Rob-n-Hild, Eastward Ho!

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Terra Nova - St Johns 375 km. 5:12 hours. Elevation maximum 247 metres

Last night was cloudy and wet so no star-gazing. And as it was still drizzly when we woke up, we went for a shortish walk with just a chewy bar instead of breakfast. It is hard get excited about getting the Trangia out when it is raining on you. Hild had also figured out how to work the propane heater in our Oasis last night so it was nice and warm inside - making the contrast to outside even worse!

On the Campground Trail we were promised signs of beaver and moose on the walk. Well,' we did see a few chewed tree stumps and plenty of moose droppings, but the most interesting bits were the nuggets of information just for kids at the bottom of the interpretive signs (the rest of the signs tended to bemoan the current status of the forest and how badly humans were treating the environment). Our faourite was that "No part of the Park is more than 7 km from the sea"! There were lots of birds, but the only one we could confirm to species was a grouse who walked just ahead of us up a slope. We think he was a decoy grouse, keeping us away from all the others 'cos he had a great way of just staying out of camera shot without actually leaving the area completely as we followed him up some stairs. We got a good shot at the top of the stairs before he walked off into the forest, job done.

Expecting the rain, we had done a lot of re-packing Mary Jane last night so - after we changed our footwear - we were on our way to St John's pretty quickly. We had missed out on our tea for breakfast so we stopped at a Tim Horton's once we got going. This was actually our first "Timmies" of the trip, partly because they don't do proper steeped (brewed) tea at Timmies in Quebec, but mostly because we had been able to make our own tea most of the time. The times it had been raining (or snowing!) previously we had found some kind of shelter, but as we were getting into more populated areas the number of Timmies sites was increasing... It was also around 9.30 and a few hours since our chewy bar - eaten on the run - so we treated ourselves to more than the usual bagel toasted with butter and had a Farmers wrap with egg and sausage or bacon.

While at Timmies we had scoped out what to do for the rest of the day. Normally we are not all that focussed on eating out, but we wanted to eat some real Newfoundland food and it seemed hard to find that kind of restaurant advertised. We finally found a place called Brown's Restaurant in Whiteway. Aa bit off our road, but worth a look and we got what we had been looking for for a while - Fishermans Brewis made with hard bread and cheesecake with bakeapple topping! Perfect! Hard bread is something we had tried earlier (see May 20), but the way you are supposed to eat it is with fish (as above) and fried crispy fat pork on the top. It worked so well as the (soaked) bread and the fish had a similar texture with the pork giving it a bit of a crisp. Maybe not to everyone's taste, but simple hearty food is what we were after. Hild also had cod, but they batter or pan-fry it here when we would have preferrd poached fish with boiled potatoes. We did get bakeapple , finally. We had seen reference to these in Labrador and realised that they are really molte (or cloudberry) and seem to be much more common here than in Norway (where the location of patches of molte is a family secret). They were yummy as a topping on cheesecake - maybe not as sweet as in Norway, although maybe they are on a reduced sugar thing here now like everywhere else, hmmph.

Having detoured a bit for lunch we drove further up the coast to post some postcards at a post office in Heart's Delight. This is just down the coast from Heart's Content, but there was no post office there...... After that we drove across the penninsula and down the other side through Harbour Grace and stopped at a monument to Amelia Earhart who took off on her solo transatlantic flight from here. Then we stopped in Brigus to see a tunnel blasted by a Cornish miner to allow ships to unload straight into the town. It took four months apparently, but we think it was 'cos the miner was working on Cornish time!

Coming up: St John's - working and/or walking?

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