Sunday, October 15, 2017

You are all familiar with the doors of cheap motels I am sure. There is a swinging clasp that restricts entry to anyone who weighs less than 170 lbs. But at least until you read this, it allowed you to drift off to sleep feeling safe on a Saturday night. In a cheap motel.

You are also familiar with the coat rack in the door alcove when you can try to hang the creases out of your Gabardine (or similar) coat after pressing it against the car seat all day, or storing it under a 4Kg bag of apples on the back seat.

Sweet Thing (not her real name) from the front desk showed me this trick last night.

A real handy way to keep the door open when you are lugging a ton of baggage in or out of the room.

Or, as in her case, entering the room of a recently-arrived tourist with a weird accent.

I know, I know, I’m going to have to drive back here to retrieve my coat next Wednesday ...

Note the indentation on the edge of the door, made by people like me who use the security device to wedge the door open when we are just trotting down the corridor to steal another half-dozen coffee-pods at five in the morning.

I tried to catch up with outstanding emails by noon, and at half-past one gave up and went out for a short drive to Holyrood, as it turns out.

I came across a depressing new development.

The ground is scraped-rock, and so looks like the out-castings of a slate mine.

The sky is a cloudy grey, with no wind to blow it away.

And the houses are a uniform dark grey vinyl siding, sometimes brown. Why can’t these people do what they do inland and use white, cream, primrose yellow or – horrors! – other pastel shades. Why pick the shade that says “blah!” like no other colour?

To make things worse, the streets have names like “Seaview”, “Harbourview” and the like, but unless you are sited on the north side of the road, right atop the cliff, all you see is other members of your housing development. May as well live in Brampton, you ask me.

I tooled along, and then slammed on the brakes.

For twelve days I have stopped at any place that advertised Jiggs Dinner, and wanted to put this place to the test too. I have been counting how many places advertise Jiggs Dinner and if you get there on a Thursday they say “We serve it only on Sundays” and if you get there on a Sunday they say “We serve it only on Thursdays”. If you go back there at dinner time on Thursday they say “We start serving at 11:00 a.m. and go on serving it until we run out”. When is that? “Oh, around about half past eleven”.

Well, let me tell you about the Station Diner in Holyrood .

First off they serve Jiggs Dinner all day Sundays. All day.

Second off they serve Jiggs Dinner all day Sundays. All day.

Third off they serve Jiggs Dinner all day Sundays. All day.

And so on.

The wait staff are charming and, I am sad to report, already married.

The tea pot is filled up repeatedly with hot water, and the milk jug is replenished.

Side orders of local foods are provided, and a take-out box for the bits of my Jiggs Dinner I couldn’t eat (because it came as a part of a bigger dish that included turkey breast, pease pudding, boiled potato, or it might have been roasted, carrot, stuffing, cranberry sauce. Then the waitress apologized for forgetting the beets, pickles etc and I told her “Mrwph Grthy Flbregy” because my mouth was full at the time.

The waitress brought me Scrunchions which are grossly mis-represented in the Wikitionary . I have tasted them and can tell you that Scrunchions are Raw Salt flavoured with Fried Pork Rind.

Since I hadn’t finished my main plate, and because she knew I was falling in love with her, the Diner, the street and the town, she fetched out of the kitchen Blueberry Cake with cream, and no, it’s not something you know. I’ve never tasted anything like it in my life.

No wait, there’s more! I read a book while I ate and drank and ate and burped politely. Chafe finished his term on the railways during the period I was going to school by train, three times a year, a journey of 230 miles that took nine hours each way, so I wallowed in more tea and history.

Amongst other things this book made note of how the railways linked the coves. We know already that the majority of settlements were along the coast, and that residents could communicate only by boat, and then only in good weather.

The railways in the southern part of the island allowed people to travel relatively quickly to and from St John’s and other major centres.

If you have following my path, or inspected a map of Newfoundland, you will see now that the Newfoundland highway system provides a half-dozen spines, with tendrils running off them.

This map shows the primary and secondary routes on the island. It follows closely the roads I drove in my ten days. I did not take #480 to Burgeo, for example. The Trans-Canada Highway is the major spine, with highways such as 430 running between Deer Lake and St Anthony

This map shows a small section of the Baie Verte Peninsula. Highway 414 heads westwards back through the town of Baie Verte to connect with highway 410, which itself springs off the Trans-Canada Highway at Sheppardville.

This same map shows a terminus at La Scie, where I stayed on the Sunday night, and spurs to Shoe Cove, Snooks Arm and Tilt Cove.

So the first phase of communication was by boat. The second phase, railways, put an end to that. The third phase, highways put an end to the second phase. An argument could be made that aircraft travel is a fourth phase.

Then there was a pictorial history of more modern times.

Doubly fascinating because I have been trying to track down why St George’s has an apostrophe in it’s name.

Wikipedia says “St. George's Bay - informally referred to as Bay St. George due to its French translation Baie St-George ...”

There is yet another Seal Cove. Everywhere a settler saw a seal haul itself onto a rock, they named the place “Seal Cove”.

Here is the diner. If it isn’t the old railway station it ought to be.

There you go!

Sunday.

Jiggs.

Right at the intersection of highways 60, 62, and 91. You can’s miss it.

To make matters worse, there is a perfectly beautiful motel/apartments opposite the diner.

And another restaurant that serves Jiggs, and therefore probably Newfoundland delicacies as well.

Sigh.

I spent some time reading the plaque. Another plaque not vandalized. How do Newfoundlanders maintain so much pride? It can’t just be that they are so much better in all respects than The Mainlanders, surely?

The old railway tracks is a T’Railway . A fake platform is in place too. The old track curves away around to the left. I stood here for several minutes with memories of the old line that curved so as it came into Southern Cross, with my mother and father standing under a lamp on the platform so that I could spot them at 2:15 in the morning when the Kalgoorlie Express pulled in. It left Midland Junction at about a quarter past five, so the 219 miles were covered in nine hours, yielding an average of 24 mph, a tad above Bell’s Newfoundland figure of 22.5 mph.

There again,

(1) After SX there were practically no stops at all

(2) There was little point in going faster. The train could have reached Kalgoorlie at three a.m. had it wanted, but who was awake in Kalgoorlie at three in the morning?

(3) The schedule was based on steam trains, which would need to stop for twenty or thirty minutes at some stations just to take on water, and perhaps coal.

That is, the schedule was practical, not lazy.

But I digress ...

Above Holyrood is a bluff mountain.

The little cape boasts a bluff mountain at its tip.

Behind the town is another bluff mountain.

These landforms are common across the island. I think that they will be a lasting memory for me.

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