Our Travel Blog

Up for an early breakfast, then checkout and head down to the harbour for the ferry across to St. Pierre. The ferry was a large catamaran looking more like a private yacht. The journey took about 50 minutes at 50Km/h, and apart from some nice swells close into shore it was a fairly smooth crossing (what a shame!).

We arrived pretty much in the city centre of this island with a population of 6500.  Immediately we appeared to be transformed from North America to rural Europe, narrow, hill cobbled streets in some areas, with house doors opening directly to the road. The only difference being that many of these houses are brightly coloured. The voltage is standard 220v / 50Hz as in Europe, the phone numbers are all French and even the cars carry EU licence plates.

The internet here has been hijacked by two high school soft ball teams so I am going to call it quits for now, I’ll finish this off tomorrow sometime. In the meantime some reading on the history of the Islands: READ ME.

OK, kids have now invaded the breakfast room, luckily we got there while supplies lasted! You can still read about St. Pierre from the link above, it will save me some typing.

We walked all around the “downtown” area just taking in the ambiance. The place was amazingly busy, not with tourists, but with locals going about their daily lives. Then at noon, someone pulled the plug. People disappeared, stores closed, there was no more traffic… it was siesta time or whatever the French call it. No more activity for a couple of hours, with of course the exception of restaurants. Below are a few more general pictures.

They Like Their Colours

Church

We headed off to lunch, and met up with the two couples who were at the B&B with us! They are staying on the islands for a few days.

After lunch we headed back to the tourist information office to catch the hop-on-hop-off bus, well the St Pierre equivalent, a mini van. We were given a tour of the island, that is the parts where there are roads, which isn’t very much. The island produces it’s own hydro and and drinking water, and all houses are connected to these utilities. Kids go to school on the island up to the end of high school, then it’s off to university in France. All schooling is free, and the kids get one free trip home from university each year. We asked a number of people what the main source of employment was, and we never got a straight answer, but I think it goes something like Federal government, followed by Island government to support the Feds, followed by Municipal Government to support the Island government to support the Feds, followed by Public Works to support everyone leaving 1 person to do the rest of the work.

More pictures.

Hospital

Specialist are flown to the Islands from France every two weeks to support the local doctors.

Local Fishing Boat (Dorey)

Site of the Old Fort

All in all I am glad we did the trip, it had it’s ups and downs with the weather and the ferry cancellation, but that also had positive side effects as I said yesterday.

We headed back to Canada, where we had to endure the slowest customs agent in the universe, I am convinced he got paid by the hour, and the slower he worked the more he earned.

The Ferry

Sorry if this is more disjointed than usual, but the internet was a pin to deal with and I kept losing bits of the text.

Following on from yesterday’s disappointments, today went a lot better. After a great meal last night and the fresh air we had an excellent nights sleep. The six of us all had a good (although maybe not too healthy) breakfast then Lyn and I decided to head off and explore the local scenery. We drove south on the start of a loop that went around the bottom part  of the peninsular we are on, for the most part following the coast. We stopped a few times for some geo-caches and had a little more success than yesterday.

One of the caches led us down a small trail towards the ocean where managed to get in a 2 mile walk to blow the cob-webs away. Talking of “blow” the wind continued to rise throughout the morning to the point that even small inland ponds had white caps on them. It would have been an interesting boat ride had the trip not been cancelled.

Just off the trail were a number of bushes with berries, can anyone identify them?

#1 – Rowan??

#2 ??

#3 ??

Again the scenery was constantly changing.

View From the Passengers Seat

Small Village.

Every few miles we would come across a small village, some with only 3 houses but mostly around 50 houses in each. All the houses we saw were in a well cared for condition, and many of them seemed quite large and new. I am not sure what people do for a living around here, they can’t all be fisherman …. can they?

Small Harbour

Small boat in Small Harbour!

I am not sure what happened to the stern of that boat. It looks as though it reversed at high speed into the harbour wall as it it is totally flat!

We went to the small town of Burin for a late lunch at a restaurant that had been recommended by our host, unfortunately it was closed for the season, but the small detour was worth it for the scenic views.

We headed back towards the B&B, and re-visited the cache that had eluded us yesterday. Today Lyn walked right up to the location and found it in a matter of seconds.

Next stop was the ferry office to check to see whether the extra boat that they had put on was still planned to operate. Our luck held, so we will be off to France tomorrow.

Final stop was the B&B.

Built in the Early 1900’s

Dumpster Diving ….. Newfie Style

There was a choice of a couple of titles for today but I’ll stick with this one as it’s the most family friendly one! Today started out wet, foggy, cloudy, drizzly and anything else that involves liquid precipitation. We had a leisurely breakfast and then set out for Grand Bank, about 350km away, to position ourselves for the ferry to St. Pierre tomorrow.

Our first stop was a quilt shop, number one error, it is closed on Tuesdays! We continued on through the wet, luckily there times when the visibility was good so we got to see our surroundings! The picture below was not taken during one of those times.

Much like yesterday, the scenery was constantly changing although driving in the rain was a little more challenging; there was a lot of standing water on the road that would cause the car to aquaplane without warning. At the turn off from the Trans Canada highway we stopped for lunch having our now usual meal of seafood chowder or Newfoundland pea soup.

As we progressed the rain became a little more intermittent and there were signs of the clouds lifting. We decided maybe our luck was changing, so we stopped for a spot of geo-caching. It seems we are doomed not to find Newfoundland caches as this one also seemed to be missing in action.

We continued down the road a little and stopped for another cache, this time we found it!

By now the rain had stopped and there was blue sky on the horizon, maybe our luck was changing (again)? We drove beyond where our B&B was to see where we needed to go for the ferry. We found the office and decided to go in and confirm the sailing times. As soon as we mentioned our names, we knew something was wrong. We were told that the office had been trying to contact us to let us know that the ferry was cancelled due to forecast high winds. This was not good news, as it meant we had effectively wasted two days and 700km of travel as the next ferry would be in a weeks time. We were then informed that the company was going to run a “special” trip on Thursday to make up for the cancellation, this would just about fit into our plans, although it would mean a late night trip back to St. Johns on Thursday evening.

Finally we headed off to the B&B expecting the worse after our day of mishaps. We were pleasantly surprised, the house was right on the waterfront and was ….. well see the pictures below:

Bedroom

Bathroom (with LARGE  claw-foot bath)

.

Sitting Area

View From Balcony

There were two other couples staying here, one from the UK and the other from Newfoundland. We soon found ourselves sitting out on the balcony with them drinking our G&T’s. The B&B also has a restaurant, which I don’t think was open, but our host offered to cook an evening meal for all of us. A pleasant evening was had over a meal of baked cod.

Continuing on from our praise of the ferry. We had a buffet dinner to complement our G&T. Buffet dinners are bad for diets! It forced me to eat salmon, beef, ham, pork cod and maybe a vegetable or two. That wasn’t too bad but then I was dragged screaming and yelling by some invisible force located at the desert table. Here I was compelled to try the apple pie and ice-cream, lemon meringue pie and some petite-fours. Lyn on the other hand seemed immune from these forces and ate quite sensibly.

We had a great nights sleep in the cabin, with a nice gentle rocking motion from the sea. We woke up at a civilised hour and went in search of breakfast. Yet again there was a buffet, but I learnt my lesson last night and stayed clear, instead we settled for coffee and a muffin.

There ferry was very quiet, with only 150 or so passengers on board out of a maximum of 750.

On leaving the ferry we took the long route up to St Johns, touring around the Avalon peninsular. Unfortunately due to some last minute changes we had to make to our routing to accommodate ferry times we have left ourselves a little short of time in the St Johns area.

The weather started off fine, but slowly degenerated into drizzle and rain, but for the most part the visibility held up and we got to see the scenery.

View From the Passengers Seat

The roads started out OKish, but rapidly deteriorated to a gravel road, then to a rock road! It appeared that they were trying to raise the level of the road by 2 or 3 feet. At the start of this section, they had installed new culverts under the road and piled rocks on top of them to the new level of the road (the photo doesn’t do justice to the size of the bump). This brought the term “traffic calming” to a whole new level (not sure whether the pun was intended or not!), later on the whole surface was large rocks. We followed a couple of Ontario motor cyclists who were having quite a hard time negotiating the surface.

Finally we regained the surfaced road and life became easier. The scenery was constantly changing, at one stage we were driving through densely forested areas, then through rock strewn areas without a tree in sight. Then we would be following the coast along a shore road, then climb up to a cliff road. It certainly wasn’t boring.

We stopped for lunch at what was probably the only cafe for 50 miles. As we sat down the two Ontario motorcyclists came in as well. They had driven from Toronto and said that the rock road was pretty challenging!

After lunch we headed out and discovered the world of Newfoundland cabins (cottages). They seem to be placed close to the road, but otherwise in the middle of nowhere with no services. I am sure there are more picturesque places to build them, but who am I to say.

One Cabin, One Outhouse, One pond (lake) and no trees.

We continued along the coast for a while and spotted a group of off-shore rocks
Eventually we made it into St John’s just in time for  a wet rush hour. We checked into the hotel, only to find that they had upgraded us to a suite with a Jacuzzi, nice!

We woke up at a more civilised time this morning, temperature was 14C with overcast skies. We started the day with a quick geo-cache hunt for our first find in New Brunswick. Back at home I had loaded up the GPS for caches along our route, but for some reason the GPS didn’t recognise the file. Luckily my latest toy, a windows phone came to the rescue and I was able to download the data and use the phone as a GPS!

Next stop was breakfast, then we hit the road for some leisurely cruising. We stopped at a New Brunswick Information centre for some travel guides (and another cache). Very shortly after that we crossed into Nova Scotia and stopped at their travel centre for more info and another cache.

We continued on at a leisurely pace through Nova Scotia and Cape Breton to North Sydney to board the ferry to Newfoundland.

View From the Passengers Seat

We were both surprised at the size of the ferry and the amenities on board, it was like a mini cruise ship. We even have an ocean view cabin! As this is a 15 hour crossing, the cabin made good sense, and its cost was not much different to a nights stay in a hotel.

Room With a View

The only problem to date is that there is no refrigerator in the cabin to make ice for our G&T’s, a cheeky trip to the bar may be in order to try and get them to part with some. Actually a second problem has just occurred; Lyn wrote all the details of places to go into a word document and left them on her computer. Luckily we are still with in cell distance from the shore so hopefully Paul will be able to e-mail them to us.

Time for pre-dinner drinks and then food.

Well, the pre-dinner G&T was a bit if a disaster as I opened the can of tonic just a little close to the computer keyboard. After two days of travelling there were a lot of bubbles waiting to escape, and escape they did!! Hopefully I have removed them all from the computer. If there are no more entries, you know why!