Passing the Tickle to Twillingate

Tour boat noses past one of the many bergs in Iceberg Alley.

Twillingate is at the end of a road. All our roads seem to end and you then have to turn around and retreat. But, to get to Twillingate, you pass through some wonderfully-named places.... like Virgin Arm, and Shoal Tickle, Main Tickle, Eddie's Cove, River of Ponds, Robert's Arm. There are so many fun and funky names in this province that I want to linger and taste them all.

We've been through Deadman's Cove, Parson's Pond (settled by the Parsons, of course), we've passed Hungry Hill, Dildo Run Provincial Park (just down the road from us), ignored Camp Boggy, and probably won't reach Roundabout, Mutton Bay, or even Path's End.

This special place, with its own language that's almost impenetrable has left a lasting impression for its total friendliness and openness. We haven't met a single grouch. Everyone wants to chat and all the women in the stores call you “love” or “sweety”.

In Twillingate, we kept coming north, through just awful fog and arrived at the only campground in town. A young boy bid us “Good day” and figured out where he could position us and our rig for two nights. His grandfather came into the office and said he had put us in an awful site and re-figured a better spot for us at the top of a hill, overlooking the Back Bay. From our front window, we can see an island with little icebergs bobbing by.

This is Iceberg Alley. The Labrador Current comes south, along the northern coast of Newfoundland and there is a constant stream of the bergs, all of them broken off the Peterson Icefield. There are a couple of tourist boats in the town that ferry people out around the bergs. We, on the other hand drove up the road a little to Sleepy Cove where we pulled off the road and came upon a huge berg, pointed and blue that drifted along ever-so-slowly. We met a couple from Greece, New York, who told us they were with a group of six other rigs in the campground and spend about seven months of the year on the road. While we chatted, a Minke whale breached and blew offshore.

They were flabbergasted by the high cost of food up here. We have generally stopped sucking in air when we visit the markets. Boneless chicken breasts at $10.39 a pound, Maxwell House coffee at $7.39 a can, butter at $5 a pound, Cool-Whip is $4.99. Gas, of course, is out of this world: $1.37 per liter. I have stopped converting to the cost per gallon – but it's north of $6. All things are expensive because everything must be shipped to the island.

We are finding water in some of the campgrounds is tea-colored and needs to be boiled. So we take on good water in our internal tank when we find it and use that instead of contaminating our tank with the colored water. Problem is these towns are so isolated they have few resources and the natives have acquired immunity to the bugs in the water – very much like in Africa and Southeast Asia.