Distance: none, nada, nothing
Elevation: a few stairs
I slept like a log in my clean bed.
Wade had made blueberry pancakes for breakfast … with maple sirup. Yummy.
Something that only tastes well in Canada though.
My first appointment was with a hairdresser, a young lady from Kasachstan. This was a country that was on my list of places I still wanted to cycle.
She had moved here from Qatar with her family because Middle East countries offered no citizenships to foreigners.
When she learned that I had cycled here from Vancouver she couldn’t believe it. Especially at my age she said. Very funny.
We had a good chat and it felt very good to be freshly trimmed and groomed again.
Next, I boarded a Hop-On Hop-Off bus. I find this is always a good way to get an overview of a new city.
Here the busses were small with hardly any people on them and the drivers would tell the stories themselves, not a tape.
St. John’s downtown is known for its colorfully painted wooden houses which reminded me of Norway or Iceland.
Despite the individual colors they all look the same more or less which had one simple reason: The city had burned down totally in 1892 and all houses were newly build thereafter.
After the decline of fishery, St. John’s economic situation had become difficult until oil had been found in the waters east of The Rock in the 1980s.
Interesting fact: this is where the Titanic collided with an iceberg in 1912.
At present, five different oil rigs were operating in the waters of NFL with some 20,000 workers on them.
And they in return created around secondary 80,000 jobs in the city.
An icebreaker was stationed in the harbor year round to guarantee access to supplies for the people os St. John’s throughout the rough winters.
The bus went on to Signal Hill. From here the first transatlantic radio transmission had been conducted back in 1901.
Fun fact: Emilia Ehrhardt started her first transatlantic flight not far from St. John’s.
We also went to Quidi Vidi Harbor, the place where TransCanada cyclists who were better prepared than me would dip their front wheels into the Atlantic Ocean.
It was a cute little spot.
I got off at a museum called “The Rooms”. My host was exhibition manager here.
Without a doubt, one of the most exciting exhibits was the few on St. John’s harbor. But there was more.
Other interesting artifacts were about Viking settlements in the North of the island around 1,000 after Christ. That means over 400 years before the official “discovery” of North America.
It was also interesting that different groups of indigenous people, e.g. the Inuit, had migrated here and replaced other indigenous groups.
A very impressive artifact was a sculpture that consisted of parts of skull of a huge whale. It was almost 2m tall.
The tour ended with a detour to Cape Spear which I had cycled to the day before.
I was amazed how hilly it was.
I learned that the place was originally called “Cap d’Espoir” (Cape Hope) by the French. But since the British could not pronounce that, it morphed into “Cape Spear”.
In the afternoon, I prepared my road trip which would take place over the next two days.
Again, Wade had given some crucial input for route and destinations.
In the evening, I tried out a “new” pub downtown. It was easy to feel at home in St. John’s especially with this untypical warm and sunny weather.