In August, Dave and I made the decision to visit NL and we booked our flights once I'd managed to purchase a couple of tickets to Come From Away in Gander, NL on September 12th. I had tried to get tickets in Vancouver for earlier in the year and they were charging $306 per ticket. I was outraged. And western NL has been on our radar for a couple of decades. Time to dive in!
We started by booking our first 2 nights of accommodation at the Exploits Motel (right off an exit from TCH). Our plan had been to stay one night, but we could not get accommodation in Gander on the night of September 11th. Something to do with a 25th anniversary of a huge event in the world??? Instead of going to Gander, we headed north of Botwood and ended up in Leading Tickle. This particular peninsula did not have a "name" (like Avalon, Baie-Verte, etc) but I did very much feel it could have been the "bay of islands" - there were hundreds of islands visible from the town of Leading Tickle. We started with breakfast in Botwood and even at 8 am it was "men's coffee" at the cafe - I thought I was the only woman in the place until I met the cook, a woman who looked slightly younger than me. Food was good (I didn't realize how good until I'd had 2 weeks in NL!) and I asked her how long it took her to get the men to push their chairs in before departure (not all of them bothered) - she shook her head and said some were untrainable.
We had a couple of nice hikes - one at a campground that had just closed for the season. The operator said they'd had a very busy summer. We got some great views out towards Notre Dame Bay. Another hike was a supposed "coastal walk" - didn't really get to see much coast. The surprise discovery was the giant squid that was captured here more than a century ago in 1878. We just happened upon this tiny park in a very remote area of NL where a replica of the squid was on display.
