We are in France--well sort of!

Since we have started this transatlantic crossing we seem to be setting our clocks back every night. Of course we aren’t complaining since we are getting an extra hour of sleep every night. Except last night! It appears that St. John’s, Newfoundland is only ½ hour back. Not one hour, or 2 hours but a measly ½ hour! So when it was 2:00 pm here in St. John’s, it was only 1 ½ hours difference at Maren’s. To me that was weird that we were a half hour off.

We finished our day in St. John’s, Newfoundland with a tour of the city. The most impressive part of the 2 hour tour was a visit to Signal Hill, or Cabot Tower. It sits high on a hill overlooking the city and harbor. This tower was built in honor of Sir John Cabot’s discovery of Newfoundland 400 years ago. Up until the 19th century public hangings occurred here. Another important event that took place here was the first transatlantic wireless signal received by Guglielmo Marconi in 1901. Also the tower is noted in the history books as the last North American landmark Charles Lindberg sighted during his solo flight to Paris in 1927. It was so windy up there that you could almost feel yourself being blown over the edge of the mountain!

The town has beautiful churches, brightly colored houses and very warm hearted people. Of course to see this massive ship pull into their harbor had to be daunting to say the least. But our exit was the Grand Finale.

Upon leaving the harbor, people lined the mountains, the hills, the streets and their porches. They waved goodbye to us. In addition we were blessed to hear the fabulous musical fanfare of Sound Symposium’s Harbour Symphony. It was written for the horns on the ships docked in St. John’s harbor and transforms the ships into an orchestra on the water. Each ship has its own horns blasts. The sound reverberates off the mountain walls and our Ms Eurodam played the very low bass notes, while other ships played their notes. It just gave us chills to see our ship slowly moving through the Narrows, horns sounding from ships all around us, people waving good-bye to us and us waving our good-byes to them. It went on for about 10 minutes and was another once in a lifetime experience that our wonderful Captain afforded us.

Monday morning we landed in St. Pierre & Miquelon, France. There is not a port there large enough for our ship. The dock is 300 ft and our ship exceeds 1000 feet. We docked out somewhere and then took Tender ships into the tiny town.

This is the last remnant of France on this continent. It only has a population of 6500 and we must have inundated it without our 2000.

At 8:00 this morning we looked out and saw a tiny village of homes on a nearby island. The homes were colorful and looked like they were placed there by the locals to wow us. It was a site that postcards are made of. By the time it took Jim to get his camera the entire island was filled with fog. No longer could we see any homes or the town.

We tendered into town (two boats at a time) at a snail’s pace because of the fog. Once there we walked the main street and realized that this port wasn’t set up for visitors, really didn’t want visitors or need visitors. It was happy with the way things were and didn’t need our tourism dollars to support their economy. The local patisserie though was very busy with a line of American’s out the door! We certainly didn’t feel the love and warmth that St. John’s afforded to us yesterday.

We spent 10 minutes walking around and headed back to the tender. Another 30 minutes getting back to our ship and we realized that we had spent one hour getting there and only 10 minutes there. Print this post