1) the end of North America is here – Cape Spear – you can not go any further east in all of North America

Before heading west, G and I flew the 3 hours from Toronto last week to Canada’s youngest province, Newfoundland and Labrador (which entered Confederation in 1949). Newfoundland and Labrador is a vast province with roughly 500,000 residents, 90% of whom live on the island.

Newfoundland is a place of firsts:

• the first ever transatlantic cable was laid here;
• the first woman to ever cross the Atlantic by plane, Amelia Earhart, left from here;
• Marconi received the first ever wireless transmission here (at Signal Hill) (you have him to thank for wifi);
• Europeans – the Vikings actually – first landed here at L’Anse aux Meadows (which we’re visiting later next week) 400-odd years before that charatan Columbus ‘found’ America.

If you get the chance; visit – you shan’t be disappointed. And when you come, make sure you ‘kiss the cod’; try some “screech”; dine on ‘cod tongues with scrunchions’; have a ‘touton’ alongside your breakfast eggs; and visit George Street in St. John’s, which – in another first – has the most pubs per squre foot of any street in all of North America.

5) shooting Battery Road from Fort Amhurst on the south side of the Narrows

Goodnight from St. John’s and onwards to Cupid and Heart’s Delight tomorrow.