Thursday, June 6, 2013

DAY 18 St. John's, NL in our rv


 A crisp SUNNY 38 degrees when we woke at 7 am. The Walmart parking lot was not noisy last night….yeah!

The photographer has declared a photo - free day!
 

We went to get free WIFI at Tim Horton’s (across the street) to get emails, update blog, find out about metrobus for St. John’s.  Then we booked in for one night at Pippy Park.  C. A. Pippy Park is a large park in St. John’s with walking trails, a campground (nice sized, large in fact).  We selected the cheapest kind of site we could (unserviced but we have use of their showers and dump station and fresh water…woohoo) and that was ours for $32.75 (a few dollars more because I went for one that wasn’t in a

Grassless parking lot but treed.)  Our site also got WIFI at the motorhome because it was right near the sites that paid the price for wifi…woohoo!  I am guess that there is a grand total of MAYBE ten rv’s here; come down in July and it will be fullJ   The park has some nice well-treed sites; the bathrooms are very dated
.

A word about phoning home.in Newfoundland  We checked both phones before we left home to see if they were usable and they were not (a trac phone with sim card and a non-contract Verizon phone with no sim card)…we decided to purchase a Canadian phone…which took a couple of days.  We wanted to use it for emergencies mostly.  Well, that $112 was really a waste of money….coverage is not good at all.  We are finding wifi more than we thought we would so that would have been our means of communication with home.  (Daughter is taking care of our mail and house.)  We have been finding WIFI about every other day and sometimes every day.  Should have saved the money or gone out for dinner.


We are finding that dining out in Newfoundland is costing us about 30% more here (with exceptions of course)…something that we hadn’t known.  So I would have allowed a larger budget for dining out.

Beer?  We brought the max we could bring (24 bottles each) and when we need to replace them; they will cost us double.  Plastic bottles have deposits on them (like big water bottles or little bottles of juice).

We had decided that we were going to use public transport to get into downtown and avoid the driving.  So I went online and picked out the bus(s) we could take…we walked to the bus stop and the ones we needed weren’t running at that time of day 1:30 pm.  So what to do?  Oh, we will just walk there…about

3.4 km or 2 miles or less.  Off we go….walking, walking….look up…what a BIG hill or little mountain except that it has houses on it (lots of houses we are in suburban St. John’s.  Up we go…oh, guess what comes next…down we go….down, down…down sidewalks that have ridges in them it is that steep in some spots…down some steps as well.  Then we hit the downtown harbor area…picturesque with its older buildings (we didn’t take any photos!!!) commixed with modern buildings here and there.  STEEP streets (wouldn’ t want to have to drive my standard transmission car here).  We have lunch there and do some walking.  George Street is real quiet now but we are told it hops around 11 pm (past my bedtime).

We are by now wandering around trying to figure out how to get back … not going to walk, nope.  Taxi? (only in desperation).  We try finding bus stops but the bus numbers are foreign and no schedules/stops

Printed on the signs.  So we ask a women walking by and start talking to her while she helps us try and figure this out.  She then volunteers to take us back to Pippy Park (probably easier than trying to explain anyway)…we had a nice chat with her while she drove us to the parking lot by Pippy.  THANK YOU…

Connie!  A nice sunny, windy as heck day in St. John’s!


Spent the rest of the day updating blog, doing laundry, relaxing from that up and downhill slog.

Oh, while we are here we are hoping to do some…ICEBERG spotting!  The tourist information centers have up-to-the-day information on where they are!!! OMG, I thought that was pretty funnyJ  So we are going to try and find some…don’t see them in NY dontcha know!  Oh, and there is also a website with comprehensive map on the latest sightings   http://icebergfinder.com/

 

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