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Ready for the Start

Susan McKenzie / 08.09.2006

Arrived at the airport in Montreal last night after an arduous twenty minute drive from my home in the west end of the city. No passport, no plane ticket, and all the contact lens solution my carry on can carry on. This is the first time a major adventure race is happening within driving distance of my home, and it\'s great.

Montreal lies in the south of Quebec - about an hour\'s drive from the New York and Vermont borders. The Saguenay Lac St Jean region is literally and figuratively the heart of the province, where racers and organizers and media can expect to hear only French spoken by it residents, with a smattering of Montagnais thrown in for good measure.

Quebec is huge – 1.5 million square kilometres. The race will cover about 1000 kilometres of the centre of La Belle Province. The Raid begins Saturday morning in the Ashuapmushuan Nature Reserve, at Lac Chigoubiche. (The words are French and English derivations of the original Montagnais place names.) The race will travel along the shores of Lac St Jean and the Saguenay River before finishing in Tadoussac, where the Saguenay Fjord flows into the St Lawrence River.

The Lac St Jean region is synonymous with wild blueberries, which are abundant in late August and early September. The locals are referred to as “Les Bleuets.� If you’re really lucky you can find the chocolate covered blueberries hand-dipped by Trappist monks, but their season is even shorter than the blueberry season.

Les Bleuets are tough people – hewers of wood and drawers of water, as we learned in social studies. The local team will have a huge advantage – Paramedic Saguenay knows the region and the strong local accent won’t require any pause for translation. (Lac St Jean French is to Parisian French what Yorkshire English is to Essex English. Behn ouah.)

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