Alas, Newfoundland is but a memory and a collection of pixels now. I’m settling down into the familiar routines of the everyday, but will spend some of my free time over the next few weeks completing my trip journal on this blog and organizing my pictures. Check back often!

We have just entered St. Anthony, on the north end of the Northern Peninsula. We spent the last two days in the L’Anse aux Meadows area, site of the first authenticated Viking settlement in 1000 C.E. We toured the actual settlement location (a UNESCO World Heritage site), walking on the turf which has been placed on top of the archeological dig when exploration ceased in the late 1970s, and visiting some of the recreated structures on display there. We also went to Norstead, a completely fake Norse settlement that aims to capture, complete with play actors (who, alas, speak English), how the Norse may have lived at the time. It was all good fun and informative. Vikings rule! They made the cold, wet journey on the North Atlantic from Norway through Greenland in small wooden ships, never losing sight of shore, trying to settle new lands.

We’ve been having a cold, wet journey of our own, as the weather this week has been rainy and cool. This made for less-than-comfortable biking, and we’ve been staying in B&Bs the past three nights just so we wouldn’t have to deal with the frigid, windy rain that’s here at the moment. Much as I enjoy camping, a warm mattress and a full meal are welcome comforts!

Last night, we became honorary Newfoundlanders (with certificates and everything!) when we were “screeched in.” This is a tradition that involves drinking a shot of screech (a form of rum) and kissing a cod (literally). We did this at The Norseman Restaurant in the town of L’Anse aux Meadows as part of the dinner theater (silly skits, local stories, and folk music) they put on several times a week. The food there was awesome, by the way, among the best we’ve had here.

Today we intend to explore the legacy of Dr. Grenfell, a missionary who settled in St. Anthony and helped the locals become more self-sufficient. Tomorrow we take the bus south to Port aux Basques, where we’ll just do a day bike trip before catching the ferry to Nova Scotia. Our Newfoundland adventure is coming to an end! Luckily, I’ll have a chance to ramp down from vacation mode over the several days it will take me to organize my notes and pictures and complete my blog.

We just finished having our second breakfast at Cow Head, after camping overnight at Shallow Bay. The terrain is now flat, and we seem to have a tailwind. We are aiming for Port au Choix tonight, if everything works out.

The weather is bright and sunny once again (some scattered clouds) after two days with intermittent rains. We can’t complain, though: overall, the weather has been excellent on this trip! Recent highlights include a tour of the Tablelands, a geologist’s paradise whose roots hark back to the genesis of Pangea; a hike halfway up Gros Morne Mountain before the rains came; a moose sighting on the road, just ten feet away from me; and a cold boat cruise of misty Western Brook Pond, an ultraoligotrophic pond with what used to be fjords (no longer saltwater, though…)

We’re in Deer Lake right now. We took the ten-hour DRL bus from St. John’s yesterday; happily, we had no problem getting our bikes on board in spite of the conflicting reports we had heard (wrap your bikes, box your bikes, they’re out of business, they don’t take bikes). We wound up getting up gawd-awful early (5am) after a lateish excellent meal (11:30pm) just so we could pack, bike to the Memorial University bus stop, and then take our wheels off and wrap our bikes in plastic sacks. The trip was made more tedious by our forgetting our reading materials, deck of cards, chess set, and MP3 player in our bags under the bus, so we had to distract ourselves by looking out the window into the foggy morning and watching (it pains me to admit this) the Olsen twins in some lame movie about a reality TV show, “The Adventures of Stitch and Lilo”, and the modern version of “Freaky Friday.” Blech.

The campground last night was surprisingly empty, and we chatted with Chris and Susan from Ontario, who are cycling in Newfoundland for a week. We wound up not getting the early start we intended today, so we just had a warm breakfast at a gas station, and we’re getting ready to climb some big hills into Gros Morne. We’ll get to Trout River tonight or tomorrow. Woo hoo!

La Manche Provincial Park to St. John’s by way of Cape Spear

After walking our bikes up the arduous slope from our campsite to the main road, we pedalled past the steep hills at Tors Cove and Witless Bay (where we stopped for our second breakfast, the first time this trip this hasn’t turned into lunch) into St. John’s. We took a detour toward Cape Spear, the most easternly point in North America. This is where many of the bikers on trans-Canada trips begun in British Columbia end their trek. It must be an extremely emotional moment for them; I know it was for me, and I’ve only been on this trip for a few days!

The hills getting to Cape Spear are very steep, and the strong winds blowing out to sea made steering the bike somewhat challenging. Make it we did, though, and saw the old lighthouse, took the obligatory picture on the eastern tip of the continent, and watched the drama of gannets dive bombing for fish as a whale puffed away in the distance. We spied St. John’s in the distance, in a small-necked harbor (“The Narrows”), and set out in that direction.

After struggling up and down the hills away from Cape Spear, we started the long, scary descent we’d heard so much about into the city. It’s a series of steep inclines, with a sharp hairpin turn under the highway right before one lands at Water St., one of the main avenues. In truth, the descent was nowhere near as terrifying as the anticipation– still, I was glad to have good brake pads. With help from some folks at a convenience store, we located our hostel— and had to pedal up a series of hills (which would quite hold their own in San Francisco or Seattle!) to get there.

The hostel is more of a rooming house. The people who run it are certainly nice, but we were laughing at the “suite with a view and a futon” that we got: we’re in the attic room, on a futon mattress on the sloping floor (the whole house has settled) overlooking, past the roofs of other houses reminiscent of East Boston, the industrial port in the harbor. Still, though, it’s conveniently located and quite luxurious after several nights of camping in the wild.

Distance: 49.02 mi<br/> Pedal time: 4:53:25<br/> Ave. speed: 10.69 mi/hr<br/> Max speed: 37.8 mi/hr<br/> (back-dated entry)