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Published: June 11th 2017
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I was up early, packed and out of the hotel by 6:30 am, determined to be at the front of the line for the ferry. I had a reservation, but I was nervous. It was freezing cold down there by the pack ice which had infiltrated the harbour all the way to the loading dock. Of course, I wasn't the first -- there were others more concerned than I -- so I parked and went over to the office and stood in line for an hour and a half. Eventually the disgruntled employees of Maritime Labrador and Newfoundland appeared and sold us our tickets. They told us that the boat had just left from Saint Barbe on the other side of the water, in the company of an icebreaker. How exciting. The ice was so bad we needed an icebreaker. Maybe we would get stuck halfway? How quickly can a boat move through ice? We doubled the normal crossing time to an estimated 4 hours, and settled down to wait.
It a way it was fun. We sat around and exchanged stories, inspected vehicles, walked up to the pier to try and see the ferry coming it. As I was
lounging by my bike at mid morning, the manager of my Hotel the 4 Seasons appears. He comes up with a big smile, happy to have found me and hands me some packages. Oh no ! I had left some little treasures in my room, as I exited at high speed early that morning. And the manager was caring enough to drive down to the dock and walk in amongst the semi's and pickup trucks to find me ! I was overwhelmed with gratitude. What grace ! "Only in Canada" I kept saying to myself (which is probably not completely true, but still, a lot of these very nice gestures happen to me here).
One 'comrade in ferry' that I talked to a lot, Mike Foster, had some really good advice on how to structure the rest of my trip through Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. A resident of New Brunswick, he has criss-crossed his province on his ATV, and was very knowledgeable on just about anything to do with out of doors. Seems he had been following me down the Trans Labrador Highway in the rain, but we only met up now. What he revealed later was that he
was a member of a group of French Canadians called the Acadians, who settled in what is now New Brunswick back in the 16th century. They speak an ancient French dialect similar to Cajun. This struck a bell with me, as Carl Blyth, Beth's cousin, has studied this dialect and its relationship to Cajun French. Mike said he understands French perfectly well, but that the Quebecois don't understand him when he speaks (although the French do -- weird).
Well, we eventually boarded at midday, and crawled slowly across the ice pack. The ice breaker ship was a little narrower than the ferry, so it had to wander from side to side to break a passage way wide enough for us. We had to wander from side to side too. Which gave the whole event an interesting randomness, as we couldn't tell where we were actually headed from the direction we were steaming in. Not that any one cared. The boat had plenty of food. We hung out on deck, talked, took photos and then went inside to get warm.
We eventually arrived in Newfoundland mid afternoon, and the group dispersed. I set off for St Anthony, way up
in the North. Tomorrow the Vikings!
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Douglas French
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Jim - It looks like you finally found a sunny day, despite the cold. Hurrah!