… with fulfilling your lifetime’s ambition is “what do you do next?”

I reached St John’s today and had a good wander around. But I found hardly anything much to hold my interest,apart from a couple of things below.

The view of the harbour from up on the hill at the entrance to the harbour is impressive though and it showed you why this was such a key harbour during all of the events that took place on the north-eastern seaboard.

Last night I stayed in a little B&B that was excellent. The brother of the woman who ran it came round – he’s a teacher and we had a good chat about the aviation history of the area.

Now in a book that I once read, it stated that there was a little aviation museum that kept the bits of- the 5 attempts to cross the Atlantic in May 1919 – the undercarriage that fell off Hawker’s plane for example. But try as we might we could find nothing anywhere that looked like it might be anything.

But then this guy told me that a good while back a new museum had been built and all of the relics from a load of small museums were collected there, and there had also been a Transport Museum created.

And as my book was dated 1970 or something, long before the consolidation, he suggested I try those places.

At the Transport Museum, one of my major assumptions was verified. Up in Central Newfoundland I’d seen traces of what looked like railway track bed – I would have staked my mortgage on it – and sure enough there had been a railway in Newfoundland and one of its tracks did go where I saw it.

So that was that. And a fascinating museum it was too – I spent ages there and learnt a lot but they had no trace of these aviation exhibits.

At the new museum, “unhelpful” is a word that I thought that I would never ever have to use in the English-speaking Maritimes, but unfortunately, here we are. The … errr …. young people on the reception desk knew nothing at all and wouldn’t be bothered to ring up to ask any elderly colleague to see what he or she might know.

But they did encourage me to visit the exhibition of a sculpture depicting the car-bombing of a street in Iraq – to see the “senseless destruction”.
“How appalling” I commented. “It’s a disgrace. It clearly made sense to the Freedom Fighter who detonated the bomb so I find your comments juvenile, offensive and patronising. When might there be an exhibition of some of the senseless American bombing of streets in Iraq?”

Yes, I was in a bad mood. I suppose these early aviation exhibits have been long swept into the obscurity of the distant past and probably won’t ever see the light of day again, which is a shame.

I did however manage to track down what I reckon is the crash site of the “Raymor” – the aeroplane piloted by Raynham and Morgan. They took off from some land at Pleasantville, near Quidi Vidi Lake, and crashed at the end of the runway, heavily overloaded with fuel.

I once saw some photos of the aeroplane on the runway and I could identify the hills in the background, and I also saw a photo of the crash site, and I was also able to identify the hills in that location too – so I’m pretty sure that I’ve got it right.

It’s really the only place that it could be because everywhere else is either totally uneven terrain or the hills are too close.

But it was still a hell of a place to try to take off with a new and untried aeroplane with an enormous load of fuel. Alcock and Brown, who had drawn to take off next from that field, immediately went around to look for another field rather than to try from there and in the end they used a field that had been allocated to another competitor but who had withdrawn. That, unfortunately, is now a big housing estate.

There were still a few other sites that I needed to track down, Hawker’s being the most important, but the light went and I needed to leave. I’ll have to come back again to Newfoundland, but I won’t be sorry. it really is a beautiful place even if the east coast does average something like … errr … 216 rainy days per year

So now I’ve turned back and sad as it is to say it, I’m on my way home. I’ve reached the apogee of my voyage.

But I did see at St John’s, a sign that said “3940 kms to Paris”. And when I fuelled up just outside the city I noticed that since leaving Toronto not quite 3 weeks ago, I’ve driven far enough to have gone to Paris and come back, and still had mileage to spare.