Six Hours in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada
A Transatlantic Signal and Two Beloved Dog Breeds
If you’re just tuning into the Family Gap Year, this is the third installment of the journey north to the Arctic. First, we hit a pedestrian before boarding the Norwegian Star. Next, I accidentally discovered remains of a steamship-turned-3-megaton-bomb embedded in a church wall in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
This month finds the family Connors still aboard the Norwegian Star in Canadian waters. If you’re curious to know what the landscape of the North Atlantic looks like, take a sheet of white paper and hold it in front of your face. For a week.
Since there was nothing to look at out the windows, the boys kept busy by playing a grotesquely complicated, hours-long game called Deep Madness, the box of which took up at least twenty percent of Tim’s suitcase.
That left me with nothing to do but talk to strangers. I met a wide variety of characters including: barefoot cafeteria guy, disillusioned architect man, Putin’s-not-so-bad dude, and I-can’t-stand-him-so-I-live-in-California-and-just-cruise-with-him-twice-per-year lady. Her husband lived in Arizona, and I wasn’t certain whether or not he was going to get a little nudge over the rail some night.
We landed at the port of Newfoundland about three hours too early in the morning for the boys, so we made a plan to meet up around lunchtime and I headed into the city on my own. About a block from the cruise terminal, you’ll find Water Street. Ostensibly, it’s the tourist hub of the city, lined with restaurants and shops and tour companies. At 9 AM everything was still closed, and had the feel of a vacant movie set.
I headed inland and uphill to visit the colorful houses of Jellybean Row—
and the two cathedrals of the city, both named St. John’s—
where I wonder if I discovered a local scandal in the peculiar stained glass window pictured above. The upper portion depicts a former priest of the parish. The lower portion shows a cloven-hooved Satan suggesting something inappropriate to Jesus while pointing to the lowest of three angels. The caption reads: And in memory of his leadership and given by one of his former choir boys. Just me or does it seem an odd choice of topic for a choir boy to a priest? Innocent, or the whiff of scandal?
I met the boys at a game shop, and we headed for Signal Hill.
As the easternmost city in North America, St. John’s was a natural launching or landing spot in experiments to bring Europe closer. In 1901, Guglielmo Marconi received the first radio signal, a Morse code “S,” from Cornwall, England. For the fascinating story of how Marconi’s invention helped to capture the North London Cellar Murderer and his mistress as they fled to New York, check out Erik Larson’s Thunderstruck. In 1919, St. John’s was the departure point for the first nonstop, transatlantic flight.
We liked it for the view.
On the walk back to the ship, I lost the boys in the game shop again. I walked to Harbourside Park and was thunderstruck myself when I encountered these dog statues. For the first time in my life I put the dog breeds and place names together: Labrador and Newfoundland.
The two breeds of dog go back about 500 years to a time when European fishermen visited the shores with their dogs. Their interbreeding yielded water dogs of gargantuan proportions which became the forerunners of the Newfoundland, and a smaller variety which became the present popular breed of Labrador Retrievers.
On my return to the Norwegian Star, I discovered Tim had reckoned an ingenious way to sneak some less expensive, shore-bought alcohol on board, because that’s the type of classy cruisers we are. He filled one of our special water bladders for hiking with Bailey’s and mixed us some delicious post-excursion cocktails.
But the joke was on him. Three months later, his water still tasted like Bailey’s.
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Fun read and the dog statues are so delightful!