Day 120: Notre Dame, NFLD -> Terra Nova, NFLD

Date: Tuesday, September 12, 2023
Start: Notre Dame, NFLD (Notre Dame Provincial Park)
End: Terra Nova, NFLD (Newman Sound Campground)
Distance: 131km

I woke to a surprisingly calm morning.  I had been expecting rain, but instead found a cloudy day and no water falling.  Not wanting to waste this opportunity, I immediately started packing up and tearing down.  I moved my bike and gear up to a spot closer to the comfort station (where the bathrooms and laundry room were) and set some of my tent up in the heated laundry room to dry.  If I could keep it dry today I'd be setup better for what I expected to be a very wet day!

While the tent dried I ate breakfast and packed up.  It took a while, but the tent was dry enough to go back in with everything else by about 9:15am and so I packed it all up and headed out at around 9:30am.  It might have been sooner, but a number of people had taken an interest in my bike and stopped to talk to me about it and my trip.

The big downside to the morning was how cold it was.  The forecast was calling for a high of 12C.  This meant that I was in for both a cold AND wet day.  And once I hit the highway I learned I was also going to have to deal with a fierce headwind.  It was a perfect combination for an intensely difficult day.

And sure enough it was.  I wasn't far from Notre Dame when the rain started.  I tossed on my rain jacket to stay warm and kept biking.  After about 25km I reached the town of Appleton but decided not to stop.  I had a spot picked out in Gander for lunch and didn't want to doddle and risk biking into the evening.

Other than Appleton there wasn't much to see on the highway.  And the biking was miserable.  My hands were already too cold to use my phone and the rain was persistent.  After another 15km I reached Gander and decided to duck into town and head to Walmart to stock up on food for my last few days.  I was in and out as quickly as I could.  I then biked down the street to a restaurant/bakery that I prayed would be open.  Sure enough I was granted that small mercy and stepped into Rosie's Restaurant and Bakery.

Their baked goods were very tempting, but I'd just stocked up on groceries so opted just to eat lunch and head out.  I ordered a hot turkey sandwich and it was the perfect comfort food for such a long and difficult day of cycling.  I ate it greedily and warmed up in the process.  When it was all done I paid and hit the road.  It was 2pm and I still had 90km to go.  In ideal conditions that would take 4.5 hours...but it was not an ideal day.

While in Gander I had noticed a sign for a Commonwealth War Graves cemetery on the edge of town.  This perplexed me.  The Commonwealth War Graves Commission maintains a the burial places of soldiers in WWI and WWII.  I had thought they were mostly concentrated in Europe, North Africa, and Southeast Asia.  I didn't know any existed in Canada.  I was curious to see how it compared to the many Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries I'd visited in Europe the year before, and so I turned onto a dirt road off the highway.  The cemeteries I'd visited in Europe are all immaculately maintained, headstones all perfectly arranged and maintained.  What I found in Gander was a civilian cemetery with a section in the back with the headstones I was familiar with.  I'd never seen one of these sites where it was also partly as civilian cemetery.  The grounds was nowhere as well maintained as in Europe.  The servicemen buried here were mostly from WWII, almost all had died in airplane crashes at the Gander airport, and all but 20 were Canadian (the others were British and Australian).  Of note is that this place was not Canadian soil when the cemetery was established.  Newfoundland didn't join Canada till 1949, so this was technically foreign soil for even the Canadians buried here.  The cemetery did have the iconic Cross of Sacrifice that mark almost every Commonwealth War Graves burial site.

I've made it sound like this site isn't well maintained.  I'm not sure that's true.  In Europe those cemeteries are hallowed ground and are incredibly manicured.  But those places in Europe are easier to maintain and make beautiful.  Newfoundland is a rocky, rugged, desolate kind of place.  The uneven ground and lack of plants and trees actually reflects the place these people were buried.  Anything else would be fake.  And so while it didn't feel equal to its European counterparts, I think it felt appropriate.

I went back to the highway and started for Terra Nova National Park where I planned to camp.  The temperature was cool enough that I needed my jacket.  It kept raining and so I was wet.  To make the temperatures even chillier the wind got worse in the afternoon.  It was a direct 20km/h headwind with gusts.  The hills also got more serious after Gander.  The TransCanada in Newfounland isn't so much a highway as it is a roller coaster.  You could put a rail down the middle of it and you would have the world's longest roller coaster.  I swear at one point the wind and rain was so bad that I was upside down.

At one point I passed by the town of Gambo, Newfoundland.  Perhaps best known as the hometown of Joey Smallwood, it was the spot where I once again reached a piece of the coastline and got to see something!  The rain had died down for the time being and I stopped at an overlook and took in the sights.

From here there are no more pictures for the day.  It started raining and didn't stop until I reached the campground at Terra Nova National Park.  But the rest of the ride was wet, cold, windy, and hilly.  It took me SOOOOO long to get to Terra Nova.  There are so many things that grind away at you in these conditions.  I've detailed all of the cold, wet, windy ones...but things like the noise of cars and trucks is much louder when they're kicking up water off the road.  You're constantly getting sprayed by the water they're kicking up as they go by, and its full of dust and dirt and so my glasses would get dirty and it would be difficult to see.  I would also occasionally feel the grit in my teeth.  The feeling of water in my bike shoes and how it squished between my toes every time I pushed down on the pedals.  While the jacket and rain pants kept me warm, it also meant that sweat built up inside and so I was still soaking wet the entire day.  Do this for 10 hours and maybe you can start to understand it.

I reached Terra Nova National Park but was still 12km to the campground and kept going.  The hills didn't quit.  It was also starting to get dark.  I rode up to the registration kiosk at 7:20pm.  The sun was scheduled to sit at 7:32pm.  I registered, found my site, setup my tent, and then went to take one of the most needed showers of my life.  It wasn't luxurious, but it felt like heaven.  I especially needed it to get the chill out of my bones.  After the shower it was pitch black outside.  I ate by the light of my headlamp and - once again - ate only what didn't need cooking...which meant another night without my instant mashed potatoes.  I did manage to eat some mackerel though, so maybe the entire day was worth it.

As I ate the headlamp illuminated the moisture in the air.  With every spec of water lit up in the beam of my headlamp it looked like a snowstorm.  I jumped into my tent and just knew it was going to be a wet night.  Sure enough, I occasionally heard the pitter patter of rain drops playing across the rain fly as I slept.

This ride is a strong candidate for worst day of the entire trip.  I've had a few others that are in contention, but I seem to remember that at the end of most of those I had a place to stay with friends or family and so could get out of the weather and warm up.  This was the day my luck ran out in that department.  I wish I had more to talk about for sights or views or landscapes but I saw so very little due to the fog, clouds, and rain.  Perhaps one of the few consolations I came up with as I biked was that I had so few days that were like this on the trip.  They make you appreciate the good days.

Two days to go...