Saturday, May 31, 2014

Trip Report! Newfoundland: Day Two

On our second St. John's-based day, we drove out to Cape Spear, the most easterly point of North America, about 20 minutes outside of town. 

Now, the road situation in St. John's and, really, the whole of the island, was something to behold. St. John's is a very old city built up piecemeal over decades and centuries, and it shows in the way the roads are laid out. Everything is very haphazard and there is seemingly no sense in who has to stop at intersections and who doesn't. And also sometimes a road will become one way for only one block and you have to figure out how to navigate around it if you want to keep going straight. And also, for a fun bonus, all the paint indicating where the lanes are was completely gone. We asked the B&B proprietor about that and she said it gets worn away every single winter and they have to repaint essentially from scratch. Finally, there were huge potholes everywhere. St. John's was actually not that bad in retrospect - the conditions in rural areas were much, much worse. So, all that is to say that the driving in Newfoundland was a little more difficult than I had imagined. Not as bad as Spain, certainly, but challenging at times. Ben did a great job, though, and we had the Triposo map to help when we got off track. We did get a little lost going out to Cape Spear but it was easily corrected and we got headed in the right direction.

It was amazing to me how we spent this trip in the most populated parts of the island, and yet 20 minutes outside of Newfoundland's busiest city could feel this isolated. The entrance to St. John's harbor is actually just to the left of center in this photo.


There it is! The very easternmost point.



There are old World War II bunkers out there. German subs actually were in the waters around Newfoundland but this post never saw any action.


There is still a working lighthouse at Cape Spear and they've also left the old historical one as it was in the 1830s so you can go inside and see how the lighthouse keeper lived. It was neat. We are nerdy. The old one is on the right - the house was built around the lighthouse itself so he had easy access without going out into the weather. Pretty smart.


I made a stranger lady take our picture. She was extremely enthusiastic and took about twelve of them.


There are trails all over the place out there that connect to the big East Coast Trail, so we hiked around for a little while. It was windy and probably in the upper 40s but it felt fine.



This is the new, working lighthouse. They had to upgrade in the 1950s due to Canadian national regulations.


These foghorns really are super loud! We heard them in several different places throughout the trip. 


This is the historical lighthouse. At one point the family had 13 kids living in there.




We left Cape Spear and headed south for about an hour to Ferryland, where they do famous picnics at the lighthouse. It's really hard to get a reservation - you have to call weeks in advance during the tourist season - but naturally I called back in March and got us a spot. It was the very first day they were open for the season.

The route out to the lighthouse was on a single track gravel road right along cliffs overlooking the ocean. Fortunately we had our Scottish experience so we didn't get too freaked out, but there were a few dicey passing incidents. You have to walk the last kilometer or so.

Weirdly, we were the only sensible people who wanted to eat their picnic indoors. Everyone else was out there in the wind. No thanks! We had a nice view. 


The food was fantastic! Ben got a roast beef sandwich and gingerbread for dessert and I had ham and brie and chocolate ganache cake. Plus an orzo vegetable salad for each of us and fresh-squeezed, not-too-sweet lemonade. Perfection!


After lunch we walked out onto the point in front of the lighthouse.


Benjamin is always very concerned with getting as far out onto the cliffs as possible. It makes me extremely nervous. Here he is down on some rocks. 


We drove back to St. John's and spent a couple nice hours in the B&B until time for dinner. In the local indie newspaper we had read about a new place called Mohamed Ali's, St. John's first real middle eastern restaurant. He worked really hard to get it up and running and ran into all sorts of roadblocks and the lady at The Sprout told us the food was great, so we decided to go there to support small business and all that jazz. He had only opened about a month before.

So we ordered and then it took 30 minutes and we still didn't have any food. I was kind of freaking out. I politely mentioned to the lady that it had been a half hour and she looked horrified and brought us little desserts for free.


Then the food appeared about 5 minutes later. This is the kind of place where hippie kids are back there doing the cooking and we think the order just got lost or something. But anyway! It was worth the wait. I got the chicken schwarma plate and it came with delicious rice and pita and hummus.


Ben got the falafel pita, which the lady at The Sprout had specifically recommended. He said it was great.


After dinner it finally started to rain a little bit for the first time of the trip, so we headed back to the B&B. On the walk back a little kitty came to see us! We felt bad for him out in the rain but, you know, he was a cat and it's probably fine.

The fog was rolling back in!


This was our last night in St. John's and the next day we were headed out to see some of rural Newfoundland.

Friday, May 30, 2014

Trip Report! Newfoundland: Day One

I had the idea to take two one-week trips this year rather than one longer one, both scheduled over holiday weeks, in order to maximize our traveling without having to use a bunch of vacation time. Ben was on board with this plan. So then we had to decide where to go.

I immediately became annoyed by how expensive flights are to Europe this year. We were going to have to exceed our most expensive airfare ever by a not insignificant margin to go to Paris, which is where I had my heart half-set on initially. So I started looking elsewhere. Nova Scotia? I mentioned this to my internet friends and someone suggested Newfoundland instead. That seemed like an interesting idea! I had never considered going to Newfoundland before. The General Googling phase quickly evolved into the Obsessive Planning Phase, and three months later, we were on a plane.

We had a long layover on Toronto. Look at this delicious airport pizza!


After our long layover we got on the plane and then sat there for 2 hours while they tried to figure out why the air conditioning would not work. As you might expect, this was an extremely trying 2 hours. This was my view.


Eventually they decided it could not be fixed and we had to switch to another plane. GREAT JOB, AIR CANADA. We were finally off to St. John's, the capital of Newfoundland and the only city of any real size (100,000ish) on the island.

We landed in extremely thick fog. Eerie! We picked up the car and then tried to find our B&B, Cantwell House. The aforementioned extremely thick fog and the fact that it was close to midnight made this kind of a task, but we managed to find it after only one wrong turn. That Triposo app we used in Spain saved us in Canada as well!

I had read online that there was a great view from the 3rd floor and of course the internet never lies. This was the fogged-in view of the city upon our arrival.


Our room was on the 3rd floor, and I was initially dismayed to discover it was not en suite - we had to share a bathroom with the other room on the floor. I forgot to ask about that when I booked everything! Oh well.


It all ended up working out great, though, because for the 3 nights we stayed at the Cantwell House, nobody else was in the other 3rd floor room. We essentially had a full apartment all to ourselves up there, with this lovely sitting room being where we spent most of our time.


The sitting room led out to a patio with this view - much better during the non-fogged-in daytime!


The weather seemed so-so to us on this first day - low/mid 50s and partly cloudy. LITTLE DID WE KNOW. By the end of the trip our definition of good weather had been substantially revised.

The first thing we did on our first day in St. John's was visit The Rooms, a combination cultural, historical, and art museum wherein we learned about the history of Newfoundland. It was settled mostly by Irish fisherman in the 1800s, which is immediately obvious when you talk to anyone who's grown up there, particularly in the rural areas outside of St. John's. The accent is crazy! There were quite a few times we didn't have any idea what someone was saying and just nodded and smiled and hoped for the best.

Newfoundland was settled primarily because of the huge amounts of cod in its waters. Cod fishing was the island's only real industry for hundreds of years, going back all the way to the 1500s. The island has come upon hard times in the last several decades, though. In the early 1990s the cod stocks finally became so decimated that the Canadian government put a moratorium on the industry. There is still a small amount of fishing allowed, but there are strict quotas that fisherman have to adhere to and most have turned to other species. We ran into people talking about this everywhere we went, how it has changed the culture of the island and forced them to look to other industries to try to survive. Tourism is one, although they still have a way to go there, and there are also offshore oil rigs that have been built in the last few decades. Anyway. We found it all fascinating. It's such an insulated community, out there in the North Atlantic, and given the length and harshness of their winters and their geographic isolation, it's not hard to understand why they've had trouble adapting to a post-cod fishing economy.

But hey! Look at the size of that narwhal tusk!


The Rooms has a beautiful view of St. John's and the harbor.


St. John's is extremely cute. It seemed like every street was lined with these brightly colored old fashioned houses.



This is Water Street, the oldest street in North America. It was first developed in the early 1500s. That's so old!


We stopped at a pub for lunch called The Duke of Duckworth. I got a bacon cheeseburger.


Ben got fish & chips. We ate a lot of fish & chips on this trip. 


The French fries at this place had a very slight sweet flavor and we were briefly excited wondering if there was a weird Newfoundland potato that was different from other potatoes. Later meals proved this theory wrong, however. They must have just used coconut oil or some other kind of flavoring to get the sweet taste.

After lunch we drove up to Signal Hill National Historic Site, which you can see in the pictures from our B&B balcony. It has been fortified and manned throughout many wars over the years - due to Newfoundland's position as the most eastern part of North America everybody spent a few hundred years fighting over it once the Europeans started settling there. It is also famous for being the site where the first transatlantic wireless transmission was received.


From Signal Hill we spotted our first icebergs! I had not really understood that icebergs were a thing in Newfoundland until a couple weeks before we left, and then I read that late May is the prime iceberg spotting time, and THEN I found out that this year has been an extremely active year. Excitement! Anyway, we were pumped to see this iceberg.


We took a self-portrait with it. It's up there in that overexposed area, I swear.


The views of St. John's Harbor are fantastic from up there!


The other side of the hill, looking out to sea.



We ended up hiking around in the hills for a couple of hours or so. There are a lot of trails up there and the views are stunning. We spotted another iceberg!



There were these little cairns in one spot, sort of a creepy scene.


We also saw a bald eagle's nest! When we first arrived there were two eagles but one of them flew off by the time we got down to this overlook. There were little grey babies wandering around in the nest! 


Yeah. It's that iceberg.



For dinner we went to The Sprout, a much recommended vegetarian restaurant. We got artichoke dip to start and it was actually made of artichokes, not just cheese with some token artichoke flakes. It was delicious! We were definitely in need of some nice vegetables after that pub lunch.


Ben ordered an open faced grilled cheese pesto sandwich.


I got miso noodles with vegetables and tofu. It was great, exactly what I needed.


But then we ruined it with cake. Delicious, delicious cake.


We packed a lot into that first day in St. John's! After dinner we headed back to our luxurious apartment-like B&B situation and hung out in our living room until time for bed.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Epileptic Banana Update

It's been about 10 days now since the seizures and starting phenobarbital. It has been an extremely trying 10 days for me. It's a good thing I don't have human children because apparently I do a poor job of handling it when someone I love is sick. 

Banana is, as you know, a feisty and mischievous cat. That's why I think it's been so hard to see him spend much of the past week and a half in a daze. Even when he'd do bad things his eyes would have a sort of vacant look. 


But he really is slowly coming around. It hasn't been a linear progression - he'll seem pretty normal one day and then take a step back toward grogginess the next day. Overall, though, the trend is positive. And today, he's been awake and wandering around for the whole 2 hours we've been up so far and is currently chasing Papaya around the house. And, most importantly, he hasn't had any more seizures at all. 

So, I think things are probably going to be okay. MAYBE. I hope. We'll see.