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Published: September 29th 2015
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We awake to a sunny but windy day in Twillingate, with many clouds in the sky, some threatening. It's rained at some point in the night and the temperature is noticeably cooler.
We check out of the hotel, then tour Twillingate. The original name of the town, by the way, is Toulinguet. It was so named by the French because the rugged coastline reminded them of this area in Brest. But Toulinguet did not trip lightly over the English tongue and Twillingate is the result.
We visit the Twillingate Museum, lovingly put together and maintained by community volunteers in the former Anglican rector's house. It's well worth the visit, with many interesting stories to piece together from the displays. One of these is the life of Georgina Stirling, born in Twillingate, who became a world-renown operatic soprano named Marie Toulinguet. (If you haven't been skipping paragraphs, you will know where her stage name came from.) After a meteoric international career in the 1890s and some personal tragedies, she returned to the town of her birth to live out her remaining days.
Time for brunch at the local greasy spoon. We snatch a table right next to the harbour
and enjoy the effect of the changing light on the buccolic scene before us. Our arteries have recovered enough to order fish and chips again. Good, but we've had better.
Next stop, the local Scotiabank to replenish our cash. Then we drive around to the other side of the harbour to see the town of Durrell.
We tour the Awk Island Winery. They make wine from Newfoundland's extensive repertoire of bog berries: blueberries (smaller, darker and more flavourful than ours), crowberries (like blueberries but tarter), partridge berries (like lingonberries), Newfoundland's famous bakeapple berries (indescribable), and others. The staff are your typical Newfoundlanders, so within ten minutes, we know all about them, they know all about us, and we are the best of friends. We enjoy a brief tour of the wine making equipment and process, then have a blast sampling many (but not all) of the two dozen or so varieties of wine produced on site. Did we buy any, you ask? A whole case, b'y! In fact, we spend way too much money there, but I blame it on the wine.
We continue on down the road to enjoy the charms of Durrell. There's a high
hill where stands the Durrell Museum (closed) that offers an outstanding view of the entire harbour. We can identify every building we visited this morning.
Time to move on. If we are going to make it all the way to Gros Morne on Newfoundland's west cost, we need to get going. We return to the Awk Winery for a pit stop and quick snack, then say goodbye to Twillingate and Durrell.
It's a long drive back to the TCH via Lewisport. We take the TCH west and keep driving. The TCH in Newfoundland is an excellent road, by the way. The weather is weird, though. We get periods of thundering rain followed by bright sun that paints rainbows all over the sky. Pit stop in Grand Falls-Windsor, where we hit a Subway for take-out supper and keep going.
Around 7:30 pm, we finally reach Deer Lake, our target destination. As they sing in Rent, "No room at the Holiday Inn, oh no." And all the other hotels in town are full, too! But the manager at the Holiday Inn not only finds us a room in a hotel that is outside of Deer Lake but on our
route to Gros Morne, but he jumps into his truck and has us follow him to make sure we get on the right route. These people are salt of the earth.
So tonight's hotel is just outside of Deer Lake near Cormack, not far from the boundary of Gros Morne. Proprietor is Wayne. It's sort of a B&B, in that you stay in a motel room but come into Wayne's dining room for breakfast. Pleased to have made it to Newfoundland's west coast.
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