Journey In God's Amazing Grace: St. John's, Newfoundland

On Tuesday, we continued our drive east, ending up in St. John's, Newfoundland, our farthest east location. It was a rainy, foggy, cold day (we've had our fair share of those!), so we were glad to get into our site in Pippy Park.

Wednesday, something appeared in the sky, bright, shining, yellow -- I think I heard someone say it was "the sun"! Wow!

One of my IBM friends from Dallas lived in St. John's when she was growing up -- I told her I would go to take a picture of her former home -- so this is it! Notice the blue sky!!!

We didn't have specific plans on what to do, but as we were driving around, we happened upon...

... the 0 KM marker for the Trans-Canada Highway.

"Officially opened in 1962, the Trans-Canada Highway is one of the longest highways in the world."

"From St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, to Victoria, British Columnbia, the TCH covers over 7,821 km and crosses six time zones."

It is located outside St John's City Hall.

We decided that, since it was a sunny day, we should go up to Signal Hill and Cabot Tower since there are nice views from there. We stopped at the visitor's center and turned in our receipts for day passes that we had purchased at Gros Morne National Park and L'Anse Aux Meadows National Historic Site and got one-year Discovery Passes for both of us. The other two sites had not yet received their 2023 Discovery Passes, so could not sell them to us -- but they assured us that if we kept the receipts, that the "next" national park/historic site we went to would credit us for what we had paid and we'd only need to pay the difference -- and so they did!

We asked if they had been having cloudy weather in St. John's and the guy at the visitor desk said it has been raining and overcast and foggy and cloudy for 28 days -- so everybody was happy to have sunshine!

We visited their exhibit area to learn about Signal Hill.

Then we drove up Signal Hill. St. John's reminds us of San Francisco with all its steep hills!

From the top of Signal Hill, we could look over St. John's Harbour from the top. Historically, signals would be sent from the hill -- flags with messages could be raised -- telling ship owners in town that their ship was on its way. Every day at precisely noon the "noon gun" would fire, allowing folks to set their watches (important to know when the sextant was used for navigation -- I think the information board said that if they were off by 3 minutes on the time, their navigation could be off by 30 miles).

Some statistics about the harbour.

The harbor and city of St. John's beyond

... and the Narrows - the entry into the harbor. It looks very narrow!

Cabot Tower on top of Signal Hill

Do you see that tiny white thing out on the blue-blue water? That's an iceberg! We didn't expect to see any this far south!

Carl up on top of Cabot Tower

There was an interesting exhibit inside Cabot Tower about Marconi's first transatlantic wireless signal being received here in 1901...

Outside, there was this marker...

Carl is pointing the "this spot" where Marconi received the signal.

We walked up Ladies' Lookout trail -- "Ladies' Lookout is the highest point of land on Signal Hill. Legend has it that the women of St. John's came here to watch for ships carrying their sons, husbands and lovers, which inspired the hill's name. " Off in the distance is Cape Spear, said to be the easternmost point on the North American continent (I thought Greenland was also part of the North American continent, but I might be wrong).