I’m going to combine yesterday and today’s posts since both were travel days. Yesterday we traveled from Twillingate to Rocky Harbor. It was about a 5 1/2 hour drive, and some of the road was pretty bumpy and full of potholes. We were moving across the middle of the province, so although there were still lots of lakes, it wasn’t a scenic as being on the coast. Once we arrived at our campground, we all got set up and then gathered for a social. I feel like I need to up my game a bit… one of our new friends, Aaron. made crostini with goat cheese, carmelized onions, and his husband grilled and thinly sliced steak to put on top. It was delicious. At the last social, I dumped pepper jelly on a block of cream cheese. I think I need to try harder. Haha! After the social, a group of us gathered together for some duck fart shots. We had some Irish tunes playing and we passed around the ugly stick. It was a fun evening. We will be returning to this campground again in 4 days and will get to stay longer. It is in Gros Morne National Park so there should be lots to explore and see.
We were up and on the road by 8:30 this morning. We are now back on the coast and we traveled with the Gulf of Saint Lawrence on our left and the very northern end of the Appalachian Mountains on our right. The scenery was beautiful… when you had time to look away from all the potholes in front of us. The roads here are very rough. I would assume the remoteness and the very cold winters contribute to the condition of the roads up here. We drove to St. Anthony which is the northern most spot we will see on this trip. It was a four and a half hour drive today. I’m really looking forward to spending some time here as this is where the Vikings landed a thousand years ago. Since I recently learned that I have Scandinavian ancestry, I like to think maybe some of them were Vikings.
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| ‘Elfen forests’ are trees stunted and shaped by the strong North Atlantic winds |
About an hour and a half into our drive, we got a group text from our wagon masters who were about 45 minutes or so ahead of us. Their tow bar broke and they were stuck on the side of the road. It had jammed itself under the rv and they were having trouble getting it unhooked from the car. One of our group got to them before us and were helping to get the hitch unhooked so they could continue on. As a result, we got to the campground with two other couples before our wagon masters did. I realized how nice it is to have the wagon masters, as the manager of the campground gave us a map, told us where the available sites were, and said have at it. Poor Kelly had to try and assign us spots and get anyone else who came in parked. All of the sites are back in which means all of us needed to find a spot where we could unhook our tow vehicles. That can really back things up if folks keep pulling in. It didn’t help that many of the sites weren’t numbered. Fortunately, most folks pulled off when they saw the wagon masters on the side of the road and waited for them. It wasn’t long before they pulled in and Kelly could happily hand back the parking job to them. In the meantime, Steve and I had to move three times before we found a site with electricity that would power our AC. At first Steve thought our AC unit had broken, but fortunately we tried two more sites and found one that worked. Whew! It’s supposed to start cooling off tomorrow, but I like having the option if needed!
Tonight we will have some cabbage rolls I made and froze using our home grown cabbages. We’ll then go to another social where our leaders are going to make floats for us. We certainly haven’t been starving on this trip!
Another side note… as we've gotten more remote, the accents used by the people here have gotten much stronger and more difficult to understand. I think it is a bit Irish with some ‘Newfie’ thrown in. Since the folks here are as friendly as they’ve been everywhere, they always want to talk to you. Steve could tell when we stopped for fuel that the guy next to us was just waiting for him to get out of the rv so they could have a little chat… and that’s exactly what happened! I really had to laugh because I could tell Steve didn’t understand half of what the guy was saying. The guy was so nice though, so Steve kept nodding his head with a lot of ‘uh huhs’ and other agreeable sounds.
Here is a picture from my phone of what a small part of our route was like today… the number of lakes here is really crazy. The whole trip has looked like this!
