Rimouski
"Rimouski is the point where you stop calling it a river out of politeness and start calling it what it is: an inland sea."
A working port city on the edge of the Bas-Saint-Laurent where the river becomes a sea in earnest, and a decommissioned submarine sits in a park like nothing unusual is happening.
By the time you reach Rimouski, the St. Lawrence has stopped behaving like a river in any sense that matters. It’s over forty kilometres wide here, salt water, tidal, patrolled by minke whales and the occasional pod of belugas, and the town has built its whole identity around that fact rather than pretending otherwise. I came for a single, specific reason — the Onondaga, a Cold War-era Oberon-class submarine that Canada decommissioned and then, rather than scrapping, hauled onto dry land at the Site historique maritime de la Pointe-au-Père and opened for tours. Climbing down through its narrow hatches into the crew quarters, the torpedo room, the periscope station, I kept trying and failing to imagine sixty-some men living inside this space for weeks at a stretch underwater. The ceilings assume nobody in the navy is over five foot nine. I am not five foot nine.
The same site holds the Pointe-au-Père lighthouse, one of the tallest in Canada, and a sober little museum dedicated to the Empress of Ireland, an ocean liner that sank in the St. Lawrence just offshore in 1914 after a collision in fog, killing more passengers than the Titanic had lost three years earlier — a disaster most people outside Quebec have never heard of, largely because it happened weeks before the First World War swallowed the world’s attention. Lia and I walked the small cemetery-like memorial to the victims afterward in near silence; it’s the kind of place that recalibrates how you feel about the calm water you can see from the same spot.
Rimouski itself, beyond the maritime site, is an unpretentious regional capital with a lively little downtown, a decent university crowd, and a habit of hosting the Festi Jazz international every summer — free outdoor shows spilling out along Rue Saint-Germain that turn the whole town briefly loud and warm. We caught two nights of it by accident, having timed our drive along the Bas-Saint-Laurent purely around the submarine, and it turned out to be the better half of the visit.
When to go: Late June through early July for the Festi Jazz international. Summer generally, for whale-watching boat departures and warm evenings on the water. The maritime site and submarine tours run seasonally — check hours before making the drive out to Pointe-au-Père.