Saturday, October 07, 2017

All I need do today is get to Marystown. According to Google Maps a crow-flight of only sixty-two kilometres.

A doddle!

I could be there in time for a 7 a.m. coffee, were I a crow.

As it was I rose at 6:30, checked to see if there were any last-minute podcasts to add to my shrinking backlog, was packed and out of the room by 7:10, and after chatting with the friendly manager of the motel, was on my way around 8:05.

A beautiful day, and most of it spent retracing my steps. The drive north to the Trans-Canada Highway was a retrace of yesterday. The drive East to about 30 Km east of Clarenville was a retrace of Tuesday/Wednesday. The 150Km leg south down highway 210 from the Trans-Canada Highway to Marystown was new, but in its way quite similar to highway 360, south from Bishops Falls to Harbour Breton.

I stretched my legs for 5 minutes just before the Trans-Canada Highway, and again just after I turned onto 210, and was checked in to the hotel in Marystown by 3:30. The restaurant serves pots of tea, so I tanked up on two pots before examining my room.

I am here because I planned to get the five long-stretch legs out of the way before doing the slower, more casual trips around the peninsulas, but now I see I could have done this better. After tonight I will retrace my steps back to the Baie Verte peninsula, which will be my fifth consecutive long drive. I could have spent a day in Baie Verte after St George’s, and then I would not have to spend two half-days on the stretch of highway between Shepardsville and Bishops falls.

Of course, if from Marystown I double back only as far as the Bonavista peninsula, I can work westwards, and so postpone the long drive for a few days, when I scurry back from Baie Verte towards St John’s to do the Avalon Peninsulas and then St John’s.

Oh well. No big deal.

I left at eight o’clock and spent an hour listening and repeating Basic Slovene, imagining that I was driving in the mountains of Slovenia. Maybe some day.

The sky is clear, but at this hour the hills hide the sun.

On the other hand (the left hand, as it turns out) the sun paints lovely shades of green on the valley walls.

After an hour of Slovenian phrases I switch to comic songs and sing myself hoarse learning and rehearsing my repertoire of comic songs.

I pass these barren plains. I can’t work out whether they have been clear-cut or burnt out.

The dead sticks make me think it wasn’t a fire, otherwise saplings this small would have been consumed. So my guess is clear-cutting denuding the plateau.

(Much later I figured the bare patches were rocky outcrops)

By 10:30 I am on the Trans-Canada Highway heading eastwards

I pass again through the quaintly named village of Falling Rock. There are a lot of places with that name in Newfoundland. In that respect Newfoundland is like British Columbia. And Colorado.

At 13:06 I reach highway 210 which runs south to Marystown from the Trans-Canada Highway. And there is an Irving gas station.

Hooray! I am making good time and can afford to stop for a coffee.

Boo! The Irving is closed and under construction.

The department of Tourism Visitor Information Centre is not closed. It is merely Temporarily Closed.

Welcome to Newfoundland!

Even the back side of the Irving Station is not working. The pumps are in, but no-one is home.

I sigh, cross several lanes of highway and after a hundred yards, re-cross several lanes of highway and turn south after a fifteen minute leg-stretch.

Marystown is 150Km ahead. At 100 Km/hour that would be ninety minutes. The speed limit is variously 80 or 90, so I anticipate arriving in Marystown around three o’clock, which will make for a short day’s drive.

There’s not much else to report. I took no more photos, but if you’d like to see what the scenery looked like got back to Friday, October 06, 2017 and study my Drive to Harbour Breton.

Oh yes. Partway down #210 the car system went “Ding! Ding! Ding!”. I know I haven’t stepped out of the car without undoing my seatbelt, not while travelling at 90 KM/hour.

There is a warning message “Change The Oil”, and I think, “Right! Exactly whereabouts on this stretch of highway am I to find a Jiffy-Lube with an operating hoist on the Saturday afternoon of a long weekend?”.

I learn how to cancel the message and get back to the “Fuel remaining” display and keep bopping along. I will be pestered by this message every time I start the car until sometime on Tuesday if I can find a place to service the car.

Of course I will look after it, but it makes me think of Enterprise car rentals, and how I saved $164 by cancelling the booking at the airport and re-booking at Kenmount Road.

Well, I spent $30 on a cab fare and $5 on a tip, so that cut into my savings.

Well! Enterprise’s motto is “We pick you up”. I wonder if I should just have phoned from the airport and said “Come pick me up” and saved that $35.

Well, here I am at 15:00 checked in to the hotel, and enjoying a pot of tea, a real pot, with real tea and real milk in a real mug. I have not inspected my room yet, I was so desperate for a real cup of tea, my first in five days.

Paradise!

Directly across the street is NoFrills. It’s just like being at home.

Next to NoFrills is Dollarama. It’s just like being at home.

And then there is the Ultramar. It’s not at all like home.

But it feels good.

I Traveled 764 kilometres at 19.79 KM/dollar today.

I have been playing “AM-Roulette” on the radio. To the best of my knowledge you can only play this in Australia and Canada. You can’t play it in the U.S.A or the U.K.

Here’s how it works: you listen to the radio until the stations get scratchy and out of range. Switch to AM radio and scan for stations. You’ll pick up, say a C&W station. Awful stuff!

Once that station disappears (because you have driven out of range), press the “scan” button and allow the radio to pick up the next station that is still within range.

Continue in this fashion until you find that you are out of range of every station. Most times the radio will continue to scan endlessly from about 580KHz through to about 1700KHz, finding nothing, searching, searching ... until you drive back within range of some station up ahead, at which point the car is filled with an advertisement for a gardening centre or a play, or a catastrophe at St Mark’s church, or whatever.

So anyway I am bopping along and pick up a traffic report, that some city has congestion because of the “Scratch and Patch” work going on. That’s funny, because in Toronto it is called “Shave and Pave”, when the highway is being re-conditioned.

Then I was further amused by the fact that both euphemisms used the “S&P” formula.

Don’t you find that amusing?

I have visited ten towns so far, so I am half-way towards achieving my goal .

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