Terri and Peter's RV Adventures

*Written on June 7th on a temporary computer, no photos available.

Yes, I cried myself to sleep last night and sleep couldn’t come soon enough. I know it sounds dramatic and maybe it is, but my deep sadness and disappointment in having a crushed laptop was more about losing my connection to you, my family and friends, during this trip and my freedom to creatively (hopefully) describe what I experience daily.

This morning I regrouped, spoke to Apple, determined the right MacBook Air to buy and found the closest outlet (not Halifax, although they have an Apple Store, another reason to move there and another reason why I like it so much): a Best Buy store in Sydney, on Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where we’ll land by ferry late Monday night. After talking to customer support and the store, they are holding one for me through Tuesday. In the meantime, I’m using Peter’s old laptop, a Microsoft Surface. So no photos until I’m up and running hopefully Wednesday, but who knows.

For now, I hope a 1,001 words is worth no pictures. I’ll just describe what we did and saw and if possible, add photos later, but no promises.

Yesterday, June 6th, we got an early start, which might have explained the snafu with my laptop. We knew we had a long, 6+ hour drive (8 with stops) and wanted to leave by 7 am. In my hurry to pack up, I leaned my backpack against the passenger side tire along with my purse just to get it out of the way. Since we were hitched, I didn’t think we’d be moving the truck until it was time to go. Well, Peter had a different idea but didn’t see my backpack. He moved the truck, dislodging my backpack and ran over my laptop inside the backpack. Communicating and being a team that does checks around the truck and RV before leaving are essential but there are always new situations that come up. This was a lesson for us both. But, let’s move on to what turned out to be a very long but interesting day.

I left Twillingate reluctantly. I could have stayed another day. It’s such a quaint fishing village with intriguing shops and an idyllic setting surrounded by rolling pine covered hills, bays, ponds, and ocean inlets dotted by islands. But drive we did. Down the arm back into the interior of Newfoundland, over to Deer Lake where we stopped at the visitor information center. We needed a referee to tell us if we should take an 80 mile roundtrip detour to Table Lands, a place that lets you see and walk on the mantle or crust of the Earth after billions of years of plate tectonic movements. Scientists used this place to learn more about how the Earth was formed and how plates and continents move. The information woman was so nice and suggested we drop the trailer in their parking lot and go as the road to Table Lands is windy with several steep hills. So we went.

The drive was spectacular: lush greenery, hobbit-like shaped mountains in the form of oversized mushrooms; rounded tops, green capped and punctuated by endless ponds, many offering shimmering reflections of the pine greenery around them. Each turn led to an even more beautiful vista. An hour later, we arrived at Table Lands. On one side, the mountains were covered in their finest greenery, on the other, the mountains and surrounding rocks were a debris field of an ocre/mustard color I’d never seen in nature before. These rocky mountainsides showed some signs of life with melting snows at the top generating waterfalls, but without the usual flowers, bushes or trees. Informational signs say the chemical make up of these rocks is so toxic that they cannot sustain most plant life. However, a moose didn’t get the memo. A fellow hiker on the trail had just seen a moose and the hiker eagerly showed me a picture he’d just taken.

While this wasn’t the same kind of high as finding icebergs, walking on the Earth’s mantle has kind of a cache I can throw around at cocktail parties (except I don’t go to cocktail parties).

Returning to the information center, we hitched up and faced a two hour drive to Codroy, located at the southwest corner of the province. We stopped at Corner Brook, the last large town before Port aux Basque, which is where the ferry dock is and 25 minutes past Codroy. There’s a Walmart in Corner Brook and thinking all Walmarts are the same (dumb American tourist assumption #496), I thought we could pick up a roast chicken and have a ready made meal when we got to camp. Wrong. No chicken and hardly anything I would want to put in my mouth. Only root vegetables and nothing organic. I haven’t given up on restricting myself to organic produce but my standards are dropping like a rock.

Getting desparate, we found a pizza place in the same parking lot and lo an behold, they had cauliflower crust pizza. We ordered dinner and while we waited, set up house in the Walmart parking lot, feeding the dogs and waiting for dinner. Just because I wanted to not feel sorry for myself, Peter agreed we should find a table in the restaurant rather than do take out. We were seated and ate like regular people before heading to our final destination: Grand Codroy Campground. Fortunately, Peter had found a second wind (all those Diet Cokes?) and aside from a few cloud bursts along the way, it was fairly good driving conditions. We arrived just before dark, around 9 pm. We’d been on the road 13 and a half hours, including stops.

Then I discovered my laptop was broken. I took to my bed, curled up in the fetal position and went to sleep, trying to convince myself that it could all be fixed. The little girl in me wasn’t having any of it. The philosopher in me thought I could simplify my life and return to pen and paper, and the attempted spiritual part of me said “f&%t it, you’ll figure it out in the morning. Just don’t do or say anything rash. It’s past your bedtime.”

So, here I am, the next day, probably not writing the most beautiful prose and not having the benefit of photos that I took along the way, but showing the resourcefulness my parents taught me. I’m grateful I have the inner and outer resources to buy a new laptop, I’m grateful for my spouse who didn’t make me talk about it last night and who offered me the use of his laptop this morning, and I’m grateful for the best traveling dogs anyone could ever hope for. I love my Cali and Lily. They are a pain and they are loves. I’m glad to be back online. Thanks for reading.