Newfoundland!

At the last minute on tuesday last week, I decided to hop in a car with a guy offering a ride to St John's, NL. The route we took can be seen here.

Basically, it was a 3200km drive. We drove from Wed evening until Thursday night, then jumped on a 7 hour ferry to Newfoundland. Then we drove up to a place called Robert's Arms and stayed the night there. Finally on Saturday we drove through Newfoundland to St John's.

OMG, the drive was so nice. Upper Quebec is gorgeous, and so is Nova Scotia. (New Brunswick was ok, but not as pretty). There were a lot of old farmhouses, and wells, and barns, and basically a lot of pretty places with friendly people that was a change from the brown brick of Ontario. I had fun looking at the scenery, the old churches and the farms. Oh, and the ferry was the best ever, I think if I didn't know better I would have thought we didn't move the whole time. This compared to the last ferry I went on in NZ, with 10m swells and nearly the entire (overly full easter crowd) passenger group throwing up. Even my iron stomach was forced to go outside and look at the waves after an hour of extreme motion. But the ferry to Newfoundland - great! Although less to do, so I'm glad we went overnight and I could sleep. During the day it must be boring as.

Newfoundland itself is amazing, there's only one real city and all the rest of the islanders live in little 'bay towns'. They are traditionally all fishermen. We had a lot of fish and chips on the way over to St John's. And it was cold! We came through the centre of the island, and it snowed while we were driving. Insane, snow in June. Hello - it's summer?

St John's was awesome. I had such a good time. We stayed with these mexican students. They were great.

On saturday night they had a party for some guy's birthday and I had a good night chatting to all of their crazy international friends. I think there were only two people who were orginally from newfoundland, but it was fun. Sunday I walked all around downtown St John's in the morning while waiting for everyone to wake up! St John's is gorgeous. It's like someone took all the quaint houses in Te Aro and the Terrace, you know all the villas, and made a whole town of them. And then painted them bright colours. It, again, was freezing cold, like a sunny wellington winter day (but in summer!), but the town is beautiful. I enjoyed all the hills around town.

That afternoon, we drove up to Signal hill (apparently where Marconi sent the first transatlantic telegraph signal) and saw icebergs out to sea, as well as views over the harbour. At night we had a huge BBQ, with homemade tortillas, shish kebabs (one of their friends is Pakistani so it was real fusion cuisine!) and shrimp. The kebabs were soo yum, ugh.. the food.. making me hungry again! I flew back to toronto monday morning

Anyway, St John's is gorgeous. I recommend everyone go visit sometime, and driving through Nova Scotia is beautiful too. I took lots of photos, and as soon as I work out how to get them of my camera when I don't have a computer, I'll post them.

Detroit

Last weekend was a long weekend. Not that I work, but hey. I have friends that do. So, ANYWAY, for the long weekend we decided to rent a car and drive to Detroit. Why Detroit you say? (and believe me, a lot of people did say why. Or - "don't get shot"). Mostly because this cool couple we met a few weeks back live there, plus it's only 5 hours drive.

Detroit was.. insane. It's like dead city. I'm glad I went there, just to see, but seriously I can see why people say Why?! We lasted a day and a half and then went back to Canada for the monday of the long weekend. Windsor just looks so nice and shiny when you look at it from detroit! I have no idea why everyone doesn't just live there. The thing that freaked me out the most was the fact that everywhere you looked there were thousands of parked cars downtown, and no people. It's a downtown of 4 million people, with 6 lane roads through the middle of it. No public ransport, and well lots of roads. Some parts of the downtown area look nice, and then you tun a corner and you are faced with abandoned, vandalised, skyscrapers. It's like, it used to be prosperous once, and then everyone left. Or went underground or something. Odd. Apparently most of the people live and work north of the city, unlike most cities I have ever been in, there is nothing happening in the downtown area.

We went looking for food DOWNTOWN on monday and there would have been more people out in a small town suburb on a sunday. I was so confused... where are the 4 million people who apparently live there? I think it could be an awesome st for an apocolypse movie.

Oh well, now I've been. It was an experience. Although, in favour of Detroit, on Sunday we went to the Eastern arkets and they were way interesting, with lots of cool stuff to buy and awesome live bands jammig in every corner. Pics later.