Big Beaver Diaries / Canadian Adventure 2019

Central Newfoundland and Fogo Island

by The Beave · Published October 23, 2019 · Updated November 22, 2019

Central Newfoundland and Fogo Island. Newfoundland and Labrador. Canada.

22 August 2019.
Not Larry and I woke up at 09:00 and had some old-high-school-bedroom lovin’ to start the day. F U N!

We packed Beatrice and cleaned the house… Now wait a minute, that is not really accurate… Actually, I burned everything that resembled garbage in the backyard while Not Larry cleaned the house. I tried to help her out but I only seemed to be in the way, so I hid outside, attending to the fire. My burn-resume is pretty impressive and I was where I should have been employed anyhow. Sometime during the morning cleaning, Not Larry painted Beatrice’s hub-caps a neon pink. Our long lady got a pedicure.

Heading out and packed up! Pretty in hot-pink hubcapped!

When all was ready, we fired up Beatrice. She seemed to not like the idea of the lengthy trip back to western Canada and was running a little rough. Hopefully she will level off.

We headed to the cove where Not Larry’s family lives and made a round of goodbyes, playing Beatrice’s ‘Cavalry Charge’ horn with every stop. People seem to really like the new-feature horn and it has made Beatrice even more popular. As we were heading out on the 420 highway from Pollards Point towards Deer Lake, we met road construction, something which has become our favorite part of the entire drive. Not Larry knew the stop sign lady, Hillary, gave her stickers and had a good chat. Hillary was commenting on the skull on the front of Beatrice with the illuminated eyes when Not Larry played the horn. Hillary laughed and laughed and laughed. She talked about how much she wished she could be in the motorhome with us to do whatever we are doing. When Hillary let us go, we played the horn as we passed the workers in their high-visibility construction vests. The workers waved and cheered as we cruised. While we were driving past, Not Larry was building them up and encouraging them about how good of a job they are doing over the PA speaker. It was a ridiculous amount of fun.

At Springdale junction when we were buying fuel for Beatrice, a man was eyeing her up. Not Larry ended up in a conversation with a man who was driving a tourist bus and we ended up selling him a book. That was fun. If people look at Beatrice, Not Larry is busy lining up a book sale pitch. That is partnership!

We carried on to a Newfoundland town called Campbellton, a place where a high-school girl in a gas station told us that we could have internet coverage and we would be able to park Beatrice in the school parking lot, “Since there is no school in August.” We found the school, called Greenwood Academy. Our location seemed suspect…‘We are just parked here officer, waiting for the children…’

The school had an abandoned look though apparently it is still in use. We parked in the back behind the school, in a shady area that made us look shadier and creepier. If anyone found us parked in the motorhome they would for sure think we were up to something and we would be the talk of coffee row. The school yard is overgrown with hollers and these could by my last words. We could be buried here and no one would know…

23 August.
We got through the night. The girl at the gas station must not have told her assailants. Newfoundland is a really pretty province, and we basically parked in a holler-growing educational dump for the night that is probaby frequented by bears looking for buried tourists! We have made better sleeping choices…

I was clever enough to start up the water heater last night, so we had hot showers right off the bat this morning. Living large in Beatrice! We headed to the ferry to take us to Fogo Island.

Welcome to Farewell! I like that.

Not Larry’s family comes from Fogo Island, and she has not been there herself since she was a very little girl. To catch the ferry, it leaves from a town called ‘Farewell.’ The man running the check-in for the ferry said, “Nice rig,” to Not Larry in an awesome Newfie accent when we arrived. It was $28 to get Beatrice on the ferry and an additional $8.50 to get me on as an additional passenger. The ride was 45 minutes. I spent most of it shooting dirty looks at a lady I recognized who had passed us illegally on a corner on the way to the ferry. When we eventually got to Fogo Island, one of the first towns we arrived in was called Little Seldom. Newfoundlanders are ridiculous. “Have you been there?” “Seldom. Actually, maybe little seldom.”

On the drive, I decided to opt out of Amazon Prime. That was a headache with about four steps just to get out of having to pay every month to Amazon to have Prime. It was ridiculous how much I had to go through to opt out. Amazon Prime is the child who seems to only have one friend, me, and when you try to call off the friendship, they beg you to stay and to reconsider. They send warnings and make is seem crazy that you would ever leave them and play on your guilt. It guess this is how success in business works…

Fogo Island is a giant rock. The back yards of houses are layers of one massive rock piled high behind the homes. We headed to the furthest point that we could drive on the island close to a town Tilting. There was an old cannon on the ground at the point.

Oooh. look, a frightening cannon.

Cannons make me wonder...

…Of course I did not live in a time when such a weapon was necessary to defend a land, but how effective were these things? Really? You had some guy packing gunpowder and a metal ball into a long cannon on a shoreline. There is no telling how much gunpowder was required to reach a distant enemy ship, so you packed it up. All the while that you were packing the gunpowder, the ship was moving with a decent speed across the water. I can not imagine that the cannon was able to shoot a huge distance, and if it was, it would be like hitting something the size of an ant with a metal ball trajected with inconsistent amount of gunpowder to fully know the force of the shot. So, anyone on a ship with any kind of distance would hardly have legitimate fears of the cannon and accuracy. With that in mind, the ship would have to be close for the cannon to be effective. And if you missed and then had to re-load, that time would allow for everyone on the ship to load the muskets and take a shot at you as the cannon-ball man.
So, I am just not sure about cannons. They seem overrated to me, like an image of something powerful and potent that is actually limp. Were cannons just a yappy little dog on the beach. If my ship was right next to yours and you had a cannon lined up at me, I would probably not like that. But from a beach 300 yards away…I am probably coming in. I will find a place to park my ship a few hundred yards from your beached-cannon, and then we will come in and sack the place.

The watchman down there in front of the water.

Not Larry and I headed to the area on Fogo Island, close to Joe Batt’s Arm, where her grandmother grew up. A man next door to the original house that she grew up in was outside and we ended up in a conversation with him. He knew most of her family and spoke of her extended family that she did not even know about. I took pictures of Not Larry on a rock that she was on when she was a little girl. That particular rock was how she actually identified the place this time to find the house!

When we left, we headed to Fogo on Fogo Island where we climbed the Brimstone Head, which is said to be one of the Four Corners of the Canadian Flat Earth Society.

Speaking of which:

I am not sure what the Flat Earth Society is up to. This feels like a skeptical post. But, I have made two revolutions around the planet, one completely east and one completely west. That I have done myself. Me. No one else has told me about it. It is not a second hand story. I have made two complete revolutions around this earth, latitudinally. This guy. I have completely circumvented the earth from two different directions. So, I am not sure why the Flat Earth Society people are even in a conversation and why they are something that is worthy of the air used for conversation or the fact that I even make mention of them in this article. Several times I have wanted to research them, but I lose interest just typing their society into Google. However, I have been thinking that there must be something more to this than meets the eye. There must be some kind of ulterior motive to this. Thinking the earth is flat over half a millennium since Magellan made a lap of the planet is a pretty silly thing to base a foundation of a new idea from. So, there must be something more to this concept. Some day I will try to care enough to do my research on this. Maybe… Potentially… Ah, unlikely…

Oh, really… But why are there only three corners on the map?

Brimstone Head is beautiful as it is this giant rock rises high above the ocean surrounding Fogo Island. Brimstone Head it more like a hill and it made me sweat to climb the rock. This is partly connected to the fact that I do absolutely nothing to stay in shape and also because the shape I know of me is changing due to the fact that Not Larry is a kitchen wizard. So, I am finding that I sweat more doing things that used to require less or no sweat at all. The days of me saying, “No sweat,” may now be behind me. The expression should probably change to, “With some sweat.” Or perhaps I should start running in the mornings…

Brimstone Head.

We were sure we missed the ferry from Fogo Island to the island of Newfoundland and I casually drove, arriving 10 minutes late expecting it would be gone. But, there was still a line-up and Beatrice was the last vehicle to get on! Lucky. As soon as we got parked, I decided I would nap for the ferry ride. But before Not Larry disembarked from Beatrice to see the ferry, she came for a Beaver ride, and then left me to sleep off the exhaustion and only came back when we arrived at the mainland. It was a great ferry ride! I felt used, but what a great way to be used!

I took over driving duties as Not Larry whipped up a driving-meal by cooking cod as I drove us to Gander. We ate dinner when we stopped and then I washed dishes as she drove us to Glovertown. RV living! We found a pull-out on the side of the road next to the ocean.

We had a couple of beer and then we had some really awesome oceanside-road-romance. Life is good.

24 August.
Not Larry was woken up in the middle of the night when I elbowed her very hard in the chest. I felt terrible about that. I was having a dream that a large stuffed animal that resembled a pirate version of the Disney character Goofy was some kind of voodoo doll. This character has been re-occuring in my dreams, and it wanted money from me in my dream and was saying, “Feed me. Feed me. Feed me,” over and over. I had the character around my neck as that is where I was carrying it. Someone came up behind me and tried to steal it from me and I put my elbow into the person to stop them. That person turned out to be Not Larry who was innocently sleeping beside me. She got it in the chest. That made me feel really bad. When we fully woke up again about an hour later she called me a ‘meanie-pants.’ I felt awful…

For the video of Newfoundland Travel Fun: A Good Time Province, click here!