Rivière-du-Loup, Québec, Canada

The day after we all gathered in Northern Maine to say goodbye to my father, we headed to Québec. My reasoning was several fold. First, this is likely to be the last trip my mother makes to a far flung destination, and I didn't want it to be just about burying her spouse--it is true that it was really nice to be back home, to see local relatives of my dad's, and to see her old haunts. However, we buried my dad on what would have been their 67th wedding anniversary, and so to ameliorate the sadness, we took another trip down memory lane--we headed to where they honeymooned. We stopped here en route to Québec City--it had been a quiet journey and we stopped for some sustenance. The Rivière du Loup is a river in eastern Quebec, which empties on the south shore of Saint Lawrence River at the city of Rivière-du-Loup (hence the name--since I live in a town that it named for the state I live in, I cannot disparage this practice--it simplifies things that do not need to be complicated). The name means Wolf's River in French. This name may have come from a native tribe known as "Les Loups" ("The Wolves") or from the many seals, known in French as loup-marin (sea wolves), once found at the river's mouth. Rivière-du-Loup was established in 1673 as the seigneurie of Sieur Charles-Aubert de la Chesnaye. The community was incorporated as the village of Fraserville, in honour of early Scottish settler Alexander Fraser, in 1850, and became a city in 1910. The city reverted to its original name, Rivière-du-Loup, in 1919. Between 1850 and 1919, the city saw large increases in its anglophone population. Most of them left the region by the 1950s. Only 1% of the population still speaks English as its first language, which for me is one of the great pleasures of being in Québec. This is a beautiful town, with gorgeous views, and a great start to our Québec trip.