Let's Start at the Very Beginning...

We had a 2 hour
delay at the
ferry in North
Sydney. So we
took a photo.
Look closely
and you can
tell how
stuffed the
car and
truck are.
People around
us were laugh-
ing at us.
That seems to happen a lot.

This is a synopsis of the trip from Habitant to St.John's.
Yeah, I know that it is 2 week old news, but like the song says,
"Let's start at the very beginning..." This is from an email I
sent to some of you when I was back online, if you've already
read it, too bad.

We had a really lucky trip. We packed the car and
truck on Saturday afternoon, and only had a few other
odds and ends to stuff in on Sunday morning during
that torential rain storm. We had planned to leave
about 10am, but we didn't actually get on the road
for Sydney until 2pm, so we had good clear weather
until Truro. This was good as both cars were so full,
we had no rear view mirror and neither of us could see
to shoulder check. Heavy rain would have made the
drive so bad. We got one spot of heavy rain outside
Bible Hill and then we seemed to be ahead of it again.
Our late start meant we arrived in North Sydney about
9pm, just before dark, and we got lost looking for the
motel, and got caught up in fireworks, but made it
there eventually.
We were also a day after the bomb scare, but that
mostly interferred with the other ferry timetable, and
we were only 2 hours delayed. We didn't even know
about it until the morning we were going to the ferry
as we hadn't heard the news while we were driving to
Sydney. I was sitting in the line for the ticket gate
with Peter in the truck behind me wondering why there
was such a big line, and starting to get worried that
we wouldn't make our reservations when the radio
announced that there were backups at Marine Atlantic
due to a bomb scare. Then I watched a boat leave the
dock and wondered if it was mine, and I asked a worker
if I was going to miss my boat because I was still in
line when I should have been checked in, and he just
laughed and said my boat wasn't even at the dock yet.
The Port Aux Basques boat was so backed up because it
runs back and forth every day, and apparently they
were loaded with people when the threat was called in.
During the delay to search the whole terminal, they
had to give the people on board free food and that
meant they didn't have any food for the return trip.
All the stores are loaded from Nova Scotia so the
ferry was delayed even more in NL while they sourced
food for the trip back. The Argentia ferry only
travels 3 times a week, so the 12 hour delay wasn't a
big problem with schedules. We did luck out, all in
all.
The ferry was fogged in the whole trip, but the seas
were calm and the temperature was warm. Mostly I
slept, after serval days of last minute house things
and packing and the stress of trying to stuff it all
in the vehicles, sleep was what I needed.
At this end, we had reservations in Placentia for a
motel because we were meant to arrive about 9:30pm and
I didn't want to drive to St John's and arrive at
11pm. We actually got off the ferry at 12:30am, so I
was really glad we had opted to stay there for the
night and travel in the morning. A lot of people
though seemed to be driving straight through, and it
was a dark, foggy, winding twisty road. I was very
glad I wasn't part of that traffic.
We arrived here the day before the Big Rain storm that
washed out the Placentia Highway and rerouted the
ferry to Port Aux Basques so we were very lucky to not
have to deal with that headache. It was a beautiful
day when we got here and we unloaded the car and
truck, and then the next day it poured rain. But we
live on top of a hill, so no flooding.