Northern Newfoundland and the Middle Age Iceberg Trackers!

As I previously stated, we came to Newfoundland because of the musical, “Come from Away,” and the biggest draw for us was to visit “Gander,” the town and the people that inspired such a wonderful show. We were so excited to immerse ourselves into the place where this wonderful story took place, clearly showing that there were still kind and generous people left in the world. 

We drove more than three hours and immediately realized that Gander was a bit of a bust.  We did go to the North Atlantic Aviation Museum, which included a 10 minute emotional piece (at least I was teary-eyed) by Diane Sawyer on the generosity of the Gander people during this trying time. Other than that, it could have been a town in any American community with a Walmart, a McDonald’s and a “Mary Brown’s,” the Canadian version of Popeye’s. It was early afternoon, and we now had to figure out what to do for the rest of the day.  

After more than three hours in the car, K-Dazzle suggested to Judy that he thought we should drive 1 hour 45 minutes north to a town called Twillingate, where he had learned on “Icebergtrackers.com” that icebergs had been spotted.  As the town seems to be just slightly south of Greenland, Judy, who wasn’t enamored with the idea, told him to bring it up with the rest of us at lunch.  We sat down, ordered and Karl started making his case.  I have to be honest, I was not loving the idea.  The thought of sitting in that car for nearly two more hours was not making me happy.  As much as I love Julia Louis Dreyfus and Terry Gross, there are only so many “Wiser than Me” and “Fresh Air” podcasts a sane person can listen to on any given day.  Plus, my arthritic hips were killing me after sitting in the car for so long.  

My ace in the whole was Bob. I thought he would NEVER want to drive this distance on the off chance that we would see some floating blocks of ice. Apparently, after 42 years of marriage, I don’t know him as well as I thought,  because before Karl had finished his sentence, like an excited puppy, Bob yelled, “I’m in!”  He immediately received the marital side-glance from me.  We were back in the car headed north 15 minutes later.

While it really was a picturesque ride, I spent a lot of time reading the map and Mary, from the backseat was giving Bob directions when we could get the internet for Waze—which was not that often.  About 90 minutes into the ride, we were crossing a bridge and Bob said, “Wait a minute, aren’t those icebergs out there?!”  I looked up from the map and Mary from her phone and we both screamed,  because there were several huge icebergs just floating in the water!  What a sight! We immediately pulled into a small store, called “ Captain Jack Boat Tours,” which obviously took people out by boat to see the icebergs while also selling a wide array of general Newfoundland bric-a-brack, such as any imaginable item with a picture of a “puffin,” jewelry, woolen socks, scarves, paintings of sea shanties and pictures of “mummers,” which is some kind of Christmas festival up here. The clerk tried to explain to us about the mummers, but honestly, I couldn’t understand what the heck she was saying.  What I did understand was that there were no more tours that day.  This bad news did not stop our new mission to find more icebergs. Our phones were then pulled out and we all tried to get internet access so that we could log into icebergtrackers.com. 

As we had two cars, we headed into the town of Twillingate, (of which I use the word “town” loosely) but somehow got separated.  Our goal was to find Twillingate’s lighthouse, because we thought if we were at a higher elevation, we would be able to see more icebergs…and we did! 

Now we are obsessed.  Tomorrow, we’ve decided that we had to take a boat ride to see puffins and to hopefully, track some more icebergs.  You know I’m excited about this because I really only like to view the ocean from terra firma.  The Sea-Bands and the Dramamine are packed and I’m just going to hope for the best…….