-
Historic & Colorful St. John’s, NL
St. John’s, the capital of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador (and yes, both doggos are from there), is Canada’s oldest and easternmost city. Roughly 1/3 of the province’s 500K population live in St. John’s and it felt completely different than the small communities we’d been visiting. It was extra busy while we were there because they were hosting families from all over Canada for the Canada Games, which are for the country’s top high school athletes. Wildfires weren’t on our Newfoundland bingo card, but we had plenty in St. John’s. We’d planned to boondock on the Avalon Peninsula, but the wildfire I mentioned before continued to grow so we…
-
Terra Nova National Park & the Bonavista Peninsula, NL
We left Fogo Island on a Friday morning so that we could spend a weekend at Terra Nova National Park. Terra Nova is an old growth boreal forest so we didn’t think Dishy would work well enough to spend the workweek there. The Newman Sound campground has full hookup sites with potable water, a rarity in Newfoundland campgrounds. We must have been tired at this point, because we got completely set up in site 244 when we realized we were supposed to be in site 243 and had to move. That was a first. We hiked the Ochre Hill trail on Saturday. Terra Nova doesn’t get nearly as much attention…
-
Island Hopping: Twillingate & Fogo, NL
From Gros Morne on the west coast we had a big move over to the Twillingate Islands, connected by short bridges and causeways off the north coast of Newfoundland. Twillingate is part of NL’s Iceberg Alley and calls itself the iceberg capital of the world. When we planned the timing of this trip, we prioritized having good weather instead of seeing icebergs, and while we are enjoying all the hiking we’re able to do in good weather, we are also having some major iceberg FOMO so we may have to come back one day. We boondocked at an abandoned campground at Sleepy Cove, on the northern tip of North Twillingate…
-
Gros Morne National Park, NL
I used to think the Appalachian mountain range ended in Maine. But no, we just spent 2 weeks in the Appalachian mountains of Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland! We spent the first week in Shallow Bay, the northernmost campground in the park, which put us in a good position for a day trip up to L’Anse aux Meadows. Newfoundland is 1.5 hours ahead of Eastern Time which means Michael is working from 9:30-6:30 local time. Shallow Bay was perfect because the campground had miles of beach that we could walk every morning before work! We took a boat tour of Western Brook Pond, which is a inland freshwater fjord.…
-
We’re in Newfoundland: Vikings & Icebergs!
Last summer we were trying to figure out how we were supposed to go back to normal life after Alaska. What other trip would require a similar amount of planning, be as challenging, but also be as amazing? We came up with Newfoundland! And so far, it’s delivering. To get to Newfoundland, we took an ~8 hour overnight ferry from North Syndey, Nova Scotia to Port aux Basques, on Newfoundand’s west coast. We booked a pet friendly cabin so we could bring the Cody kitty with us. I think our ferry crossing would have been much more fun had Cody not been sick in the days leading up to it.…
