole order
- Different beds
- 22 of 24 at 7 beds. The whole order
What each stretch of the open season has actually been like
- First two weeks of June
- Road open, plateau still closed for calving, snow patches in the gullies. Inns half empty and quiet. Blackflies bad inland, tolerable on the coast. Lowest inn rates of the year.
- Late June to mid July
- Plateau opens, gannets on the nest and loud. Coast has run 55 to 68 degrees with fog most mornings burning off by eleven. Whale boats start running daily.
- Mid July to mid August
- Busiest six weeks. Inns full and priced highest; reserve four months out or accept the second choice village. South shore water swimmable near 68 degrees. Gannet colony at its fullest.
- Late August to mid September
- The stretch most drivers prefer. Traffic gone, water still warm on the Baie des Chaleurs, blackflies finished. Whales still feeding offshore. Rates drop back about fifteen percent.
- Last week of September to Columbus Day
- Color on the mountain slopes, which draws a second short crowd. Gannets leaving. Cold on the north coast, high forties by afternoon with real wind. Some village restaurants already closed for the year.
- After the second week of October
- Most inns shut, the mountain road closes on the first serious snow and the loop stops being a loop. We do not place bookings into this stretch.
The four hundred steps, and other things people wish they had been told
The gannet colony is the single best hour of this trip and it is guarded by a staircase. You cross by boat, land, walk the headland, and then descend roughly 400 steps cut into the cliff to reach the viewing platforms, and there is no alternative route back up. People arrive not knowing this, get halfway down, and then face the return in full sun with 90,000 birds shrieking above them. If your knees or your lungs are marginal, that is the day to sit in the village with a coffee, and it is better to decide that in Nebraska than on the sixth step.
The other honest drawback is distance. Nine nights sounds generous until you add the two days it takes to reach the start and the two to get home, and then it is a thirteen day absence for a nine night trip. Some people fly to Quebec City instead and collect the car there, which cuts four days and adds airfare plus a one way drop charge that has run near $220. We will price both ways in the written figure and we will not tell you which is right, because that depends entirely on how you feel about four days in a car, which is not something this office can know about you.
This office takes no payment. Nothing here is a checkout, we hold no card number, and the inns and the boat operator bill you directly under their own terms. We are paid a commission by them after you come home. We do not sell or advise on travel insurance, and since this trip crosses an international border, entry documents are a matter between you and the border service, not something we handle or comment on. We publish no opinions about these places and we grade nothing.