Mon 29 – Tue 30 Jul 2019
Monday, the day we were to head towards the west side of Newfoundland via Deer Lake. We decamped efficiently and early, with both girls fully playing their part, not needing to be given jobs, but observing, then coming up with their own helpful suggestions such as sweeping out the tent with our miniature dustpan-and-brush or airing and rolling the airbeds for a night’s storage.
It was arguable whether to have the car satnav switched on today – the directions were to join the Trans Canada Highway at St Johns, head west, then exit at Deer Lake ... after 400 miles. You don’t really need a satnav for that. We kept it on for a while for the novelty value (we don’t normally have a satnav), but there was no doubt about its lack of usefulness when it firmly told us, “Turn right NOW!” where there was no junction in sight ... mainly because we were halfway across a very long bridge suspended high above a river.
We stopped a couple of times alongside the Trans Canada. Firstly, for a well-priced, tasty, cooked lunch in Clarenville. Secondly, for a picnic tea. After keeping an eye out for a while for somewhere nice to picnic, we finally gave up and pulled into a lorry park at the front of a roadside restaurant, where we perched on bits of cardboard on the gravel to eat our pack-up. Predictably, when we drove away after eating, it was less than ¼ mile before we came across a signed picnic spot set in a glorious location amongst trees overlooking a large lake. Typical.
We have always stayed with Art and Flo when in Deer Lake, but communications had been a bit hit-and-miss in recent months and, being a good bit older than us (by about 25-30 years), we weren’t sure if they were still running a B&B or finally enjoying a bit of relaxation as part of a well overdue retirement. So we spent the night at another B&B, run by the marvellous Gordon, enjoying use of the fully-equipped, shared kitchen, fast wifi, private bathroom with huge tub and big, comfy beds, things we can only dream of when camping.
Next day, after a good breakfast, Dave walked around to Art and Flo’s to find out the state of play and whether they were up to a social visit from the four of us descending en masse. Happily, they were. So we drove across and found them to be exactly the same bubbly characters, brimming wih positivity, that they’d always been. We spent an uplifting couple of hours there, swapping stories and nattering about good times past and present, and also met Willy, another guest who (like us) had first stayed there 18 years ago, kept in touch and made repeat visits. Willy said he had 16 siblings (13 sisters and 3 brothers) and wanted to look up his Newfoundland ancestry on the west coast whilst he was over, and he looked about our age, even though he was 20 years older. He had some amazing stories: in particular, on 9/11, he was a pilot due to fly into Washington DC, but suddenly grounded in Oregon on the other side of the USA (in fact, not far from where we were camped that terrible day 18 years ago).
We could happily have stayed much longer, but needed to head to Gros Morne National Park to set up for camping. We bought groceries before leaving Deer Lake, including the three bars of chocolate that Dave had promised as prizes for the girls and me for wild-swimming in the chilly waters of Newfoundland whilst he had stayed out relaxing in the sun. The girls wolfed theirs straight away, but I decided to have mine later. (And I will tell this story now ... After quietly savouring the prospect of the chocolate bar for a couple of days, you can imagine just how much I was looking forward to the treat. My mouth was watering as I reached into the food box ... rummaged around ... and couldn’t find it. Exasperated, I asked Dave where he’d moved it to. “Oh, the chocolate bar. You hadn’t eaten it, so I did.” My response is not printable.)
We ate sandwiches for lunch at a very hot, unshaded picnic table just outside Deer Lake, then headed to Gros Morne National Park, hoping to stay at Berry Hill campsite, where we had camped 18 years ago, and to pre-book and pay for a boat trip on the landlocked fjord of Western Brook Pond, something we had never done. To cut a long story short, the Berry Hill campsite was full, but we managed, through quite a lengthy process and involving stops at the National Park entry kiosk, National Park Visitor Centre and boat company office in Rocky Harbour, to book a campsite 30 miles further north (reached via a slow road) for 3 nights at Shallow Bay, then back south for 3 nights at Berry Hill, with a boat trip in the middle. But the boat company office wouldn’t take payment in advance, and we were about to head 30 miles north, so the choice would be either to risk paying by card at the jetty on the day itself (a 2 mile walk from a roadside in the middle of nowhere to a landlocked fjord in the middle of nowhere, with a card machine frequently out of signal and thus out of action) or revert to that most modern of payment methods: a huge wad of cash. (That’s assuming you can find a cashpoint.) It was gratifying to know that, despite the passage of time, they haven’t lowered themselves in Newfoundland to making anything too easy or customer-orientated.
To our relief, the girls behaved impeccably and quietly whilst all this was going on. In the Visitor Centre, they made up a game whereby they took turns in spotting a text quote somewhere on the sign boards and then challenging the other to find it. They waited patiently through the other discussions, and took the extra journey north in their stride.
And Shallow Bay turned out to be an idyllic place to camp, with modern facilities (a bit of a long walk from our tent), grassy sites set amongst shrubs and conifers, and, just 100 m away and reached by a path through the trees, a beach of pure white sand, backed with dunes and set in a pretty bay with a rocky spit projecting cross-wise a little out to sea. We wandered down to the shore to watch the sun setting across a beautiful expanse of sea, thanking the alignment of stars that had unwittingly brought us here.
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