The ferry to Newfoundland

We made it! We are now in “Newfie-land” and will be going to Labrador soon. Right now we are 3439 air miles from home. That’s 459 gallons of fuel and at $5 a gallon, that’s about $2,300 to get home…if we could go in a straight line.

We got up at 3:15 am, finished getting the rig ready for travel and everyone pulled out right at 4:00 am. We traveled butt-to-nose 3.8 miles to the ferry terminal, got measured and checked in and waited.


Waiting for the ferry to arrive


Some of the guests went back to sleep but, as staff, oh no, we had to stay up and work. We had to get the sleeping berth assignments, boarding passes and things like that. I even had to have a guest walk across the street for us to buy two apple fritters at Tim Horton’s, a donut shop.
We started loading the ferry about 7:00

The Newfoundland Ferry (note how the bow opens up!)

Starting to load

Getting loaded!

Still getting loaded!

and were underway just after 8:00. The crossing was pretty uneventful. The almost-promised whale sightings were non-existent as the fog rolled in. We had to slow down considerably as the visibility was about 50 yards at times. The foghorn was sounding the whole way across. Here’s a picture of the fog for you to enjoy!

Dense fog midway to Newfoundland!

We arrived at Placentia, NL about 2:30 am, disembarked, and headed up the road for the Sobey’s parking lot (Sobey’s is a grocery store over here) to catch a few hours of sleep.

Our Sobey's 3 to 4-hour napping spot

It was raining and foggy and one rig got lost, later to turn up 28 miles down the track at a gas station, sleeping soundly. Since the rig didn’t show up, Barry and I had to go look for it and lost another hour’s sleep in the process. Anyway, we all got up at 7:30 to depart the store’s parking lot before it opened, per the request of the manager. We fired up and all headed to a gas station restaurant 28 miles up the road where our lost chicken had roosted for the night. We overwhelmed them with about 30+ breakfast orders so the meals were slow in getting to the tables but the food was very good. After breakfast, we finished our trip through some really beautiful country…full of lakes and trees…to the Pippy Park Campground in St. John’s where we all hooked up and then crashed for a few more hours of sleep.