We departed the Charlottetown, PEI bus station at 07:45 and arrived at Chambers B&B in North Sydney, NS, at 22:00. This included a five hour lay-over at Truro which had a German bakery and the Split Crow pub. Both helped.
Since our Newfoundland ferry didn’t leave until 23:40, we had all day Friday to visit North Sydney, something that could have been done in fifteen minutes but was much more interesting over eight hours. We boarded the ferry and sat in our reserved seats that out-first-classed the seats in a Dreamliner, spending the time until and beyond the sailing hour trying to adjust them for maximum comfort.
The night, spent some in sleep and the rest in listening to a moose-hunting family snoring in dissonant rhythms, ended with the lights going up and the loudspeaker informing us the Captain plans to dock at 06:35 at Port-aux-Basques.
We wait. Finally the call comes for the walk ons to proceed to the 5th floor shuttle loading area for transport to the terminal. Jumping from the shuttle, we go where the lady with the brown shoes points and there, waiting impatiently, are our bags. We grab them and rush out to the big brown bus with the moose-damaged door. The driver throws them into the under-the-bus bin and we board. At 08:00 (NDT), we pull out of the security area on our way to St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland-Labrador.
In spite of our many years of accumulating information, most of which became extinct just prior to our learning it, we did not know about NDT--Newfoundland Daylight Time. For its own reasons, Newfoundland sets its clocks a half hour earlier than those in neighboring Atlantic time. It sees Christmas, New Years, and your birthday a half hour before anyone else. So while you are thinking, “I wish, oh I wish it was Christmas,” It is. St. John’s has a half hour of celebration all to itself.
Fourteen hours and 845 km later, we are at HI-City Hostel, St. John. It could have been earlier, but the driver (who had been driving the evening before when the moose rammed the door), kept jumping out with a roll of duct tape and a variety of objects with which he could pound whenever we hit a scheduled smoke break to either 1) tape into place the parts that were falling off or 2) apparently being a believer in redemptive violence, beat the bent door into submission. And we know how well that worked for the moose.
It’s easy. Invariably, someone asks, “Couldn’t you have flown?”
Fair enough question. We prefer land mass transit for ecological reasons and because I get very anxious at take off. Realizing our schedule was falling apart and our sitting parts were nearing the point of no return, we purchased tickets to fly St. John’s to Halifax.
We hired a taxi to the airport at 10:00 on Thursday morning, 4 October. The wind was powerful, hovering near a sustained speed of 30 mph with gusts beyond. The airport lies on a relatively flat plain away from the uneven terrain of St. John’s and the harbor so the winds are more constant but also more predictable.
Flight schedules were starting to stack up with some arrivals circling, waiting for a break in heavy rain and turbulence, while on the ground, a flight was canceled due to an unavailable repair part. Unease was building as we hurried down the ramp and dropped into our seats in the crowded, sold-out airplane.
The pilot launched our 737 across the runway and into the air so quickly my take-off anxiety attack remained standing at the gate with a “But wait...” look on its face and we were well on the way to Halifax before the wind even had a chance to mess with us.
The air distance from St. John’s to Halifax is roughly the same as the bus distance from Port-aux-Basques to St. John’s--500+ miles. We traded a day’s scenery for a 1.4 hour flight, landing in warm, partly-cloudy weather.
I finish writing this in Rm 303-A at the Heritage House HI-Halifax, a private room with a shared bath eight paces away. The night is quiet and we are almost two hours into Friday and at the start of our third week of travel by train, bus, ferry, airplane, and, of course, foot.
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