Distance: 137.6 km
Ride time: 6:59:25
Average: 19.7 km/h
Max speed: 42.1 km/h
Total: 43369 km
Cycling around the world is not all glamour and girls in bikini… It’s also eating peanut butter sandwiches by the road side in the rain.
Oh well, I have certainly had my share of sunshine over the last years – a good thing since I wouldn’t see the sun today.
I was aiming for Gander, a town of 10000 people in the middle of nowhere. Aviation is the big thing here. The airport used to be an important refueling point for transatlantic aircraft. It was also in Gander that a lot of aircraft landed right after 9/11 as the airspace was shut down. The passengers had to stay for several days – and of course they were received with open arms. This is Newfoundland after all.
I was getting ready to leave Tim Horton’s after a coffee break when a police officer came over and asked if I was going to camp for the night. This is in itself interesting; further south in the US it was absolutely unimaginable that somebody would sleep outside in a tent. Up here it is very natural. The police officer continued “You should head down towards the lake. There is a nice area which is actually the site where an aircraft crashed a number of years ago. Oh, and by the way, some say the site is haunted!”. They have an interesting sense of humour around here 🙂
After hearing about the plane crash I opted not to go down to the lake. Instead I found a quiet place right outside town. No ghosts were heard or seen during the night 🙂
Yes, many did land in Gander after 9/11. It’s a place name I’ve known ever since.
As for the ghosts, maybe we all now know that you’re actually scared of something. 🙂
Btw, seem to be getting a lot of errors for the Captcha. Keep having to reload and redo the comment.