Kathleen's Window: Gander, Twillingate and a Glimpse of an Iceberg

Monday, July 22, 2013

The fog cleared late Sunday afternoon and we discovered that we were closer to the ocean than we realized. Monday morning we packed up and drove back through St. Bride's, this time without fog. We were surprised to see the lack of trees and how close the ocean was to the town. We passed Bunny's house and headed north along the coast to Placentia. The views were spectacular, but typical of so many places in Newfoundland. The Cabot Trail in Nova Scotia is beautiful, but Newfoundland is many Cabot Trails. The problem is accessibility. If Newfoundland were closer and easier to get to, it would have many more tourists.

St. Brides

Bunny's House

The road to Placentia

Looks like Big Sur

The tire was holding air so we continued north and got back on the Trans-Canada Highway heading west. We retraced our steps through Terra Nova National Park, (the highway runs through it), and stopped at a look off at Newman's Sound for lunch. After lunch we arrived in Gander, a town along the Trans-Canada Highway that is in the interior and not close to anything! We pulled into the North Atlantic Aviation Museum. It was a well done local museum that had several historic planes on the grounds, and inside followed the history of aviation in Gander.

Gander Lake

North Atlantic Aviation Museum

Gander currently has a Canadian military base and 150 air traffic controllers for the general area plus a good chunk of the north Atlantic. But, at one time it had the largest air terminal in the world. Aviation came early to this area. Once it was established that early float planes, and ski planes, could land on Gander Lake, a town and airport were established here. During WWII, thousands of Canadian and American fliers were based here. The town grew up to service them. The first trans-Atlantic bombers flew through here, and many bombers were flown to Europe for the Allied Forces.

Early bush plane

Catalina PBY retired after WWII and over 11,000 flight hours for the forest service

One of the first Hudson bombers to cross the Atlantic from Gander

Wasp Rotary engine

DC-3

After the war when civilian trans-Atlantic flight boomed, Gander had thousands of international passengers pass through it's gleaming, fashionable terminal. It was the re-fueling spot before the crossing. Many famous people passed through there. The small airport bar was the only bar in Canada open 24 hours and celebrities were a common sight on their trips to and from Europe. Repeat customers included Elvis, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, Winston Churchill, President Eisenhower, and many others. A building boom took place as there was a need to house the airport workers and their families. Gander became the first planned community in Canada.

After jets allowed airlines to travel directly to Europe and they no longer needed to refuel, the communist block countries became the big customers. This was the best route between the Soviet Union and Cuba and Europe. Uri Gagarin came through many times. Fidel Castro experienced his first snowfall while re-fueling in Gander. The Soviets shipped their own fuel to Gander because they used it so much. It also became the prime spot for Communist defectors and their families.

Castro tobogganing in the snow

As the airlines moved on to non-stop flights, the thousands of international passengers that passed through the terminal were suddenly gone. Gander still had a role with military support and air traffic control. It took on a new role on 9/11. At 12:28 pm that day, Canadian and US airspace were closed, and planes had to be landed immediately. 6,700 passengers and crew landed at Gander and had to stay in the town for the next four days. The town of 10,000 rallied and took them all in, feeding and housing them mostly in their homes. The US presented Gander with a commemorative section of a World Trade Center I-beam in gratitude, which is on display in the Aviation Museum. The town has a long history of hospitality and drew on that to care for the strangers that had nowhere else to go.

We enjoyed our tour of the museum and the aircraft, but needed to pick up a few things at a grocery store and find a place for the night. Gander was remote enough that even though they had a modern grocery store, the prices were noticeably higher than the last store in Clarenville. We are having sticker shock. Gas and diesel prices have risen more than 10 cents a liter in a week. That means almost 40 cents more for a gallon of fuel! Those prices directly impact food prices since everything is sent up here by boat and trucked all over the province. The higher diesel cost won't cause us to travel less, but we'll definitely be spending more than we expected.

We drove 15 minutes north out of Gander to a private campground at Jonathan's Pond. The first sign we noticed on the office was the boil water notice. When we asked they said that they were waiting for the test results and in the mean time they were adding extra chlorine. We decided not to hook up the water and use up what we already had in the tank. We were hooked up to a 30 amp spot, but the power was cutting on and off. Greg thought there were too many campers for their electrical set-up. The camp seemed crowded with families and the kids were yelling and screaming (literally) on the beach near our site until late. We were glad to head out the next morning, back to Gander! One of the tire patches wasn't holding the air in any more, so we needed to get it professionally patched.

After two tries we found a Goodyear Dealer who would work on a dually. The mechanic was in the Canadian National Guard and had been sent to train at Fort Pickett in Virginia. He said that was the farthest south he had been and he'd never been to Maryland, but didn't seem to know where it was anyway. Of course, Maryland is north of Virginia, but the geographic confusion continues. As I have said before, Americans are no better about Canadian geography. When people ask us where we are from we say, “Maryland...in the States...near Washington, DC”. When we just say Maryland we get everything from a blank stare to, “I think we drove through it once. It's small, isn't it?” We have also had people think that Maryland is, or is in, Maine or New Hampshire. We got the tire patched and drove north away from Gander again.

The weather was beautiful and warm and we traveled north to the coast. Twillingate is known for its whales and icebergs. Iceberg Alley runs from along the coast of Labrador down along the northern coast of Newfoundland. This time of year the current brings them close to the coast. The islands that surround the Twillingate area were isolated until recent history and are quaint and the coastline scenic.

Fireweed in bloom

We stopped before we reached Twillingate at Dildo Run Provincial Park along a beautiful stretch of water with islands called Dildo Run. (Yes, there is also a town called Dildo. Sometime I'll list some of the unusual names in Newfoundland!) We discovered that the park was very full due to the Fish, Fun and Folk Festival in Twillingate. They found us a space for two nights, so we checked in before driving to Twillingate. We noticed a boil water order, again, and were told that they had added extra chlorine, so it should be okay. I spoke with a fellow camper, a woman who was originally from Michigan, but had married a Newfoundlander she met in college in the States. She has lived here for 20 some years, and in Canada for over 30 years. She loves it here, and said she would never move back to the States. She said for as long as she could remember, the provincial parks have had a boil water order. She said that they wash and flush with it, but bring along their own drinking water. Greg decided to boil our drinking and cooking water, but filled the tank for our other uses.

Dildo Run Provincial Park

Driving through the town we decided not to stop and drove directly to the lighthouse at Long Point. The parking lot was crowded and we made our way up to the observation platform looking out on the Atlantic. Off on the horizon was an iceberg! We spent some time looking for whales and watched some boats below us cod fishing. There were giant jellyfish, Greg estimated two feet across, we could see swimming way below us. We soaked up the warm sunshine knowing that the forecast called for rain the next day. Back at Dildo Run we settled the RV back into our secluded tree surrounded space. Since we were just around the corner from the wash house we took advantage of a nice laundry room and got two weeks of laundry done before dinner and bed!