Robinsons to Port aux Basques, NL
Traditional territory of the Mi’kmaq and Beothuk
107 km
Cold rain, then sunshine and a lot of wind, 9 ºC
Woke up to more rain and the painstaking process of putting on slightly damp layers from yesterday. I hadn’t been able to find my gloves last night, and they turned up in the morning, soggy and chilly near the wet grass. As we started packing up, I realized my camera was broken and Asad realized a rear wheel spoke was broken. My camera was fixable with the tools we had; his rear wheel wasn’t.
We waited at the motel to secure a backup plan of taking the cross-Newfoundland DRL-LR bus to Port aux Basques, then biked 10 km on the wet highway to a gas station. At around 2 PM, Asad was outside working on his wheel (it had two broken spokes and a flat at that point) and a pickup truck pulled up that was headed to Port aux Basques. In fact, they worked on the ferry.
So that was our wheel-saving ride to the southwest coast of Newfoundland. We didn’t get any wild wind stories or any photos of the Long Range Mountains, but we also didn’t break Asad’s bike and we did make it off the island in one piece. We dried our gear in the ferry terminal’s sun beam and are currently falling asleep with nothing but the Gulf of St. Lawrence between us and mainland Canada.