August 30; 38km; 837M Vertical

St. John’s to Cape Spear and return.
We polished off the formal bit of the tour with a ride to Cape Spear, the most easterly point of North America. True to form the lighthouse and the ocean were invisible due to heavy fog. Five minutes after we arrived another cyclist, just finishing his Cross-Canada tour, showed up. He was accompanied by his wife (in a car) who had a bottle of Champagne. We had a bottle of Screech. We toasted everybody and had our pictures taken by 5 different cameras. Then as we partied the fog cleared for 30 minutes and we got our pictures of the most easterly point before heading back to St. John’s.
The final stats for the trip Victoria to St. John‘s: 8027km distance and 50,473M vertical climbed.

August 29; 96km; 905M vertical

Whitbourne to St. John’s
On this, our last full day on the road, we had one of our toughest days of the trip. We spent all day ploughing into a 25kph head wind. Then as we climbed one particularly high hill we entered the fog which lasted the rest of the day. The fog immediately coated our glasses with water however the road remained dry. The headwind whistled through our helmets which meant we couldn’t hear anything. It was fortunate the Trans-Canada Highway in NL has such a good shoulder as we really couldn’t see anything or hear anything. Things seemed even worse when TimG got two punctures in 5 km. After having only 1 puncture in 12 weeks it was a truly unlucky day.
We arrived in St. John’s at 5:15, cold, wet and miserable. We found the Wades house with no problem and we were met at the day by Sue with towels, and Brian with the beer. It was nice to have a home cooked meal again.

August 28; 103 km, 1173M vertical; 15C E.wind

Clarenville to Whitbourne
Second last day on the road and the bubble burst today. After a week of good road and good conditions, we suffered today. We have taken the Trans-Canada Highway across Newfoundland and we have been impressed with the good road and decent shoulder we had to ride on. Until today I had NL leading the provinces for road conditions but NL took a hit today. We had a strong crosswind or head wind all day. Twice the crosswind blew me off the road. As the big trucks went by we either got hit by a blast or sucked along by a vacuum. All this was made worse by putting a rumble strip on a narrow shoulder which absolutely ruined the road for cyclists. At times we were expected to ride along a 4 inch strip between the rumble strip and the gravel. I’m good, but not that good. At one point when I pulled over for a photo break, I had to confess it was more of a cool off break. I was imagining all the things I would do to the engineer who designed this stretch of road. The narrow shoulder and debris on the road meant we could not watch the scenery, but the TCH did open up today with nice vistas of the terrain around the highway. We finally made it to Whitbourne at 5:30 and the nice lady at the information booth set us up with a decent room and a nice meal.

Note to Don: I carry a Fujifilm E550 digital camera and a 9" Fujitsu Life book. The camera has 6.3 pixels resolution. We take about 10 shots per day and download them to my PC every night. From the PC we upload 3 or 4 to the blog every day.

August 27; 148km, 1437m vertical; overcast

Gander to Clarenville
Three days and 325km to go. There didn’t appear to be anywhere on the map between 90km and 145km to stay at and 90km was not enough so we decided to do the 145km to Clarenville. It was a foggy start and visibility was poor so photo opportunities were rare. We had been warned that the rest of journey would be a lot hillier than the last three days through the central region of the island and it was. Fortunately, it did not rain and the SW winds of the last few days had died down so our progress south was a lot easier than we thought it might be. We arrived at the Visitor’s Centre in good time and managed to get a motel room in town close to a restaurant and a pub which is where we are off to right now for a well earned beer or three. Bye bye.

August 26; 106km; 723M vertical

Grand Falls-Windsor to Gander
We woke up to steady rain so we had a leisurely breakfast and started off at 10. The rain had stopped but the road was wet when we started however we enjoyed a somewhat level road and a tail wind for the first 40km. The road got hillier but the wind helped us out and we got to Gander at 2:30 PM. This is the soonest we had arrived anywhere and it left us with the whole afternoon to site see. We then toured the aviation museum and airport at Gander.

August 25; rest day in Grand Falls- Windsor

August 24: 106km; 533M vertical; 30°C

Springdale to Grand Falls-Windsor
We had a light day planned, with just a short hop to Badger but we decided to head for Grand Falls - Windsor today and take tomorrow as a rest day. The first 10 km of our day headed directly into the west wind as we returned from Springdale to the Trans-Canada Highway (TCH). Our average speed was 19kph as opposed to yesterday’s average of 28. A tale wind does make life better.
At our first stop of the day we met up with Bess, an elderly lady who has ridden from BC to Newfoundland this summer. She will spend the winter in St. John’s and ride back to BC next summer. She camps out most nights and seems to cover as much ground as us each day. We have been meeting her for the last 3 days and we will probably see her again before St. John’s. The TCH has closed in and we see trees, tress, and more trees, with the occasional stream crossing the highway.

August 23; 131km 641m vertical; warm and sunny, strong W. wind.

Deer Lake to Springdale
We stayed at a nice comfortable B&B in Deer Lake and chucking out time was 9:30, unlike the normal 11 or 12am, so we made an early start. It wasn’t long before we were fair whizzing along the highway aided by a strong west wind. After tea breaks at a couple of gas stations along the way we managed the 131km to Springdale at a respectable average of 28.3kph. This may not put us in the Tour de France league but two old geezers flaked out on a motel bed are impressed. There were not many photo opportunities because, unlike the previous days with many scenic views, today was spent riding with dense forest on both sides.
One point of interest turned out to be a crashed caravan on the opposite side of the road and we were travelling so fast we were over 100yds past it before we decided to go back and get a picture. No sooner were we back at the caravan taking pics than a motorcyclist stopped and wandered over to take a picture and while I was talking to him another one had stopped and walked over. TimB is stood 20yds further away and had been waiting for me to get out of the way and is now waiting for a crowd to move. Before any of us have finished a pick up truck driver towing a caravan stops thinking that this is a fresh accident site. He gets going again when he see that this is not the case and the rest of us move off quickly before we manage to stop all the traffic in both directions. It all seemed to be a bit Monty Pythonish. When we got to Springdale we visited the waterfront to see the sights.