Our last day in Newfoundland dawned cloudy but warm, and I checked our email for information about this hike we'd talked about with the newlyweds. I should have known better, with this extremely sporty family.... The hike they'd decided on was rated as "difficult" and was 3-5 hours long. (They did eventually downgrade to a 3-4 hour "moderate" hike, but by then we'd decided we were going to The Rooms instead.)
So "The Rooms" is one of those clever names. In Newfoundland, the temporary structures used for cleaning and curing the catch of cod were called "fishing rooms" and the architecture and name reference this.
The museum sits on the former location of Fort Townshend, the equivalent to the Halifax Citadel - on the highest hill, star-shaped, etc - the garrison was withdrawn in 1871, after which the fort decayed and was eventually buried. Apparently (although we didn't see it) there are some remains of the fort viewable in situ in the basement of The Rooms.
There were several amazing exhibits in the museum section of the place, tracing the history of the land and its settlers from the Inuit to the Vikings, through the English, French and Irish to the present day. There were comparison photos of Irish people's faces with the faces of people with the same last names in Newfoundland, and some of the similarities were astonishing!
We also looked through historical exhibits about Newfoundland's time as its own dominion (it was the last province to join Canada, (not til 1949) so there were examples of Newfoundland stamps and currency), both politically and as regards their contributions to the 1st and 2nd World Wars.
The archives weren't open when we went, but it's not as though we had anything in particular we wanted to see. In the Art Gallery, we were particularly struck by "Pointed North," an exhibition of Rockwell Kent's work, particularly focussing on his time spent visiting Newfoundland. It was really great.
After that, we went back downtown, got a few more photos in the sunshine, saw a couple street performers, and then went to "The Ship" - another hidden "lane" pub to meet up with the hikers before getting on our way to the airport.
It was a nice visit, and Sarah came through with a big bag of cds (we'd discovered early on that the auxiliary plug-in for my car stereo wasn't working on the right side, and we hadn't brought nearly enough cds for that to be the situation) for us to play on the way back west, but we wished we could have stayed a little longer (and, in light of later events, we really could have). We said our goodbyes, hugged everyone, and got in a cab to the University to get our bags, and then to the airport.
One of the first things the nice boy at the Air Canada counter asked us was whether we'd heard about "the delay." Well, no, we hadn't. Nobody called or emailed or anything. So it turned out our flight had been delayed by 4 hours "due to fog in the morning that set everything back" (although apparently in an unrelated event, a woman scaled a barbed wire fence and ran out onto the tarmac in Halifax that morning, to try to stop a plane (which she believed, erroneously, to have her partner aboard) from taking off - drama, drama, drama.
We were already cutting it tight to get to our hotel before the owners closed the office and went to bed, so that 4 hour delay might have meant that we didn't have anywhere to sleep at all. Air Canada didn't care, and didn't offer to do anything at all. Remind me of this day when I think about booking another Air Canada flight when there is any other option at all, including the bus for multiple days.
Fortunately, the lovely couple at the Tidal Bore Inn (yes, another one, although we were either not there or fast asleep when the tide came in or went out) were willing to just put our key in the mailbox and let us sign the paperwork in the morning.
The time actually went pretty quickly - we had some food at the airport restaurant and then I worked on trying to catch up on this blog until they finally called the flight.
We arrived without incident in Halifax, collected the car, drove to our quaint-as-hell motel in Truro, I had a bath and we crashed hard!
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