MONDAY 22 August

(Note:  There are 8 photos for this post, but they are all associated with the 2^nd day.)

Today was a travel day for us, and we had a longer way to drive than usual.  That meant and early start and that, in turn, meant no coffee or breakfast.  We targeted a 9:00 AM departure, and actually pulled out of the campground at 8:58 AM.

Our destination was Sanger Memorial RV Park in Grand Falls – Windsor, Newfoundland, a 424 km (~263 mi) drive and the closest city to half way between St. John’s and Channel-Port-aux-Basque.  Our mapping and navigation devices said it would take ~ 4-1/2 hours.

Our hitch up procedure went smoothly, as it pretty much has since we developed our checklists and started using them.  We had nice weather for the drive, starting out cloudy and cool and eventually becoming sunny and a bit warm.  Except for a couple of miles on either end of the trip, our route was the Trans-Canada Highway (Hwy-1) west.  This stretch of the T-CH is very good, some of the best road we have driven in Newfoundland.  It’s posted 100 km/hr maximum for most of this length except in Terra Nova National Park where it’s typically 80 or 90 km/hr.  There were the usual slowdowns to 70 or even 60 km/hr at major road intersections or areas of roadside development, but the navigation systems take that into account when estimating arrival time.

We pulled into Sanger Memorial RV Park at 13:38.  Linda took care of our registration and we were in our pull-through, full-services site (#43) by 13:50.  (Our What 3 Words location is “handles.mixers.restored”.)  We had to level side-to-side about 1.5”, but we got that done fairly easily and completed the rest of our un-hitching/arrival routine.  The temperature was in low 80’s (F) by now and even though the humidity was comfortable, we turned on the main heat-pump in cooling mode.  Being on a 50A electrical service, we also turned on the electric element for the water heater.

We were hungry by this point, but Linda wanted to get a load of laundry started, so she stripped the beds and headed over to the laundry room, which was only three sites away from ours’.  With a load in the washer, she made a breakfast meal for “linner”; Bagel sandwiches with Just Egg patties, cheese, and sausage patties.  (All vegan, of course.)  Just part of the program to use up refrigerated and frozen items as much as possible before getting on the ferry to Nova Scotia this Friday.

Getting the laundry done made a more hectic afternoon than either us would have liked, but it needed to be done and our next/earliest opportunity would be on Saturday, but more likely next Monday.  If nothing else, you gotta have clean underwear.  ?  The laundry room only had two washing machines and one dryer.  The washing machines took quarters but ran a load in about 30 minutes.  The dryer did not take any money or have a card slot or keypad for a code.  A sign said to go to the office and pay the 3$ cost for a cycle, which was ~70 minutes.

As I was getting ready to walk to the office to take care of this, a notification popped up that a good friend of ours had died in an accident, with a suspicious link.  The notification appeared to be from Messenger, the messaging app that Facebook uses, but I don’t, because almost every message I’ve received proved to be bogus.  It turned out that I gotten a similar message a week or so ago, but I thought it had come from the person rather than being about them.  As I was walking to the office, I got a call from our friend Pat letting me know that both of these notifications were bogus.  Indeed, later in the day a third one popped up for yet another friend.  The commonality among all of these, beyond Messenger, was that they were all members of the two converted bus groups we belong to.  It appeared to me that someone ‘s account got hacked (which is why I hate Messenger) and the hacker gained access to their address book and was , perhaps, successful in then hacking additional account.  I’ve done surprisingly well not using Facepuke while on this trip.  I should delete my account, but there are groups I belong to that I find genuinely useful and interesting, including “Camping Eastern Canada.”

Like Pippy Park CG in St. John’s, Sanger Memorial RV Park is a municipal campground that is part of a larger day-use park along the north side of the Exploits River.  Trails from the campground lead down to the river front, and we went for stroll while our laundry was in the dryer.  The campground had password protected Wi-Fi, with Wi-Fi access point (or router) in/near the laundry building, but the signal was weak, we had trouble connecting some of our devices, and the data transfer rate was very slow when we were able to use it at all.  I used the “inSSIDer” program on my laptop to examine the Wi-Fi signals in the area.  Indeed, the Park Wi-Fi was a single radio on the 2.4 GHz band, with a weak signal and a low data rate.  Yeah, that’s not gonna work too well.

We were admittedly “spoiled” after the Wi-Fi at Pippy Park, even with the connectivity issues we eventually encountered, and needed to recalibrate our expectations.  Our cellular signal was also weak, but we were able to use our phones to get to the Internet and hotspot them to get my computer online.  Our iPads were fine, and never seem to have any difficulty connecting to anything.

We had a light dinner:  garlic hummus with chips, and a bowl of fresh fruit and then went for another stroll around the campground.  Another airstream had pulled in during the afternoon (making three in our section of the campground) and parked two sites down from us.  The trailer, and the white Ford F-250 looked familiar.  The door was open so we shouted “hello.”  Sure enough, it was Don and Soon, who we first met at the Gros Morne – Norris Point KOA.  It turned out that the had been at Pippy Park CG the entire time we were there, in the same section of the campground as us, but we never crossed paths.  They had also been to L’Anse-aux-Meadows around the same time we were.  Like us, they were headed to Grand Codroy RV/Tent Camping Park, just north of Channel-Port-aux Basques, to catch the ferry back to North Sydney, Nova Scotia.  There reservation was for the next day (24^th); ours is for the 26^th.  Newfoundland is a big place, but a small world.

 

TUESDAY 23 August

I was up early, in part to see if I could connect to, and actually use, the rather anemic park Wi-Fi.  Before going to bed last night, I had started downloading the 14 app updates pending on my iPad Pro and left it on and plugged in to charge.  This morning, seven of them had completed.  I was still connected to the Park Wi-Fi, but had to reconnect to the iStore and initiate the remaining updates.  All of them completed successfully, albeit extremely slowly.

PHOTO – 300x323_parasol-whitetop_SMRVPk…  We saw this flowering plant while walking around Sanger Memorial RV Park and Gorge Park.  Google Lens identified it as Parasol Whitetop.

I made a cup of coffee while waiting for my iPad to finish updating.  When my iPad was done, I finished a multi-Sudoku game I had started last night.  With that done, I returned to working on the blog post for this past Sunday.  The post was written but I still needed to select and edit photos.  My initial impression of them on Sunday was not very favorable.  But with the passage of 36 hours, and having better (darker) light conditions in which to work, I managed to pick and process 14 of them.  Again, it was a cloudy day and the lighting was not ideal, but I was satisfied with my choices and manipulations (which I try to not overdo, other than straightening and cropping).

 

Today was my sister’s 67^th birthday, so we both sent her “happy birthday” wishes via text message.  It’s not as nice as getting a card in the mail, but Linda has found keeping up with cards to the grand-daughters to be a challenge.  In the past, we had an app that allowed us to create a postcard, image on one side, text and address on the other, apply a personal stamp, and have it printed and mailed from a business in San Diego, California.  The owner never made any real profit from it, had reached his mid-70’s, and shut it down this year so he could travel.  We couldn’t fault him for that, but we miss that service as it allowed us to send Mads a post card once a week like clockwork, and wanted to do the same for Sadie.

 

 

 

We decided to redo our COVID-19 tests this morning.  We were both negative.  We’ve been feeling back to normal, more or less, for a week now, but it was a relief to have objective evidence that we are not sick or contagious.

 

 

 

 

Our son, daughter-in-law, and two youngest grand-daughters got home on Sunday from their 3-week trip to Banff National Park (Parks Canada) and back.  The girls had Monday to settle back into their home routine, but were anxious to talk to us.  We Facetime with them when we can, but our Internet connection at Sanger Memorial RV Park would not support that, so this was voice call only.  Both girls seemed to have genuinely enjoyed their “camping” trip out west, which was very nice for us to hear.   We were impressed with how much Sadie’s speech has improved, but then, she’s quick to point out that she is  “almost four.”

After our telephone chat with the grand-daughters, we drove the short distance west to see Grand Falls Windsor and visit the Salmonid Interpretation Center.  This is where a non-profit organization was created to work with the hydroelectric company and the provincial and national government to reclaim the Exploits River as a significant habitat for the Atlantic Salmon.  This involved cleaning up the river and creating an infrastructure that would allow Atlantic Salmon to get around hydroelectric dams as well as natural obstructions and reach spawning grounds much deeper in the river system.  The hydroelectric dams, starting with Bishop Falls, had cut off access to most of the river and its tributaries, but this project resulted in the Salmon reaching places in the watershed that could not reach naturally.

The Salmonid Interpretation Center explains all of this and allows visitors to view some of the “fish ladder” structure, including a subsurface viewing area into a holding tank.  But the tank serves another, very important, purpose.  Using an automated video recording system, the fish in the holding area, which are headed upstream, are counted every hour and then released to continue their journey.  Not that long ago, they only counter 1,200 fish getting to this point.  This year they have counted 45,000 and they believe the watershed is capable of getting that number up to 100,000 or more.

There was a short trail to a viewing area, and I was able to get a few photos with my phone of the waterfall.  It’s been an unusually dry summer here, and the center staff “apologized” for the low water levels and flow rate.  We still though it was impressive, but based on the film we watched, it must really be something with the snow melt and spring rains.

There used to be two towns here; Grand Falls, located south of the T-CH, and Windsor, located north of the T-CH.  In fact, the guy in the trailer next to us, explained that the two towns used to be divided by the Trans-Newfoundland Railroad tracks.  Once the railroad ceased to operate, the tracks were removed.   They amalgamated on January 1, 1991 to become the single town of Grand Falls-Windsor.  It wasn’t until we found this out that the name made any sense.  But then it seemed to me that it was hyphenated incorrectly, and should be Grand Falls – Windsor, but it’s not.  (Note the spaces on either side of the long hyphen.)  The area, especially the Exploits River, is now well known for its Atlantic salmon and actions taken to address their sustainability.

From the Salmonid Interpretation Center, we drove to the Irving Oil fuel station in the Grand Falls part of town.  On the way, we took a detour through the downtown area.  It was bigger than we expected, and quite nice, especially the Town Hall.  The fill up at the gas station was a record for this trip; 108 L and 210$.  It will be similar tomorrow, as we have slightly farther to drive than we did yesterday.  Our neighbor at the RV Park said there used to be a marker about 10 miles west of here for the mid-point of the Newfoundland Trans-Canada Highway.  The highway was completed in 1965 and was a big deal.

We still had some items to launder, so I handled that chore for a change, which gave Linda a chance to sit outside and read.  I took my iPad and sat in the laundry room, where I had enough Internet access to play a few games and catch up on some blog posts using Feedly.  We won’t need to do laundry again until we get to the KOA in Halifax, Nova Scotia six days from now.

Dinner was a simple meal of vegan Italian sausage on bun (with mustard) and baked beans.  We always keep an eye on the weather forecast, so we knew that rain would likely start around 7:30 this evening and continue through the night and into the morning.  Since tomorrow is another long travel day, we will be leaving a bit earlier than usual in the morning.  To minimize having to work in the rain tomorrow, we went out after dinner and drained the waste tanks, stowed the sewer hoses and adapters, disconnected and stowed the shore water system components, and put our camping chairs away.  I also installed the stinger in the truck and lined it up with the 3P hitch.  We were just finishing around 7:30 PM when it started to sprinkle.

The rest of the evening was spent doing what we often do, with Linda reading a book and me working on photos and blog text.  I did get a text message from Keith-the-lawn-care-guy with a photo of the barn showing the vapor barrier “house wrap” being installed and siding waiting to go over it.  I had not bugged Chuck-the-builder in a couple of weeks, so I texted him to request a couple of update photos.

 

 

 

 

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