Cross-Canada: Day 18

Gander to St John’s  Distance: 393 Kms Time: Approx. 4.5 hours

Our final day on the road started out the same as our very first, rainy and misty.  We rejoined the TCH and continued east along the shores of Lake Gander on our right.  After a short distance the road ahead started to rise and the views became more spectacular. Just before we reached the town of Gambo we stopped at a look out point that looked east along Freshwater Bay. The view was stunning and the mist and rain seemed to break just long enough for us to get out and take a picture.  To the south of the look out was Gambo Pond, joining both was a boulder-strewn river with marshland on each bank. Way in the distance we could see the TCH cross the river just after it emerged from the pond on way to the ocean. We continued on passing through Terra Nova National Park.  We couldn’t really see much here as clouds had come down to meet the road obscuring nearly everything around us.
To try and avoid the rain and cloud we turned off the highway and headed along the Discovery Trail towards Lethbridge, Newfoundland. It was actually good to get off the highway and start to drive the Equinox again. The road surface was wet but again the Equinox had no problem holding the road, on a couple of the hard bends the traction control did kick in, this was more due to the fact that certain sections of the road were covered with damp wood chippings that had blown from an earlier passing truck.
Lethbridge sits on Sandy Cove in Goose Bay, it has a population of about 900 people that are housed on the gentle slopes of the hills that surround the bay. The weather started closing in again and we turned back and joined the TCH. At this point the surrounding area became more mountainous with the rock becoming exposed on cliffs and bluffs along the water. The landscape started to become more rugged with the surrounding trees starting to become more sparse and smaller with more inland lakes and beaver ponds. At this point the TCH was running due south along a thin tract of land where you can almost see the ocean on both sides. The landscape became more barren with any exposed trees short and windswept.  On either side of us we could make out the rock rising up and into the cloud but couldn’t make out how high they went. In some places, when the cloud broke, we did see high gray rock faces with small bushes clinging on to the sides blowing in the increasing wind.
About 50kms outside of St. John’s the TCH becomes a four-lane highway and turns northeast towards St. John’s.
The closer we got to St. John’s the heavier the rain and cloud became. When we did enter the city it was difficult to see anything more than a couple of hundred feet away. Undaunted we headed towards Signal Point and our final destination. As we started to climb up the hill we realized that the cloud cover had now become a very heavy fog. Visibility had dropped to about 10 meters as we reached the summit, we realized we weren’t going to be able to see anything. It seemed anti-climatic after driving so far but we waited for a bit of a break in the fog and managed to get the Cabot Tower at the top of Signal Hill in the background for a triumphant picture of the Equinox. It was only here that we actually realized the magnitude of what the team had achieved. When we left Vancouver we set the second trip meter in the Equinox to zero, it now read 9,881km.
The equinox had performed exceptionally, way better than we ever thought when we headed north towards the mountains from Vancouver.  We visited 86 Shell gas stations on the way, with the staff giving us much needed encouragement, good wishes and 10 times more air mile points! We are still calculating gas mileage and the total amount of gas used and will update this site when we have. One thing we are  sure about is that using a top grade nitrogen enriched gasoline has certainly reduced engine wear and tear especially on such a grueling journey as this.

Keep clicking on to this site, we will be updating information, photographs and our final thoughts on our travel partner, that did all the hard work, the Chevrolet Equinox.
We will also be following up with a special section in Carguide magazine that will fill in all the gaps that weren’t already covered on this blog!
Now that we have retuned the Equinox and after 18 dry days on the road we can actually have a celebratory beer, and what a fitting city to be able to enjoy it!