– St. John’s, Newfoundland To Corner Brook, Newfoundland –

Our run today in St. John’s was really nice. We started near the capitol building, and ran down a nicely gravelled path to a little lake in front of Signal Hill.

It’s a very popular place to run, too, as we ran into a few single runners and several packs of running clubs. Ripley didn’t meet any other puppies along the trail, but she did get to see some birds and chipmunks, so she was happy enough.

It’s a long, sort of boring day today, so it was nice to started it off with a good run. We also had a nice breakfast at our hotel. Have you ever seen an automatic pancake machine? Well, I hadn’t. There’s something hilarious about pushing a button and having a machine spit out a perfectly cooked pancake. It literally spits it out, too. You have to put a plate at the end to catch it.

After breakfast, we filled up our cooler with ice and our Suburban with gas and hit the road. Most of today’s drive is just a backtrack across all of the parts of Newfoundland that we’ve already seen, as there’s only one major road that leasts east and west. We just had to turn around and do it backwards.

So, we started in St. John’s and got on the Trans-Canada highway and headed west. It took us a couple of days to get over to St. John’s, but without doing any exploring, it’s only about 6.5 hours back to Deer Lake, and another half hour or so down to Corner Brook, and our destination for the night.

Corner Brook and the road to it was the first new road we saw today. We saw a baby Moose along the road, which I have to say was pretty cute, if still huge. It was obviously a young moose, though, as it appeared very small and unfinished compared to others we’ve seen. I wonder how big yearlings are? In horses, full maturity takes two or three years. Maybe they are similar.

At our gas station stop in Clarenville, a stop we were familiar with, since we bought our ice there just the other day, Mark bought a raspberry Coke, since he’s been seeing them around and was curious. They also had ginger lime Diet Coke. The one he bought was kind of weird. I don’t like soda at the best of times, but the raspberry aftertaste of the sip I took was definitely strange. Mark said it tasted like cherry Coke, for the most part.

In Gander, we bought lunch at an A&W Canada. When Mom watched the news the other morning, Mark caught an advertisement saying they now had a brand new veggie burger, and told me we should try it. We happened across the perfect opportunity in Gander, and bought two. My parents had regular burgers, of course. They were pretty good, actually, particularly for fast food. My favorite veggie burger comes from Mooyah, but these were impressive compared to a lot of other places. We tried Harvey’s earlier in the trip, and these are definitely better than those.

Literally across the street from the A&W was the North Atlantic Aviation Museum, so we stopped to have a look around. They have several decomissioned planes out front, and we took some pictures and read the placards. We’d seen the place on our way over, so it was nice to get a closer look. My favorite place was a forestry service plane with those pontoons for landing on water. It was painted a delightful orange and green.

We made it to our hotel around 5pm, or a little after. It was an older hotel that looked as though it had been refitted to be a bit more modern. It was huge, and the parking for it was terrible. It also contained a pool, a barber shop, a bar, and a restaurant, to name a few. It had ballrooms, even. I wonder if they still use them.

Since lunch was a little late, we sat around for a while, resting. It’s been a long couple of days, and tomorrow will probably be exhausting as well. We were going to take Ripley to the dog park, but it started raining as soon as we found where the local one was, so that plan was scratched.

A little later, around 6pm, Mark and I drove out to get our dinner from the a nice-ish grocery store. While mapping to it, we saw a “national historic site” on the map, so we decided to drive up that way to see what it really was.

First we accidentally drove underneath it, and we had to reroute and try again to find the right way up the hill. It turned out to be right on the top of the hill, with streets full of houses and duplexes leading up to it, making it seem like you aren’t going the right way.

I guess James Cook surbeyed part of Newfoundland, which we didn’t really realize. The site on the map said, “James Cook National Historic Site.” We didn’t see any facility, just a park, some signs, and a statue of James Cook, as well as a nice view of the town. I need to look up whether or not the thing is actually part of Canada’s National PaRk System. If so, we technically visited another park.

That done just before the rair got heavier again, we hurried into the grocery store to pick up a handful of things for our dinner. We took them back to the hotel to eat, and then Mom and Dad walked over to a KFC a few doors down to get their dinner. It started to rain harder again on their walk back. Silly weather. It was 32 degrees celcius earlier, which is well over 80.

Tomorrow night we will be in Nova Scotia. We drive two and a half hours down to our ferry in Port aux Basques, and then we take the 7 hour ferry over to North Sydney, Nova Scotia. I bet we are tired when we land. We have to be at the ferry a whole two hours early, and it leaves at 11:45am, so we won’t have time to run in the morning. Our hotel doesn’t have breakfast, either. I hope it is a big boat, so I don’t get seasick.

– Trip Total : 5,274 miles –