Often the best part of a holiday trip is before you get there: when it works upon your imagination. We're going to attempt a flight from Ottawa to Newfoundland and back next month, a thought that really excites me. I spent this evening with two ladies who worked at St John's University for a great many years, so of course I asked them what Newfoundland was like and in particular the northern tip, where we're likely to land.
"Rather than stay in St Anthony you ought to book a room at The Tickle Inn, Onion Cove," said Averil. With a name like that, who could resist searching for it on the Internet, at least? Averil also told me there were plenty of black bears on the island and that it's not unusual to find polar bears, either, who have inadvertently drifted across from Labrador on an ice-floe.
We've been poring over the NAV charts in order to work out a promising route and I'm been doing another sort of homework by reading The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx, the bulk of the novel being set in the very area we're aiming for. The characters in this story arrive by car:
... Quoyle steered up the west coast of the Great Northern Peninsula along a highway rutted by transport trucks. The road ran between the loppy waves of the Strait of Belle Isle and mountains like blue melons. Across the strait sullen Labrador.
The car rolled over fissured land. Tuckamore. Cracked cliffs in volcanic glazes. On a ledge above the sea a murre laid her single egg. Harbours still locked in ice. Tombstone houses jutting from raw granite, the coast black, glinting like lumps of silver ore ...
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