Yesterday was a sea day and we did nothing.  There was a whale sighting in the afternoon and we were on the starboard side where it was swimming.  I looked and looked and never saw it.  John not only saw the fins and back he saw the whale breach.  Figures.

It was formal night so we got all duded up for dinner.  After dinner we went to the Showroom at Sea where the captain introduced the ship’s officers and we had a champagne toast to a successful voyage (Gotta love the free champagne).  We skipped the evening’s entertainment in the show lounge – a jazz clarinet player – and went back to our cabin to read until bed.  I didn’t take one photo all day. So that was that.

We arrived in Cornerboork, Newfoundland at 8 am under partly cloudy skies.  Cornerbrook is a mill town with a large pulp mill right at the end of the bay and the town growing up the hillsides around it. We had no excursions booked and our only plans were to try find a light-weight cardigan to replace the one I left on the banguette in our Boston hotel restaurant and then go searching for some geo-caches. 

We wandered off the ship mid-morning and walked into town.  The ship was docked about a kilometer from town (a bit longer if you walked via the highway) There was a free shuttle but along the T-Railway path into town there were a couple of geo-caches.

The T-Railway is a province wide connection of walking/biking paths on the old railroad line.  The railway service in Newfoundland was discontinued quite a few years ago and all the tracks were taken out and either gravelled or paved.  An energetic person could go for miles and miles around the province on T-Railway.

The first cache was located quickly.

We searched and searched for the second one to no avail.  We read the previous logs to see if there may be a hint posted but all the posts were DNF (Did not find).  No one had found it since 2010 and yet the person that hid the cache checked it in January and said it was there, the co-ordinates were accurate, and “the cache was visible from a meter away without lifting a finger.”  The location was a little sitting area with big rocks forming a semi-circle, two benches, flower beds and rose bushes in bloom.  We looked and we looked and we looked and we finally gave up and walked the rest of the way into town.

I managed to find a new cardigan in the first shop I checked (my kind of shopping – in and out and done) and we walked back to the T-Railway to find some more caches.  There are seven hidden along the trail extending about 2 km to the west of town.  These Newfies hide hard-to-find caches.  We did find three more; only one of which was a quick find, and we gave up on the last one after searching up, down, over and around a big rocky slope for half an hour.  By then both our phone batteries were dying so we turned around, walked back to town and went to Tim Horton’s for coffee and an apple fritter for lunch.  After that it was a leisurely stroll back to the ship and we were on board again by 2 pm.

All in all it was a very exciting day in Newfoundland.  We enjoyed it though. And now we are sailing to Red Bay, Labrador.