… that I wouldn’t be blogging tonight but here I am in the harbour (well, the terminal, not actually in the harbour) of the ferry terminal at Channel Port Aux Basques with a few hours to go before I sail back to civilisation and I’ve discovered an internet hotspot.

And furthermore some very kind lady fellow passenger has shown me how to configure my computer to use it, so here I am

Last night’s B&B was exciting. $50 a night for the room and breakfast. Breakfast was help-yourself, make it yourself, cook it yourself – just like last night’s meal where my stock of food was put to good account.

And although the room was advertised as “with private bath” I quickly learnt that what that meant was that when it was your turn to go in, you could have it to yourself without 20 people clambering in with you.

And that’s not as strange as it might appear either as all through breakfast different people kept on appearing – out of the attic, from tunnels in the ground, all kinds of places. It was a hobbit-hole to go with the best. But who’s complaining? $50 with breakfast and I could do with some more places like that on my travels.

I wasn’t in a great rush to get to Channel Port Aux Basques as the ferry wasn’t until the late evening so I had a leisurely drive southwards.

The scenery along the road is typical of the western side of Newfoundland and in the early morning sunlight with a hanging cloud so typical of my own home in the Auvergne in France, I could be quite at home here.

Along the road I noticed a sign for the town of Stephenville and that rang a big bell with me. During World War II Britain mortgaged everything that it had in order to raise the cash to buy weapons from the USA and when the money ran out, they started selling off the land.

The US Air Force took over a large area of land here at Stephenville and built a huge air base, aimed primarily at refuelling the bombers that were always on patrol ready to attack the Soviet Union. It remained in service until guided missiles and rockets took over from bombers, whereupon it was abandoned.

I stopped for lunch by the seaside in the shadow of the Cap Anguille lighthouse. We’re close to the entrance of the Strait of Belle Isle here, and this is the short cut out of the Gulf of St Lawrence and Western Europe.

The Strait is narrow and is quite often beset with icebergs, so navigation is not as straightforward as it might be. There are hundreds of wrecks littering the shoreline of the Strait as we know, hence all of the lighthouses along here to warn mariners of the dangers.

We’re back on the road and back in the typical Western Newfoundland scenery again. This is what the road looks like between Woodville and Codroy, at Bear Brook Cove not far out of Channel Port Aux Basques.

But now you’ll notice something else, and that is that the weather has closed right in. Rain is something that it’s impossible to avoid in Newfoundland and although I’ve done well this last couple of days, it’s finally caught up with me as I prepare to leave.

At the entrance to the town of Channel Port Aux Basques is a small railway museum exhibiting relics of the Newfoundland Railway. As a good way to pass the time in the middle of this torrential rainstorm I went over for a wander around to see what I could find about the history of the railway.

However, as you might expect, the museum was closed, and that was that.

I wasn’t going to hang around in the town and so instead, I went for a drive along the southern shore of Newfoundland. After a short drive, I found myself at the harbour at Fox Roost.

In fact, this is what most of the southern shore of Newfoundland looks like and had the weather been better, I would have been happy to spend much more time along here having a really good explore around.

And not only is the area famous for its beautiful scenery, it’s also famous for being littered with old waggon bodies from the Newfoundland railway.

The metal frames would be quite valuable for scrap but there would be no market for the bodies and they would make excellent garden sheds and storage units. In fact I could do with a few around here.

The road only goes so far down along the coast – you have to take a ferry the rest of the way – but right down as far as it is possible to go, there’s harbour le cou road – the road to neck harbour.

And the view from down at the end is just as stunning as the view from this end, but there is a limit to the number of photos that you can put on these pages. To see the rest, you need to go to this page.

By now, it’s going dark and I can see my ship in the distance heading towards port. I need to be heading back or I’ll miss it. And it’s not the Joseph and Clara Smallwood either – it’s the “Caribou”, and so when I went into the ticket office, I did say to the girl at the desk that I hope it doesn’t get torpedoed tonight in mid-channel. But that went clean over her head.

But here’s a thing.

There’s a cigarette lighter socket in the boot of Casey, and it only works when the ignition is switched on. I’ve wired a small inverter in there, one that I bought the other day, and I’ve wired the slow cooker into that. At lunchtime I threw in some water, a couple of handfuls of pasta, a small tin of veg, half a tin of beans – and a while later 1/3 of a tin of sauce into it and that’s been cooking away as I’ve been driving around.

While I wouldn’t say that it was boiling, it was certainly hot enough to eat. I reckon that meal cost me less than $1:00 and if I can keep this up, it’ll go some way to bringing the budget back under control.

Eventually, we were allowed to board the ship and Strawberry Moose did well to park Casey correctly.

And having wined and dined, I’ve now found myself a nice comfortable reclining seat and I’m all set for a long voyage across the Gulf of St Lawrence, some of the most unpredictable waters in the world, submarine attacks notwithstanding.

+4

-3