18 June 2026 – Isn’t she a charmer?

Built well into the 20th c. but designed in Victorian “classic Canadian riverboat” tradition, The Canadian Empress takes 56 passengers and offers beautifully-scaled (and informative) trips along both the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers, with frequent stops for exploration ashore.

We board late afternoon, are taken for an early-evening cruise to view Montmorency Falls (taller than Niagara), and spend the night at anchor in the Louise Basin, before…

at 6:30 am, starting our journey. We pass through the 19th-c. locks that protect anchored craft from the river’s 6-metre tidal variations; we take one last look at the city, with the Château Frontenac en haut and three red-&-white Coast Guard vessels en bas…

and we settle in for life on the river, its waters already a-glitter with early morning sunshine.

The river is still broad but, even so, we can always see both shores, and the life that populates them. Sometimes industrial; sometimes, as here approaching Champlain, a scattering of homes.

First stop: Trois-Rivières — population now some 150,000 and both larger and more diversified than when I visited it decades back, to interview an innovative high-school principal for a CBC documentary I was preparing.

I mention “diversified” because for more than 100 years (late 1890s – 2000), this small city was at the heart of the Canadian pulp and paper industry. Drawing on lumber from the boreal forests of the region & the waters of the St-Maurice River, it helped make Canada the world’s largest newsprint exporter by 1913 and the world’s largest producer by 1926. Now a by-gone era, for multiple reasons — but that history is honoured, explained, demonstrated in Musée Boréalis, created within and around the footprint of the old CIP mill, in its day the world’s largest.

I marvel at the old machinery (here, in the Filtration Plant)…

in ignorance but with fascination and respect.

Also with tattered and probably inaccurate memories of a visit to a pulp & paper mill in my small childhood, taken on a personal field trip by my engineer father whose company sold machinery to these mills. I remember whoever-it-was detailed to show me around keeping a very firm grip on my overalls as I peered — amidst all the noise & heat & odours — into a swirling vat of pulp. Wouldn’t do to lose the kid overboard! That is not a joke. As they explained at the museum, occasionally a worker did fall in (safety standards being laughable, in the day), and there was no saving him.

But! But! We don’t just marvel and listen and learn, we get to make our very own little squares of paper! The lively young guide gives us the same cheerful instructions she offers adults & kiddies alike. Soon we are dunking our frames in the pulp, lifting them, finger-wiping a margin, blotting (both sides), covering & ironing (both sides)… and then, squealing like kiddies, we flick-flick-flick our frames…

and our little rectangles of paper drop onto the mat. You betcha I’m taking it home with me.

Dinner aboard and then — bless these long June evenings — still time, light and warmth for those so inclined to go wander the town on their own.

Isn’t non-plane travel the best? No security rigamaroles, just a reminder to be back onboard by X hour, and meanwhile, go amuse yourself. So I do.

Up on the three-tier Esplande de Trois-Rivières, I — in the company of assorted Tri-fluviens (and their dogs) — stroll and admire the view. This freighter, for example (bound for Iceland & Greenland, our captain tells us), bathed in the golden glow of early evening.

I turn slightly inland into the old city, walk a stretch of Rue des Ursulines, parallel to the waterfront…

looking east toward both Parc des Ursulines and Cimetière des Ursulines. I don’t go that far; I amble a few more residential streets and return to the Empress.

It’s only the next morning — this morning — that I remember the captain also said something-or-other about “squalls” to come.

I admire Île des Barques, off Ste-Anne-de-Sorel, through rain-bright steps under a rain-wet canopy.

Later today: Montreal. My home town.