Tuesday 25 June to Friday 28 June 2024, 1041 miles
Tuesday was going to be a long ride to get to the town of St John’s, a town on Newfoundland at the most easterly part of Canada. The journey from Deer Lake was pretty straight forward in the end, tarmac all the way, with sufficient fuel and food stops to keep the bikes and us all happy. The last couple of hours was the most challenging of the ride, it was very wet, torrential rain and low cloud that reduced visibility. My motorcycle gear held up well so I arrive dry, although tired from the long ride and the concentration needed to ride in heavy rain with reduced visibility.
OK I will eat somewhere else!
We stayed at the Monastery Hotel, good accommodation, although not the cheapest. As it was still raining very hard we decided that dinner in the hotel would be a good plan, bad decision, poor quality and expensive. The most worrying part was that reviews suggested this was one of the best restaurants in St John’s.
On Wednesday 26 June 2024 we had a walk around St John’s, it has a small town centre with an abundance of Irish pubs, I guess this is a result of its heritage and the Irish working in the fishing industry. A brewery in the centre of the town was called “YellowBelly brewery and public house”, born and bred in Lincolnshire I was intrigued to know why the nickname for Lincolnshire folk was on a brewery in the most eastern city in North America. According to the staff it was named after the Irish immigrants from Wexford that settled in St John’s and wore a yellow waist band to differentiate themselves from other Irish settlers. Apparently the name Yellow Belly is a name still used for Wexfordians today. Later in the evening I tried one of their beers, which I can recommend. I wanted to take a photo in the pub which upset the girl serving behind the bar, she didn’t want her photograph taken, not that this was my plan, I just wanted a photo of the inside of the pub. After a little chat and assuring her she was not in the photos things settled down.
Inside YellowBelly public House in St John’s
In the afternoon we took a short ride to Spear Point, the most easterly point of land in North America. This point also boast the oldest surviving lighthouse in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Spear Point, Newfoundland
That evening we had dinner at an Irish bar in St John’s, by comparison the restaurant in the Monastery Hotel wasn’t so bad. We move on tomorrow, I hope the food and weather improve.
Thursday 27 June 2024, it was time to leave St John’s and head back West to catch the ferry from St Barbe to Blanc Sablon, Blanc Sablon is a port just in the Quebec region, a short ferry ride to cross into Labrador. This was going to be a 2 day ride to catch an 8.00am ferry on Saturday 29 June. This time we decided to stop at Gandar air museum, the museum is halfway between St John’s and Deer Lake which makes it good place to stop for a break and look at something interesting on the way back West. The museum has an exhibition about when the airfield was used as a place to land aircraft when all flights over North America were grounded following the 9/11 New York terrorist attack.
Gandar Air Museum
The weather forecast said heavy rain, so I booked a cabin for tonight, a good job I did because the heavens open just after I arrived at Cormack, a small town North of Deer Lake. The stores in Deer lake supplied the food and beer for the evening.
Friday 28 June 2014, a relatively short ride to St Barbe, we booked a hotel in the town so we were close to the ferry port for tomorrow’s 8.00am sailing across to Blanc Sablon. I stopped on route to take a photograph and saw my phone was telling the AirTag on my keys had been left behind. I back tracked 20mile and found it outside last nights cabin on the gravel. This proved to me the benefits of AirTag type devices.
