We’ve just finished a wonderful, fun, hectic, and over-stuffed visit to Newfoundland mostly with Meps’ dad.

Whew!

Now we are catching our breath and thinking about how to get back to Seattle and build that boat. And working on putting up some pictures and stories from Newfoundland.

And, while we are relaxing, we will be able to check our email a couple times a day and even have ready access to a payphone, so drop us a line, and we’ll reply or call back!

In the middle of nowhere, at a Newfoundland Tourist Chalet, we were engaged in conversation by the middle-aged attendant, whose nametag identified her as Rita. She was curious, friendly, and so garrulous that I suspected we were the only people who’d stopped in since she’d opened the place that Sunday morning. She asked the three questions that almost every Newfoundlander asks us: “Where are you from? Is this your first visit to Newfoundland? Are you here on holiday?”

Eventually, the conversation came around to Rita’s children. Her son has graduated from university, but had to move to Halifax for a job. Then she spoke about her daughter, who is in her sixth year of university at St. John’s. The girl hopes to become a teacher in Gander, but such jobs are very hard to come by, and the competition is fierce. “You have to have French,” Rita said, “and music. That’s why it’s taking so long for her to finish.”

That is the story of Newfoundland’s younger generation. The fishing industry collapsed in 1992, and there’s not much else to do here. To get a job, you have to leave. Or, in the case of Rita’s daughter, study for years to land a teaching job in a community with fewer than 10,000 people.

At a restaurant down the road in Grand Falls-Windsor, the waitress asked the usual three questions, surprised that we had no family or other connections to bring us all the way to Newfoundland. When she heard my dad was from Florida, she said her son was at school in Prince Edward Island, studying to be a chef. “When he gets done with school, he wants to work either in Florida or on a cruise ship. We don’t have chefs in Newfoundland. Just cooks.”

Another example of an 18-year-old Newfoundlander who has left the island and probably won’t be returning. His mother has never traveled farther than Ontario; she has no desire to.

Our next stop was the logging exhibit outside Grand Falls, where we hit a treasure trove of information. The guide there was a talkative fellow about my age who answered dozens of questions that Barry and I had saved up. “I talk a lot,” he said. “My friends tell me I have a longer tongue than a fur-lined gaiter,” referring to boots used by lumbermen.

Like many Newfoundlanders, the man was shorter than me, the product of generations of malnutrition. His ancestors had plenty of fish and turnips, but not much else. He’s a third-generation resident of Grand Falls, his family originally from a fishing community on Trinity Bay.

Grand Falls-Windsor is not a dying town; there are jobs there. In the beginning of the 20th century, an English publisher built the largest pulp mill in the world on the falls of the Exploit River, and it’s still in operation.

Talented and articulate, the guide admitted that he could get a better job outside Newfoundland but doesn’t want to. He and his wife have a 7-year-old daughter, and he loves the fact that there is so much open space here. “There are only 500,000 people in Newfoundland, and half of them are over there on the Avalon peninsula,” he told us. He raved about the free land in Newfoundland, “Crown land” where you can hunt, fish, hike, cut wood, or camp. By comparison, he described a hunting trip with relatives in Ontario, where they had to drive “for hours” to find a tiny patch of Crown land. He made me think of a cowboy from the West, unable to fathom life in a city with all the people.

But I wonder about his daughter. What will Newfoundland be like when she grows up? Will she stay or leave?

At our hotel that evening, the clerk was a woman from Ontario who moved to Newfoundland 13 years ago. I expressed my surprise, saying, “That’s different. Mostly we hear of people leaving Newfoundland.” She’d come to tiny Robert’s Arm at age 18 with her parents, who were originally from Newfoundland and who bought a little hotel for their retirement. She met her husband in Robert’s Arm, married and had children. Just a normal family, but a rare one to buck the trend. Adding Newfoundlanders, not taking them away.

A couple of weeks ago, Barry and I were sorting our socks in the “Soap Bubble,” Lunenburg’s only laundromat. On the folding counter, we’d set aside the notebook where we were compiling a grocery list.

Mundane stuff, not usually of interest to travelogue readers like yourself.

A tall, lanky guy with a neatly trimmed beard came into the laundry. He was stuffing his clean clothes into a compact orange duffel bag when he glanced our way. “Cruising Notes,” he read out loud from the cover of the notebook. “Are you cruisers?”

I looked down at the medium-sized notebook, one of a half-dozen I’d accidentally-on-purpose removed from the supply room at Microsoft. At the time, Barry had complained, “I can’t tell them apart!” so I decorated each one differently with markers, stickers, and ribbons. This one, as you know, said “Cruising Notes” in inch-high letters, with pictures of waves and junk-rigged sailboats and globes. We were currently using it for lists, notes, limericks, doodles — everything but the cruising notes for which it was originally intended.

Now folks who cruise on sailboats usually have no trouble recognizing each other. They end up in the same anchorages, marinas, or waterfront pubs, and they know each other as much by the names of their boats as by their given names. So those of us who are boatless or away from our boats have a harder time finding someone who “speaks boat,” so to speak.

In a very short time, we discovered that Kris is a world cruiser, working on a circumnavigation of North and South America. He carries a South African passport, but his accent is that wonderful mix of sounds that indicates he’s lived in many, many places. He calls himself a “professional foreigner.” He’s currently doing some work on a tall ship named Larinda. “Come on down and see her,” he said. “Most people call her a junk rig, but you’ll recognize it as a fully-battened lug rig.”

That evening, Barry and I wandered down to the boatyard for a look. The Larinda was a project boat more daunting than any we’ve ever seen, and that includes Jim Fine’s Gulfstar in New Orleans. The engine removed, furnishings ripped out, and bare sections of hull recently patched and slowly being cured. Kris is justifiably proud of his ingenious washing machine sprinkler system and timer setup to keep the ferrocement damp.

I was confused by what I saw. The boat looked ancient, like an old hulk that had been abandoned for years. But her tale is more tragic than most: She was only launched six years ago, after someone lovingly spent 28 years building her.

The impact of 2003’s Hurricane Isabel on the U.S. was so devastating that most Americans were unaware of Hurricane Juan, which made unprecedented landfall at Halifax, Nova Scotia. Larinda was one of the victims. Holed by another boat in 100-mph winds, she sank in the harbor there. Like many Canadian cities (Victoria, B.C. is one), Halifax doesn’t treat their sewage, and Larinda sank right in a sewer outfall. She sat there for three weeks before being salvaged. Pee-yoo!

Fortunately, her new owner knows a thing or two about sewage, being in the business of treating cruise ship waste. That boat has been scrubbed with every cleaner known — she may look a mess, but she’s not even stinky now.

Our tour ended, appropriately, in the forward head, where you could see signs of the boat’s former grandeur. Over the bathtub, with its whimsical frog fixtures, the walls are covered with full-color hand-painted tile showing Larinda sailing in her former glory, all her butterfly-like sails set. She was a beauty, and one day she will be again.

Back in the galley, or what remains of it, Kris broke out a bottle of Cuban rum he’s been saving since his trip to Cuba last year. We pulled up a folding chair and launched into an evening of what Brian always called, “Sea Stories and Fairy Tales.” If you don’t know the difference, show up with a bottle of rum sometime and we’ll tell you. But don’t be surprised if it takes until 2 o’clock in the morning, as it did on the Larinda, with our new friend Kris.

Up at the very northeast corner of Maine is a small old town called Lubeck. The only pay phone is in front of the convenience store, which was a hopping place at 8:05 pm (the grocery store closed at 8:00 pm). While Barry was on the phone with his Mom, I watched a car pull up with an older couple inside. They got out, and the fellow lit up like a light bulb when he found something on the ground beside his car. “Guess people just don’t like these ol’ pennies any more,” I heard him say to the woman as they went into the store.

On their way out, I chatted with the man briefly and he explained his reaction to the pennies. “Years ago, I promised God that any money I found would be His.” I smiled at him, and encouraged, he continued. “Once time, I was down on my luck, found $20. It was real tempting to keep that for myself! But when you make a promise to the Lord like that, you better keep it!” He winked at me, wished me safe travels, and drove into the night.

We spent the night at the Lubeck boat ramp. Learned a lesson or two about boat ramp parking lots. First of all, they’re great places to make out in your car. Which means there was plenty of noise and activity there at night, even though the boat ramp was not in use. Also, if there are commercial fisherman, don’t expect to sleep in. They all showed up for work about 5 am.

So at 6 am, we were at the tiny border crossing between Lubeck and the Canadian island of Campobello. We planned to visit Franklin Roosevelt’s summer home there, the little 37-room “cottage” where he contracted polio. The border guard asked our intentions, and we answered truthfully that we were only planning to be there for the day. Later that day, we found out we could take two ferries and be on the New Brunswick mainland without any additional border hassles. After all our worries about crossing the Canadian border and being searched for contraband guns, meat, or fruit, it was completely anticlimactic. We were in, and we were going to stay — not one day, but several months.