The Last Province

Photo courtesy of Molly Bawn Whale and Puffin tours. We were so excited to see the puffins that we didn’t take any good photos of them on our boat tour. 

This blog post is coming to you at 4:00 pm Atlantic Time, 4:30 pm in Newfoundland:

We made it to Newfoundland, the final province! We’re on the final stretch of our journey before flying back to Vancouver. We’re still both enjoying ourselves, but also looking forward to seeing friends again.

Even as we approached Newfoundland, it looked so unique compared to other parts of Canada we’ve seen. The coastline looks like it belongs in a fantasy novel or Treasure Island — craggy headlands and exaggerated jagged cliffs.

These rocks are over 1.5 billion years old, making them the oldest exposed rocks above sea level anywhere on earth. 

If the Maritimes embody Canadian stereotypes of kind, polite, friendly, and stoic people, then Newfoundlanders seem to be an exaggerated version of those stereotypes. So many people stop us to chat and ask about us. And they’re all so warm, or at least I think they are. It’s sometimes a struggle for Karen and I to understand people. A few people we’ve come across are more difficult to understand than our conversations in Quebec with folks who spoke little English. It’s not just the accent itself but also the phrases and even the sentence structure people use. For example, at a campsite the owner came up to me and said something along the lines of, “Look at da curls on ya ther’! I ‘ad me own a mop like dat back in da day, sure! An’ Christ the Redeemer, you’s got yerself a ginger too — mine used ta be a redhead, she was, b’y!”


Later in the week we went to a town that tested our maturity: Dildo. We bought all of the town’s postcards and got them stamped with the unique postmark at the local Canada Post office. Apologies to those of you who don’t receive one; we would have wanted to buy more! On a related note, the worst thing Karen said to me on this trip is she called me a child (not too bad for a four month bike trip with almost no company other than each other). Later in the same day I called her a hypocrite for calling me a child. Our time in Dildo showed us that we were both right.


After leaving Dildo we were a little nervous biking through Conception Harbour. Given its name, we did our best to get through quickly and not dawdle. Afterwards, we went to a blueberry festival in Brigus, which included a three foot pie. Karen’s been asked to make pies for a friend’s wedding in September so this felt a little like a jurisdictional scan. 


For being a giant pie, it was surprisingly tasty!


We also went on a boat tour to see puffins! There were thousands of them, and they were very cute. They looked like cartoon characters the way they flapped their wings. I was almost equally as excited by the dog on the boat. For those who may not know I have an obsession with employed animals and the dog, Arwen, was trained to be a whale-sniffer.


We also spent the afternoon apart today so Karen could bike to Cape Spear and I could watch some of the Canada Games. Amusingly, these four hours were the longest we’ve been apart after spending every moment with each other the past four months.


Thank you to everyone who’s been reading the blog post. I’ll do one more next week, because of course no blog feels complete without a corresponding FAQ and metrics. 


Karen’s Newfoundland book of the week: The Wake: The Deadly Legacy of a Newfoundland Tsunami.

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