{"id":609,"date":"2009-08-19T22:00:53","date_gmt":"2009-08-20T02:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/?p=609"},"modified":"2010-03-16T17:52:44","modified_gmt":"2010-03-16T21:52:44","slug":"st-johns-cape-spear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/st-johns-cape-spear\/","title":{"rendered":"St. John’s & Cape Spear"},"content":{"rendered":"

8\/17 Beautiful day to see St. John’s. We parked downtown, had breakfast at Velma’s, and walked around for a while before heading up to Cabot Tower and Signal Hill. The view of the harbor and city from both was breathtaking with a lighthouse in the distance on the water. We stopped by the Signal Hill Historic Site.<\/p>\n

We went down the hill and visited the Johnson Geo Centre that has exhibits on the world, but most particularly Newfoundland\/Labrador geology. The center is actually dug out of the rock they discuss and the left the raw rock walls showing around the perimeter of the display area. They had a theater where we caught the end of a very good movie on tsunamis.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.geocentre.ca\/<\/a><\/p>\n

8\/18 Day was a total rain out. Miserable at the park so we went into town to Coffee Matters and hung out all day catching up with email since they had wifi. Dinner at Velma’s that night again that night when it finally stopped raining.<\/p>\n

Note on Pippy Park: It’s close to everything so it’s convenient, but the sites are small, it’s in the middle of the city, the place is packed, and the sites are solid gravel with no ground to set the tent up on. The gravel was surrounded by trees so there was shade. There are some open camping areas for tents that provided no shade since they’re out in the open and you can’t park by your tent. Next time I’d check to see if there might be a better place to stay in the area.<\/p>\n

8\/19 We packed up left St. John’s for Cape Spear — the eastern most spot in North America. They had both the original, restored lighthouse (a national historic site) and the new working lighthouse.<\/p>\n

We visited the Cape Spear bunkers used during World War II to guard against the Germans. We had read in St. John’s that a German submarine had fired a torpedo into the harbor even though they were unable to enter because of the wire net that protected the harbor entrance.<\/p>\n

After Cape Spear we went south on 10 to Witless Bay and then cut northwest on 13 to get to one and return to Clarenville to visit a friend of Jean-Francois’s.<\/p>\n

St. John’s and Cape Spear pictures:
\nhttp:\/\/motorcycle-journeys.com\/past\/canada_2009\/photos\/newfoundland\/newfoundland.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

8\/17 Beautiful day to see St. John’s. We parked downtown, had breakfast at Velma’s, and walked around for a while before heading up to Cabot Tower and Signal Hill. The view of the harbor and city from both was breathtaking with a lighthouse in the distance on the water. We stopped by the Signal Hill […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trip_reporting","tag-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=609"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":762,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609\/revisions\/762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorcycle-journeys.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}