The Felix House

Wednesday morning Mike and I woke up determined to turn our day off together into an adventure. The weather could not have been more cooperative providing us with a windless, rainless , warm sunny day!
First stop was Ste Anne de Bellevue, a little town by the water where Mike went to college. A seafood lunch, extra large coffees, little used bookshop and walk around campus later, we got back in the car and drove down Chemin Senneville where all the old turn of the century mansions are! I forgot to snap any pictures, but we did look some up on remax later only to discover they are well out of even our imagined budget!

Our next stop was supposed to be Mike's (late) Great Uncle's old property down by the water in Vaudreuil, but that plan got rained on when we saw the big government signs that said no trespassing all around the property! I was definitely too chicken to sneak onto it, and so we settled for skipping rocks and walking by the water down the road where it is completely legal!

Finally, I asked Mike if we could go visit the old Felix house where his stepdad used to live before being evicted because the Historical Society in the area didn't want anyone living in it! (It used to belong to the writer Felix Leclerc*).
I really didn't expect such a heart breaking scene when we pulled up! It turns out the historical society couldn't get any funding from the government and they haven't had the budget to maintain the house, so it's basically just rotting away! The house itself is facing the water and has about a million acres of field behind it. It's got four barns surrounding it, one that used to be a blacksmith's shop, the other storage for the carriages, the third where they stored the farming tools and the fourth, the old delapidated one you can see in the pictures, was a stable for horses!
Sneaking around through all the old abandoned buildings definitely satisfied our adventure cravings and we happily settled onto the couch at Mike's mom's place afterwards to enjoy some pizza and James Bond with the kids!
I'm still a little heartbroken that the Felix House will probably just stand there until they declare it condemned and are forced to tear it down! But I'm glad I got to visit it before that happenned.

*I feel like a total dummy, because I have somehow been under the impression that Felix Leclerc is a painter my whole life and just recently was informed (thanks Guillaume) that he is actually a poet/writer! In my defense, I think my elementary school may have mislead me because my sister thought the same thing as me!