Tuesday, May 4th
Too Many Parentheses
Tuesday, May 4th. Too Many Parentheses
What is your favorite weather?
Is it the same as mine?
Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain.
Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain.— The Northern Pikes, Let’s Pretend
I wonder what they put into their Guinness over here. I actually have a bit of a headache this morning. I would try to run it off, but it is pouring quite heavily. Started sometime over night and, according to the nice lady on The Weather Network (the Canadian version of The Weather Channel), it shall rain all day. Not the best day for the scenic route then, but whatever.
First a quick round through Grand Falls-Windsor. It is indeed two towns. One, Grand Falls, is south of the T.C.H. and the other, Windsor (but you figured that out by now), is north. Makes the whole thing a bit easier. Grand Falls is the bigger and prettier part. It has a large brown church, a large gray church, and a small white one (at the least), so you can choose your church by the colour. Windsor seems to be only residential houses, but it also has the commercial strip.
I take the Trans-Canada back to Notre Dame Junction and turn off onto a highway designated as Road to the Isles. Large signs point to a strawberry U-Pick operation, but I doubt they have strawberries just yet.
First town: Lewisporte. Again a settlement around the southern end of an inlet. It starts off with the usual commercial area but is later followed by lots of white wooden houses in a rather liberal arrangement as seems to be normal for towns here. Normal, too, that it has plenty of churches. At the northwestern end is the port where the M/V Sir Richard Bond is waiting for passengers to Goose Bay in Labrador. She looks a proper old-style ferry ship and her route looks rather interesting too. Noted.
I turn around and go back to the highway, but stop at a Tim Hortons for a coffee and a doughnut first (using the headache as an excuse for the latter). This coffee shop chain is more then any other a Canadian symbol. If America runs on Dunkin’s (as the slogan goes), Canada runs on Tim Hortons (and possibly A&W, but I am sure we get to them later). (Maybe I should cut down on the parenthesised notes a bit.)
The road runs through small towns or, mostly, bypasses them. The landscape looks like it would be heart-achingly beautiful on a sunny summer day. But in this rain and fog, it certainly has a strange, melancholic quality. Time for some appropriate music and I dial up Figgy Duff on the iPod, er, rockPod, one of the great Newfoundlandian bands of the seventies and eighties (Figgy Duff, not the iPod).
After Boyd’s Cove, the road crosses on dams and bridges over Chapel Island to New World Island. The wind drives shreds of clouds over the road as the water splashes under the tires. After the town of Summerford off the highway there is first Virgin Arm and then Dildo Run Provincial Park. True story.
The road eventually ends at Long Point with an outlook over cliffs and then the Atlantic. There are a lighthouse and a gift shop. But around here hibernation is still ongoing. The displays and telescopes are wrapped safely in plastic and duct tape. The wind is strong, driving rain and fog over the parking lot and the cliffs. The Canadian flag braves the wind and stubbornly clings to the pole, bending it quite far. A fog horn noisily startles the lone visitor. On the drive back, some of the raindrops on the windshield look suspiciously like snow flakes.
I have to return to Boyd’s Cove before I can left into onto a new highway, later once again left. The map promises Carmanville which I miss completely, but I am sure it is there somewhere. In Musgrave Harbour, population 1364, I turn off the highway and drive through town. Lovely little place, again lots of white houses, occasionally a grocery store or other business. Very tidy, too.
The next town is Lumbsdon. Right at the entrance lie a bunch of large rocks surrounded by a fence as if someone was collecting them. My precious. Lumbsdon itself features a pedestrian crossing with a yellow warning light but, in this weather, no pedestrians. The petrol station doubles as a liquor store which seems awfully practical to me.
After Lumbsdon the rocks and boulders continue. The landscape looks a bit like the glaciers have just left. At some places, the road is cut straight through the larger specimen. Shortly after Centreville the trip counter jumps to 1000. The hamlet of Trinity is memorable because it features its very own mountain below which is a tiny post office. Which reminds me: postcards. Ah, let’s do that tomorrow.
The road returns to the Trans-Canada Highway after Gambo, known, in Newfoundland at least, as the birthplace of Joey Smallwood and subsequently featuring the Smallwood Interpretation Centre, the Smallwood nature trail system, and Joey’s Lookout.
You never heard of the man? Maybe a wee bit of Newfoundland history is in order, then. Like many other territories in North America, Newfoundland including Labrador on the mainland was a British colony. While various other colonies in the area either went their own way or joined the Dominion of Canada, Newfoundland (still including Labrador) became its own Dominion in 1907. It had been self-governed since 1855. During the Great Depression, things went especially haywire for the small dominion and in 1934 it gave up its self-government and returned to being ruled by Britain. After World War II, the question came up again, though. Three options were brought up and eventually put to a vote: Keep the British government, return to self-government (known as responsible government in British colonies), or join Canada. The man behind the third option was Joey Smallwood.
After two rounds of voting, with the people from the cities mostly voting for responsible government and the people of the land mostly choosing Smallwood’s path, Newfoundland (and, yes, Labrador) joined Canada as its tenth province on March 31, 1949. Smallwood subsequently became the first prime minister of the new province. And hence the interpretation centre and the trails and the lookout.
A bit south of Gambo, the TCH runs straight through Terra Nova National Park. A sign warns motorists that this year there had been already 3 moose-related accidents. Another sign points to Sandy Pool. No, not a famous actress, an actual pool.
Apparently, I have been driving quite a bit today and I catch myself staring at the raindrops wobbling in unison on the bonnet. But it is only a couple more kilometers to the town of Clarenville which you may remember from the first grocery shopping yesterday. I have declared it the destination for today. At the entrance, a sign points to the White Hill Ski Resort. It indeed seems to offer downhill. There certainly are mountains here that should suffice.
I check into a motel. Like all these establishments, it has its own pub. While being rather practical, I suspect provincial liquor laws behind this. I am not sure about Newfoundland (including Labrador) and can’t find the details in Les Internets, but there were Canadian provinces where the first establishments that were allowed to serve alcohol after prohibition were hotels. Although, calling the fridge with bottled beer and four slot machines a pub is a bit of a stretch. On the other hand, try getting any beer within walking distance from a motel in the other parts of North America.
But the people at the slot machines (the only customers at all) are such a sorry sight, that I retire to my room and some TV and baby carrots after just one beer. While I write this, a French pop music radio channel is running on the TV, at this moment with a version of Sting’s Englishman in New York, named Africain a Paris. Why I am telling you this? I have no idea. Let’s see what is on Discovery.
Beer of the day: Black Horse Premium Lager (the most local of the beer in the fridge, Molson’s Newfoundland-only brew).