There is a kind of traveller who has stopped choosing a destination and started choosing a thermometer. They are not after monuments or food: they are after being able to go outside at midday in August. If that sounds like you, the north shore of the St. Lawrence is made for you and almost nobody will suggest it.
01 The figures that matter
The hottest month of the year on this coast is July, and its average high is 21.3 degrees. Not the high of one mild day: the average of the highs in the hottest month. The average low that same month is 10.7.
August is practically the same, with average highs of 20.7 and lows of 9.9, and adds the year's best light: 238 hours of sunshine and the highest share of possible sunshine, 53.5%. July totals 244 hours, the calendar's maximum.
What turns those figures into an experience rather than a statistic is the night. Sleeping with ten degrees outside, no air conditioning and the window open, is exactly what half the cities of the northern hemisphere make impossible between June and September.
02 What it gives you and what it does not
03 The route
The structure that works best is two or three bases along the north shore, strung west to east. The first, at the mouth of the Saguenay fjord: three or four nights, with boat trips, trails above the fjord and lookouts from land.
The second, further east along the coast road: two or three nights in a stretch of lighthouses, shingle beaches and very small villages. It is the part of the trip with nothing scheduled, where you stop wherever you feel like it.
And an optional third one, inland, climbing towards the Canadian Shield: forest, lakes and empty roads. It is the stretch that convinces anyone who thought Canada was a country of cities with a national park next door.
04 The packing mistake
Almost everyone who comes escaping the heat makes the same mistake: they pack for a summer. And here a summer of twenty-one-degree highs with ten-degree lows means that by nine in the evening it is genuinely cool, and out on the water, cooler still.
What works is layers: a T-shirt, a fleece or thin jumper and a waterproof jacket with a hood. And footwear that copes with getting wet, because July is the wettest month of the year, 110.8 millimetres spread over nearly sixteen days with rain.
05 What you have to accept
The first thing is that escaping the heat has a price, and the price is light. No month of the year exceeds 53.5% of possible sunshine, so roughly half the daylight hours are cloudy. If you come from somewhere with permanent summer sun, you will notice.
The second is that there are beaches but no swimming. The sand is beautiful and so are the dunes, but the estuary water is cold twelve months a year. If your summer holiday is measured in hours in the water, this is not your destination.
And the third is that the car is not negotiable. Away from the river corridor public transport barely exists, and the distances between villages with services are measured in tens of kilometres. Without a car the trip shrinks to a couple of bases and loses exactly what makes it worthwhile.
