Tuesday, October 03, 2017

Well, the cab was early so I left early. First time I’ve taken a cab to an airport in what – twenty years? $13 for the cab and I gave the nice driver a five-dollar tip for being early.

We had a chat about traveling alone. I suggested that both sides had benefits. On this trip I can bail out if I feel the weather is to cold or damp, or I can stay on longer. I can eat what I want when I want, and watch wrestling on TV if I want to.

The counter, of course, is that there is no-one to turn to and say “Well! Will you look at that!!”, and no-one to watch your bag while you detour to the washrooms.

I am sitting in the plane for thirty minutes in YUL seriously contemplating, grabbing a cab from the St John’s airport to the car rental place. Why spend an hour sitting at the airport and an hour-plus in the bus system when I could be on my way sooner and in Clarenville sooner. Time enough to check out the buses on my last couple of days in St John’s.

As usual my bottle of water is confiscated and I am given a free one once I clear security.

I do not understand airline staff, mainly because in the interest of speed they don’t listen to my questions, and since I am tenacious, the process takes ten times as long as it would otherwise.

I weighed my bag before I left home. Twenty pounds or close to it. At check in it shows up as 9.9Kg, whatever that is in pounds. I have to remove 0.9Kg from my bag. I think that the obvious object is this laptop, but what then will happen to the laptop? If my carry-on bag is too heavy with my laptop, then the laptop is still being carried on, but under my arm, right?

The scripted response from the clerk is “This will save you money”, of course, $20+ to check my shoulder bag. More discussion ensues, mainly because the clerk has only four scripted responses available, and is not a student of logic.

Turns out that by removing the laptop from the bag, the bag is under twenty pounds, and so I walk through security, where I would have to remove it from my shoulder bag anyway. So through security, and then into the gate area, and I slot the laptop back inside my bag, which now weighs 9.9Kg again, and everyone is happy.

Except me. What a stupid way to delay check-in.

I chatted with a security guy for two minutes. He suggested that the clerks can’t answer my question because the rule-cum-system is irrational, and there is no rational answer.

My boarding pass says “Gate 8-Bee”, and I listen to the Ottawa flight being announced for “Gate 8-Ay” Then pre-boarding for us at Gate 8-Bee, then normal boarding for us at Gate 8-Bee. Like all nervous passengers I re-re-re-check my boarding pass printed just twenty minutes ago, and it still says Gate 8-Bee. We troop off and swerve right where the path forks to 8-Bee, staring at the Ottawa passengers on their way to 8-Ay.

The gate clerk is turning people back! The gate clerk turns ME back and says that there has been a boarding gate change. The 8-A clerk is sending her people to gate 8-B. We sheep mill about excitedly wondering whether we will all end up in Chatham Ontario by error.

How can they change gate assignments between the time of the announcement over the PA system and the time it takes us (five minutes tops) to walk to the gate?

And what would it have taken to post a clerk at the fork in the paths and do the old hostess thing with the wave of the hands telling us where to go?

My estimation of Porter Airlines drops another notch, and I have not yet reached the accordion corridor, let alone the plane, let alone my seat.

I board the plane and note that it has two seats each side of the aisle, and since I am in 15A I must have a window seat. Whoop-de-doo!

I try not to dislodge the first class passengers with my shoulder bag, now back at 9.9Kg as I work my way down the aisle. Lucky for me the rows are arranged in the same order as I learned to count. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen; here we are. And someone is sitting in MY Seat!.

I politely ask him to change, since I am in the “A” seat, and I rarely get up during a flight. Also I like looking out of the window. At first he refuses but once I point out that my boarding pass says 15A (OK, so it had the wrong gate number; surely they can’t have screwed up the seat number as well?), but the impostor leaps up and announces that he is 14A, and moves forward one row where is sitting a gorgeous blond in HIS SEAT.

Not to be making any dumb-blonde jokes but she announces that although she is in 14A her boarding pass says 16A, so she leaps up.

Now there are three of us all trying to un-stow and re-stuff bags into the overhead bins.

It’s all my fault.

Then things get worse. Blondie is now sitting next to a buddy of hers from the same company, and both of them watch TV at night, for both of them are loud talkers.

Sitting right behind me.

Excited they are, for they haven’t seen each other since, oh, yesterday in the after noon.

We take off and about an hour later let down into Montreal where we sit on the tarmac for thirty minutes while 50% of the passengers struggle to get off and the plane is restocked with passengers. Then it is up, up and away for Halifax just over an hour later where we sit on the tarmac for thirty minutes while 50% of the passengers get off and the plane is restocked with passengers. Then it is up, up and away for St John’s, just ninety minutes later where I decide to get off.

An uneventful trip until the landing. We fly out of Halifax and continue to cover tracts of land that look just like the last three hours of the flight from Europe – small patches of farm stretches of brown and green, puddled with lakes. Then out over the water.

Staring through the grease-stained double-clear plastic window I spot much activity below. Fishing boats? Surely not. There must be thousands of them down there, and I don’t believe that any one cove in Newfoundland can lay claim to a thousand boats. Whales? Could be, but nowadays the sighting of a whale makes headline news. I come to the conclusion that they must be the tops of breaking waves.

Then land comes into sight and I realise that we are flying over France! Specifically the Overseas Collectivity of Saint Pierre and Miquelon , specifically the “Grand” is in view. If this is France, can Newfoundland be far ahead?

No, as it turns out. We have travelled in a near-straight line along the coast of Nova Scotia to St Johns. We crawl across a few peninsulas and the pilot treats me to a great view of Cape Spears (I’ve read about it and will go there), Signal Hill (ditto) and The Narrows, the entrance to the harbour. There are about a dozen largish ships in the harbour. We are aimed straight at the runway, and the last thirty seconds of flight contain twenty alarming seconds of sideways, skew, slip, judder, and all those awful bumps and noises that occur just before you land in a rolling ball of flame and unburned fuel. Also black smoke. But our pilot “puts her down firmly” and every one but me and a blue-rinse lady across the aisle unclip their belts and stand like so many sheep in the aisle for fifteen minutes.

Now throughout the three flights (Toronto-Montreal-Halifax-St John’s) I have been amused by the very thin plastic that was used to form the water bottle handed out at Toronto. I take an occasional sip, but whenever I do the bottle hisses and pops because of the change in cabin pressure. Three ups and three downs means six hiss-and-pop events from my brave little aneroid barometer.

Half an hour later in the taxi, I realise just how strong the wind is at ground level. We must have flown through a belt of air travelling at 70-100 Km/hr during those last few seconds.

Well, a quick trip to the toilets, a $2.25 copy of The Telegram, and I wander outside to see the last of the taxis disappear.

I learn that St John’s currently operates a Closed Taxi Stand. City Wide Taxi is the exclusive provider of ground transportation services for the public at St. John’s International Airport.

The taxi dispatch scheme consists of a 55-year old Newfoundlander in gardening gear with a clipboard. He waves his hand in the air at, I assume, taxis zooming past on the highway a hundred yards away. After I’ve stood shivering in the biting wind for a minute or two he asks me “Where to” and I say ”Kenmount Road near Avalon Mall” and he says something in a foreign language so I ask “How much?” and he replies “Dirty Tollars” and I remember reading about St John’s Taxi scam, flat rate from the airport to anywhere, sort of. Cab pulls up, I hop in the back with my shoulder bag – no tip to the despatcher for his privilege of tossing the small suitcase I don’t have into the trunk and my shivering outside for those few minutes – and we are off.

The meter reads $75.75 before we have left the airport. Being a savvy traveler I question this and my Syrian taxi-driver, a student of Physical Chemistry, tells me that his radio works better when the meter is tripped, that’s all. He has locked the doors from his console. “Click!”

We roll up at Enterprise Kenmount, a saving of $164 for me at the cost of a $30 cab ride and, I am ashamed to say, a five-dollar banknote as a tip, and I wander inside, almost two hours ahead of schedule.

I am handed the keys to a Chevy Trax. Yes, I know. I’ve not heard of it either. Still, it’s a step up from Bill Brysoin’s Hyundai Excreta, Bright red with a strong frame that can easily carry the mass of a 370-page user manual up the hills. I adjust the seats, the mirrors, note the odometer reading, and leave the user-manual on the seat; it will make for light reading during supper, and I head off looking for signs that announce “TCH West”.

There are no photos of this trip this day.

In the first place I am in a strange car on a strange highway, and in the second place, I am on a strange highway in a strange car. On top of that I have an urge to get to Clarenville before sunset.

So.

My first impressions of The Land, as I have heard it mentioned. It is pretty. Temperature outside is 7c but I am snug in the little red car, just call me Noddy . The sky is clear, the sun is alternately warm on my arm and blinding in my face.

The drive swings through all points of the compass between due south to due north, so the sun is zig-zagging all over the place. I set cruise control at 104 Km/hr and suppress the urge to wave at everyone who flashes past me.

Once we get past a major exit (was it Conception Bay South or Placentia?) the road settles down from its boring two-lanes each way into an exciting three-lane switch-back configuration.

The first hundred or so kilometres featured pot holes. Four to six feet long and about a foot wide, where the asphalt had peeled right off the surface down to the concrete bed. Some drivers make a game out of this, a sort of slalom, but I think that it just increases their chances of losing control at a combined speed of 200 Km/hour.

Basically, if you are driving uphill, you have two lanes and people can whoosh past you at the traditional speed differential of about three kilometres per hour, but once you have crested the hill, you get only one lane, and the other direction (from their point of view, “uphill”) get two lanes.

The exciting bit comes when the highway crosses a bridge at the foot of a valley, for there only two lanes are provided, so we all squeeze into a small space, those of us straining at the leash to overtake on the uphill stretch, and those of us too scared to touch the brakes in case the idiot behind us rear-ends us into the traffic approaching us with once again a combined speed of 200 Km/hr. But there again, maybe I’m paranoid because Mister Puzey was such a good Physics Teacher.

The hills - nay mountains - are impressive chunks of rock cloaked in green. We don’t have anything like this in Ontario, not even if you include the Niagara Escarpment. The lakes are blue, deep blue. Ultramarine in my little box of water-colours, it was, when I was but eight years old.

It is Pretty. There is no other word for it.

After the Highway 210 turn off at Goobies (traffic heading towards Saint Pierre and Miquelon), traffic dies right off and I spend more time staring from side to side. The island is called “The Rock” and my first impressions are that it is made of rock. The vegetation has done a pretty good job of breaking it down and the microbes and earthworms have done a pretty good job of building it up. Small white rocks surround each lake, and big brown rocks stand guard over them.

It has been a good introductory drive. I recognize many of the place names and route destinations from my studies of the various maps and travel guides. It feels like home.

I arrive in Clarenville a shade under two hours after leaving St John’s, locate the motel and check in, and then head off to cruise the downtown for somewhere to eat.

I’ve not gone half a kilometre when I spot a Sobeys, the most expensive supermarket on the planet, but who knows when next I will get a chance to buy a bag of apples (at over seven dollars as it turns out, but very sweet) and a medium-size pop bottle to replace the one that the nice man at Porter Airlines stole from me this morning.

I cruise Clarenville three times. It boils down to a toss-up between the Chinese restaurant or an Irish pub, so instead I locate a family restaurant attached to a motel where Sweet Thing (not her real name) helps me pick out local items from the menu.

Turns out that all the seafood is local, but I can get fish and chips any time I want in Toronto. While she reads the menu to me, I read it myself and come across – TaDa! – Cod Cheeks and Cod Tongues. I have a sneaking suspicion that these are the only parts of the cod that they are not allowed to put in Fish Fingers, but I order them anyway, with a baked potato. They also do Jiggs Dinner , and to save you clicking on that link I have pasted, here “is a traditional meal commonly prepared and eaten on Sundays”, but it’s not Sunday, so. It’s Tuesday, right? And Jiggs Dinner is served here only on Thursdays. So! Welcome to Newfoundland.

A good meal, and I eat it all, scraping my plate with my fork. I even ate the coleslaw salad. And the Touton (deep-fried dough served with molasses). This is almost as good as France. But it is not pronounced as my French would pronounce it “too-tonne”, it is “toe-tans”, and I know I still haven’t got it right.

Back to the motel where in the true spirit of Bill Bryson I announce the toilet open by snipping the sanity ribbon with a pair of nail scissors, unplug the air unit, the controls being ineffective, swing the fridge door wide open to make an effective heating unit, and head off to the breakfast nook to stock up on bowls of fruit cheerios and packets of oatmeal biscuits to see me through the night.

The bathtub is huge – wide and deep – so I turn on the taps, turn off the taps, press the plug in place and then turn on the taps again. It is a matter of seconds to squeeze a bottle of hair shampoo into the tub, my having no other legitimate use for it, grab my $2.20 newspaper, and settle in to do the crossword puzzle mentally.

It turns out that Newfoundland, like every other state and province in the western world, owns a young couple who “escaped death by seconds” in Las Vegas. A sad story, the shootings I mean, it is true, but sadder still for the hundreds of local reporters who have to put a local slant on the story.

And so, as Pepys said, to bed.

Search