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.
It is a stark, chilly, windy place with some of the warmest people you’ll meet this side of Ireland.
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.
Goodnight from St. John’s and onwards to Cupid and Heart’s Delight tomorrow.




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