5: July 28th and 29th Twillingate to Fogo Island

28 July Trinity to Twillingate

When we rented a car back in St. Johns, we didn’t ask for this big ass Cadillac-pretend-Chrysler 300 and not being a big ass car owner it took a while to get comfortable handling this behemoth. But after driving a lot on this trip, including a 4 ½ hour drive to Twillingate today, I’m thinking this is the most comfortable vehicle I’ve ever driven. Minimal fatigue and as quiet as a New Year’s Eve party in Sanibel. But while highway driving is fine, navigating this yacht through small towns and parking spaces is not easy. Also, while I’m apologizing to Canadians for Trump, I might as well apologize for accelerating global warming with this big ass car.

The drive from Trinity to Twillingate today was a hump, half of which was on the Trans Canadian Highway with the other half on small roads with a few very small seaside villages. For long stretches we had the roads all to ourselves. No other cars or trucks in sight. Just rolling green windswept wilderness. When we arrived in Twillingate (check out the location on Maps) I was surprised to find a thriving town of 2,000 celebrating the annual “Funfish Festival”. Did a little sightseeing around town – the lighthouse, trails and coves.

Then headed over to our B&B, “Captains Quarters”, a lovely spot on shore of the bay. John, the owner, gave us the tour but near the end, we were interrupted by a newly arriving couple. The wife of the couple looked familiar to me but I couldn’t place her. Turns out the couple, Scott and Alice, are from Massachusetts. Turns out Scott and Alice live in Ipswich. Turns out Alice recognized me from the Saturday music sessions I had been attending a the Dory Boat Shop in Gloucester. A mindblower to meet someone from our music club here in remote Newfoundland. All four of us were dumbfounded. Alice brought her banjo on the trip and Scott brought his concertina, a little hand organ, so we decided to first go out for dinner and then come back and play music. John, the B&B owner, had a guitar so I'd be able to join in. Got to talking to Scott about what we do or did for a living and to further blow my mind, he’s an EE and worked in the same field I did, electronic power supplies. To even further blow my mind, he worked for a company called Analogic in Peabody, MA. They were a customer of mine and unbelievably hard to deal with so they turned out to be the only customer I ever walked away from. “Take your purchase order and shove it!” Great dinner with Alice and Scott, and good music afterwards. We’ll be seeing them when we get back to Mass.

Maria and I walked the neighborhood around the B&B before dinner and came across graveyard with a sign listing all the people buried over the years. A long, long list even though there were just a handful of gravestones. Once can see from the predominance of children listed what life must have been like before antibiotics. One family’s list of deceased caught Maria’s eye. Check out the Froude family in the photo below. Does make you wonder what happened to that family.

Did I mention the wind in Newfoundland? Actually its been calm for the last few days, but otherwise has blown hard and I wonder what it must be like here in the winter. I’ve not been any place where the wind blows like this. The locals are complaining about the 80 to 85 degree temps during the day. They prefer it much cooler.

29 July 2018 Twillingate to Fogo Island

Twillingate, although wonderful, was really a one night stop to tide us over for the next day’s drive and ferry ride to Fogo Island. Fogo Island is approximately 15 miles by 10 miles with about 6 communities and a population of about 2000. It’s the largest of Newfoundland’s islands and the amount of shoreline from all the juts, points and peninsulas is astounding. In the 1960’s and 1970’s the Canadian government tried to resettle outlying Newfoundland and Labrador communities since It was just too expensive to service them with basic needs. There were incentives provided but Fogo Island resisted and apparently their ability to resist resettlement and survive in an era when the fishing industry was hammered by the moratorium is legendary in Canada.

We’re staying in the town of Tilting, just past the town of Joe Batts Arm. Lots of crazy town names here. This place is one big mysterious crag of a rock. The tourism industry is a little strange here. We’re in a very cozy B&B with four Canadians from Ontario and all six of us are having a hard time finding a place to eat. Tommy, who runs the B&B, seems put out when we ask him where one might eat dinner. Maria says Tommy told her we could get take outs at the gas station.

Fortunately we were able to make reservations at a restaurant in Joe Batts Arm. The name of the place is Scoff and we were lucky to get in at 5:30. No room after that. I had a great laugh when after dinner the waitress asked us if we wanted separate checks. I told her that in 51 years of marriage, we’d never been asked that. Actually a pretty good meal, but this particular round of blaring Newfoundland sea shanty music wore me down. Now I like music a lot, and folk music is pretty much the idiom I work in. But macho men roaring “Way, hey, and away we go”, “The sea, the sea, how I love the sea”, “Take me back to the deep, deep sea”….etc, got to me tonight. After an hour I wondered if any women sing sea songs. I guess some folksingers find the sea romantic and nothing but a good time, but the industry’s collapsed and I’m thinking the wonderfulness of a fishermen’s life never was what it used to be. I wonder why folksingers don’t sing about the good old days in the steel, coal and auto industry, collapsed industries shucking workers due to automation and other reasons. I can hear them now singing “Way, Hey, Lets rivet the chassis right onto the frame” or “Take me back to the assembly line”. Maybe a terrible comparison, but I imagine the life of an ocean fisherman to be extremely hard.

Yet again Maria and I ended up apologizing to the latest group of Canadians we’re run into. One of them almost broke my funny bone when he complained that Americans were stealing Canada’s reputation for being overly apologetic. I’d forgotten that they were known for apologizing.

Saw a sign outside a lovely house today: “Welcome The Freak’s”. No irony intended, I’m sure.

Fogo Island was appealing to us when we planned the trip since it seemed so far out there. All of the villages still seem to be primarily involved in fishing and crabbing with few hints of it being someplace a tourist might want to go, which is why we’re here. I’ll let the pictures do the describing except to say that Fogo Island is what I imagine the islands north of Scotland must be like.