Home!

During the final two days of the trip, we tried to determine what it is that we both were experiencing – a now-familiar feeling we’ve had at the end of each of our trips. We’re happy to be coming home, yet there’s a sadness to ending our adventurous life on the road. We concluded that it’s primarily a feeling of wistfulness (yearning or longing) with a touch of bittersweet (contrasting emotions of sadness and pleasure). And overall, it leaves us with a sense of satisfaction with the adventure just concluded.

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Caraquet, NB

I’ve been hearing about Caraquet, New Brunswick, my whole life. My mom’s family (ok, the men in my mom’s family) made their living fishing in the Caraquet area for 8 generations. During the Great Depression, jobs dried up and people, including my ancestors, were struggling to find work. My grandfather Ferdinand (‘Fred’) Murray moved his wife, Marie-Louise (Godin) and the first 7 of their kids (of the eventual 13) to Berlin, New Hampshire, where the paper mill was hiring. The rest is history…

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The Best Laid Plans…

Greetings from a rainy day in Cape Breton Highlands National Park!

We set out to visit the Maritimes this summer, and it appears we’re gonna fail. When we started planning, we’d thought that all of island provinces in eastern Canada were considered the Maritimes. As you probably know already, that assumption was incorrect. Newfoundland and Labrador are not considered Maritime provinces – they’re eastern or Atlantic Canada. We stand corrected!

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Farewell Newfoundland

We had no expectations about traveling on the island of Newfoundland. According to google maps, the primary roads create a funky ‘H’ across the province – 1 north south road on the west side, another on the east side, and one road connecting the two across the middle. Many side roads lead to (mostly) small communities along the coast. We’d heard varying reports of the quality of the roads on ‘The Rock,’ but even the most foreboding of these led us to believe we’d seen worse. (And the roads were fine!)

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St John’s NL

St John’s Harbour

At the southeastern corner of the island of Newfoundland, St John’s is the largest city in Newfoundland and Labrador. At this moment, about 530,000 people live in NL, and 212,000 of them (40%) live in the St John’s metro area. [By contrast, just 26,650 (5%) live in all of Labrador, though Labrador accounts for 72% of the land area of the province.] Anyway, statistics aside, we were eagerly anticipating our visit to the urban St John’s for several things we would find there: music, history, hiking, sightseeing… and a Sprinter service center.

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The Road to the Isles

Sunset over Back Cove, Fogo

Newfoundland and Labrador covers a pretty large area. If the province were a state in the US it would be the 4th largest, after Alaska, California and Texas based on landmass. (Based on population, it would be the 2nd smallest, right in between Vermont and Wyoming…). Similar to Alaska, it’s a big space up north with very few roads. What that means is that people touring Newfoundland in RVs often find themselves moving around in cohorts based on which of the 3 ferries they took and when they arrived, and we just keep running into each other over and over again.

As we chatted with people in our northwest Newfoundland cohort (because that’s where we arrived on July 7), they all mentioned plans to visit Fogo Island and Twillingate. Those 2 places were on our list, as well. As we crossed paths and chatted with travelers in other cohorts, heading in the reverse direction, they all said you’ve got to see Fogo Island and Twillingate. Newfoundland and Labrador Route 340, known as the Road to the Isles, heads north from Gander. So did we.

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Gander

Well rested and with the truck’s vents blowing cool and conditioned air, we moved an hour on up the road to Gander. Located on a ‘Great Circle’ route between North America and Europe, Gander was built to be an airport town for refueling trans-Atlantic flights, and for a time was the largest and busiest airport in the world. It has lately become well known for its townwide hospitality when planes were unexpectedly grounded there on September 11, 2001. On that day, North American airspace was closed and all planes were required to land. Within a few hours, 38 planes landed in this town of (then) 9,300, unloading 7,000 unexpected guest from 95 different countries for an unknown duration. It ended up being 5 days. Among locals, the stayover is now known as ‘9/12,’ and the guests are called ‘Come From Away’s (CFAs). We were interested to see this historic town. Maybe we’d have a chance to talk to some of the kind people and thank them for their generosity.

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Grand Falls-Windsor and Bishop’s Falls

Atlantic salmon

We headed inland from the west coast, driving along big rolling hills, almost always with a lake or river beside the road. The sign said ‘Welcome to Grand Falls-Windsor – Perfectly Centered!’ That’s a fact. GFW is in the center of Newfoundland, and it’s the largest town in the interior. It’s also away from the natural breezes that keep things cool along the coast – a feature which, during the rare heat wave that’s been afflicting Newfoundland, made for a hot town!

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Blanc-Sablon, QC

The Qajaq W

We are not keen on reservations, as a general rule. Reservations force us to arrive somewhere at a certain day or time – what if we find something interesting along the way there!?! So, even though we didn’t make reservations on the ferry making the crossing from Blanc-Sablon, QC (2 km/1.2 miles from the Labrador border) to St Barbe, Newfoundland, finding that there was no room for another RV on the day we arrived planning to cross was not a cause for distress. To the contrary, yay! We have an extra day to explore this tiny corner of Quebec.

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