Murray’s Mom

21 km, 2 hours
As you can see by our distance and ride time, we certain didn’t go anywhere fast today. We started off slow in the morning, finishing up some photo updates while we had Internet.

We wanted to leave such that we could head up to the Northern Delights restaurant for after noon, since we heard that Murray’s mom would be there from noon on. Scott suggested a boat tour – and Becky could never say no to a boat tour, so we also added that to our days itinerary (4 pm tour after lunch).

After lunch, we had the opportunity to actually meet Murray’s mom… “Who is Murray” you may ask? Murray is a very friendly guy from Gunners Cove who we met in Perth Ontario on our first day riding. He was part of a team of people sandblasting and painting the water tower and staying at the same Motel we stayed at. It was neat being able to meet his mother. Apparently, he has been asking if we’d stopped by yet. (Yes, Murray’s mom does have a name – Grace. This, along with the name of the restaurant were minor details which we didn’t get from Murray… According to Grace, he does tend to leave out the odd detail) Our bikes and our various inquiries about “Murray’s mom’s restaurant” apparently caused some talk in Gunners Cove. We found out from Grace that we asked directions from a cousin yesterday, and her husband saw us riding before we got back to the restaurant.

Grace has run the restaurant for a number of years, and her mother Ethel had it before that, so it seems like they’re something of a Gunners Cove institution.

Our pilgrimage to meet Murray’s mom is now over. We had a lot of fun getting here, and having a quest made our visit to the Northern peninsula much more entertaining for us.

The food at Northern Delight is excellent and reasonably priced too! We enjoyed a traditional Newfoundland Jiggs Dinner for lunch. Fortunately we shared, since it was huge! Roast beef, chicken, salt pork, boiled potatoes, turnip, carrots, partridge berry pie, and there’s probably something we forgot. Highly recommended!

After our lunch, we headed down to St Lunaire for a quick tour of the Dark Tickle Jam shop. We had a chance to meet Steven Knudsen (the owner) and ask many questions about berries. It turns out that one of the things I thought might be a berry is actually quite poisonous .. oops .. guess we’ll stick to bakeapple berries, as they are pretty easy to identify.

At 3:30 pm we headed down to White Cove tours for a boat trip hosted by Captain Tobias (Tobe for short). We were the only tourists brave (or foolish) enough to go out in the weather, but it was still fun. The boat trip was rather wet, and we didn’t see whales, but Becky really enjoyed it. There was quite a bit of swell so the boat bounced around a bit. Neither of us took anything for motion sickness, which was unfortunate, as Scott spent much of the voyage feeling queasy. He still had fun though. We saw some baby eagles in their nest which was kind of cool. We also saw the house where E. Annie Proulx wrote her novel The Shipping News. Apparently she wasn’t particularly popular with some of the locals, but she and Tobe got along quite well.

Becky created some excitement by dropping her sunglasses from the fly bridge onto the edge of front deck, which wasn’t easily reachable, especially with the boat bouncing around. Sherlock (a friend of Tobe’s also on board) found a mop and used it to move the glasses into reach and successfully recovered them. Given how much the boat was bouncing, it was truly amazing they didn’t end up as fish food.

We were cold and wet when we got off the boat, so we decided to get a room at St. Brendan’s Motel in St. Lunaire-Griquet rather than riding the 25 km back to the Triple Falls RV park in the fog and drizzle.

Scott continued to feel queasy for a while after arriving at the hotel, and will be looking into various options for motion sickness before we get on the freighter. He has used Sea-Bands before, and we have Gravol, but there are probably other options too. Suggestions welcome!