The Battery, at the base of Signal Hill in St. John’s.  Weeks earlier, I started this trip in Atlantic Canada’s largest city, but went on to see many little towns, villages and remote areas - so arriving here in Atlantic Canada’s second largest city felt strange.  Suddenly doors had security locks, parking became an issue, and ships docked in the harbor were not little fishing vessels but huge barges.  The Battery - a tiny fishing village surprisingly close to downtown St. John’s - served as a reminder of the rest of Newfoundland, even though most fishing villages aren’t built on the side of a five-hundred-foot cliff.

The flight from Deer Lake to St. John’s was short but remarkable, not only because the plane had just eighteen seats, no stewardess, and no bathroom, but also because the view of Newfoundland from 21,000 feet showed such an endless expanse of bogs.  As with Deer Lake, the approach into St. John’s was beautiful, particularly over the rocky coastline.  Above, Signal Hill, with The Battery at the base and Cabot Tower on top, has served as a lookout overseeing the narrow entrance to St. John’s Harbour for around five hundred years.

Cabot Tower, atop Signal Hill, is named after John Cabot, who sailed into the harbor in 1497 and claimed the place for Britain.  The tower was built in 1897 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of his arrival.  Four years later, Guglielmo Marconi received the first wireless transmission from across the Atlantic Ocean here; his work, for which he won a Nobel Prize, is celebrated on the top floor inside Cabot Tower.

The view from Cabot Tower to the site of Fort Amherst, across the entrance of St. John’s Harbour.  At first, during the 1500s, St. John’s developed on its own, serving fishermen and traders from many European countries.  If you’ve read the rest of these Atlantic Canada pages, you know what comes next in the history: a lot of fighting between the British and the French, particularly in the 1750s.  The very last land battle of that war took place on Signal Hill in 1762 - the French were occupying St. John’s at the time - and after that, St. John’s became firmly British.  About a decade later the British built Fort Amherst, and like Halifax, St. John’s became a garrison town.  The British left a century later, and the fort is now gone, but the 1810 lighthouse - the oldest in Newfoundland - remains.

This is the reverse view of the second photograph on this page - from the top of Signal Hill back down to the city of St. John’s.  About halfway back down this hill is a remarkable geological display called the Johnson Geo Centre, most of which is underground, dug down right into the Signal Hill rock; only the small entrance on top can be seen from the surface.  The exposed rock walls inside the Geo Centre are over half a billion years old, much older than the Rocky Mountains.  Given the geological marvel that Newfoundland is, it’s only appropriate that the best presentation of geology I’ve ever seen is located here; the Johnson Geo Centre is unexpectedly entertaining, well worth the hours I spent there.

Detail of downtown St. John’s.  The building with the red sloping roof on the upper left is The Rooms, a combination museum, art gallery, and archives, and it too is surprisingly good for a city of a hundred thousand.  Its name as well as its shape come from the seaside buildings where fishermen and their families would process the fish they caught - cod was abundant here.  The Rooms opened just two years before my visit, and it’s a marvel; while grabbing a late lunch at its very good café, I spent as much time gazing at the building’s interior structure as I did at the wonderful view of downtown and the harbor.

You might have noticed that some of the smaller buildings in the previous photograph seem unusually colorful; well, they are.  This is Victoria Street in downtown St. John’s, just downhill from The Rooms, with the Atlantic Ocean in the background.  If any view of the city can be considered iconic, this is it; St. John’s colorful buildings are featured on artwork and souvenirs of the city.  Cabot Tower can be seen far in the distance above the yellow building.

Though the colors here along Victoria Street are dramatic, many of the buildings throughout the old part of downtown St. John’s are colorful - including the plum-colored Bonne Esperance House where I stayed during the first half of my visit.  Running Bonne Esperance House was a chatty, young, eager technology enthusiast who served up a good breakfast (once again with Newfoundland wild berries) in the garden out back, kept the wireless Internet running well, and readily recommended places for downtown visits; he provided a very good stay.

Above, two townhomes in one building along Victoria Street.  I wish I could be as enthusiastic about the accomodations for the second half of my St. John’s visit - at the deluxe Fairmont Newfoundland - but that’s difficult when the place provides an antithesis to every point I just made about Bonne Esperance House.  Though literally steps away from one another, the two are worlds apart.  I stayed in a dozen places this trip, and the two supposedly the most special (and certainly the most expensive) were by far the worst experiences: the Fairmont hotels in St. Andrews and St. John’s.  If I wasn’t lying awake at night because of the excessive heat in one (see the earlier St. Andrews page), I was wasting time because of the excessive Internet setup in the other (no wireless in the room, must use the business office, much call to get an access code, must specify the length of time to be online, must do this every time using the Internet).  I had been wanting to stay in the great lodges of the Canadian Rockies on a future trip, but as they are Fairmont properties, I’m reconsidering that.

More row houses near the top of Victoria Street.  Just down the hill from here, where a lot of St. John’s best shopping can be found, is where I found Fred’s Records, the best music store in Newfoundland.  After stocking up on CDs of Cape Breton music back in Baddeck, I wanted to do the same with Newfoundland music, and Fred’s turned out to be the perfect place to do just that.  A lot of St. John’s best eating can be found just down the hill as well; my final dinner in Atlantic Canada, at Blue on Water, was one of the best of the entire trip.

The Atlantic Ocean at sunrise, viewed from atop Signal Hill on a different day.  Weather in St. John’s is particularly changeable: Signal Hill was completely fogged in the day before my arrival but crystal clear the day I took the earlier photographs.  When I returned again to take sunrise shots of Cabot Tower and downtown St. John’s, it was getting fogged in...

...allowing nothing more than glimpses of the sun.  The fog never came onshore though, and that is true for my entire stay in St. John’s - so in terms of photography, I consider myself quite lucky.

A half-hour south of St. John’s is Witless Bay Ecological Reserve, which manages to combine bird watching, whale watching, and iceberg watching all within a two-hour boat trip.  It was too late in the season for icebergs, and the whales weren’t keen on surfacing this day, but the birds were definitely out.  The white streaks on the rocks are exactly what you think they are.

I almost missed the boat tour courtesy of the Fairmont, which along with its other issues seems to have a problem delivering breakfast orders, but an extremely fast drive got me to the dock just in time.  I should note that this shot was made with a long lens and then cropped; boats stay well away from the rocks, no doubt to the disappointment of tourists wanting close-up shots of puffins like the ones seen on the boat tour promotional materials.  A few puffins were out this day, but only at quite a distance, so I’m very glad I got my puffin photographs back in Bonavista.

It seemed appropriate to spend my last morning in Atlantic Canada at the easternmost spot in North America.  That I did - at Cape Spear, site of one of Newfoundland’s oldest lighthouses, where the first light of day touches the continent.  A twenty-minute drive from St. John’s got me here just as the sun was climbing out of the morning haze.  So just how far east is this place?  Well, the distance from St. John’s to Boston is about the same as from Boston to St. Louis.  It’s way east.

The view from Cape Spear; fog passing just above the fishing boat caused this unusual lighting.  So, knowing what I know now, would I still take a 25-day trip through Atlantic Canada?  Definitely - and I would set it up very much the same way as I did.  I would trade the two Fairmont hotels for others, and I would find a way to spend more time around Mahone Bay in Nova Scotia and Trinity here in Newfoundland, but those are the only changes I would make.  No doubt I missed significant parts of Atlantic Canada - the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia, the St. John River Valley and Acadian Coast in New Brunswick, the extreme lighthouses on Prince Edward Island, the Irish Loop and outports and Cape St. Mary’s in Newfoundland, and countless festivals throughout Atlantic Canada - but those can all be saved for another trip.