The Rest of Newfoundland

After our extended stay in St.John's with Dana we did a quick tour around the Avalon peninsula including hitting up the most eastern location in North America, Cape Spear.

Derby standing triumphant at Cape Spear.

It was honestly fairly miserable weather while we were down on the peninsula (I think we spent about a third of the voyage in a dense fog) so there were not too many highlights in the region. We did get out for a hike out to the East Coast Trail, unfortunately, by the time we actually got to the trail, after walking through streams and small lakes we had already done 6km and had to turn back in order to not be hiking in the dark. The documentation failed to mention the hike to get to the hike. The coast was really neat and rocky though when we got down to it. The biggest highlight though was our B&B that night. We ended up staying with a women name Rita Hagan and she was one hell of a character, she had stories to tell none stop. The first time Meg heard this older, Christian woman say "What the Eff?" she almost choked. Aside from being reviewed in Frommer's and having some opinions about that (strong opinions of course, as most of hers seemed to be) she also had an Aussi fellow stay with her who ended up writing a song about his memorable stay there. You can check it out here. The video pretty much captures what she is like.

After that we ended up back in St.John's for one night camping up near the university. We wanted to try to get out on the town for Halloween and we ended up having a great night. We heard lots of fun live music and ended up shutting things down around 3:30 and making our rather cold and windy way back to the camp site.

From there we made our way down to the south coast of Newfoundland. The south coast seems to have three or four highways running down to it off of the Transcanada Hwy (which runs up north most of the way along the island) but many towns along the coast are accessible only by ferry. We were actually in a little community with no cars, the "streets" were all board walks. It was really cool and we met and chatted with a few really interesting people. Unfortunately there were times when the language barrier hampered communication a bit. We have a couple photos below of our town hopping.

After that stay we boogied down to catch the ferry off the island.

Picture of McCallum
(they have a diesel generator that supplies power to the town, the power lines are not run from afar)

Little fishing shacks clinging to the rocks in McCallum
(On the far left you might be able to see some fish hanging to dry)

Me, looking good.