Latest News - last update 25th of November 2024

Our vacation in Germany flew by. We spent a lot of time with family and friends and welcomed our fourth grandchild. That's why we were a little wistful when we boarded the plane back to Las Vegas after almost seven weeks. After a night in the hotel, we take MOMO out of storage and stay at a campsite to install the various spare parts we have brought with us. 

Coming from Flaming Gorge, we spend the night in the National Forest, where we always find nice pitches that are kindly free of charge. We continue via Vernal to the Dinosaur National Monument. At the main entrance there is a visitor center and a museum with a dinosaur quarry where the sandstone with its exposed and preserved dinosaur fossils is protected by a glass building. In the museum are two dinosaur skeletons made from real and reconstructed bone parts. 

The border crossing to the USA goes smoothly. There aren't many people here in the solitude of the prairie anyway. Everyone is nice and friendly and nobody wants to look into our car. We are through in 15 minutes. Montana is as big as Germany, but only has 1 million inhabitants. For the time being, the landscape remains the same as in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, endless fields of grain and steppe grass. 150 kilometers later we arrive in Malta, the first town worth mentioning on the route. We stock up on US dollars and replenish our supplies. Fortunately, the prices are somewhat lower than in Canada. It is scorching hot and we drive 30km out to a reservoir. There we can camp for free on BLM land right by the water. However, we can't swim because the lake is totally shallow and musty. But a nice campfire and a great sunset make up for the lack of swimming fun. 

We cross the provincial border into Manitoba and 60 km before Winnipeg we find a great place to swim at a quarry pond with crystal clear water. We would have liked to stay another night, but after our morning swim we were bothered by thousands of flies, so we decide to drive on around midday. MOMO needs another oil change and we find a German mechanic in Steinbach who moved to Manitoba from Bremen a few years ago. He also does an inspection and fixes a few small oil leaks. Thanks to Karin's unsurpassed research, we are once again very lucky to find such a competent garage.

We stay in St Malo Provincial Park for two days, go swimming and go for a bike ride in the surrounding area and have a good time. 

We leave Montreal and enter the province of Ontario. The federal state has an area of over one million square kilometers, making it larger than France and Germany combined. Although Ontario only accounts for a good 10% of Canada's total area, it is the province with the highest population density in Canada at 11.2 inhabitants per square kilometer. In comparison, Germany has an area of 358,000 square kilometers with a population density of 236 inhabitants per square kilometer.

We make a stop in Cornwall to do the laundry again. We also need a stable internet connection for the German team's game in the European Football Championship. We spend the night at the marina and go for a stroll around the town in the morning and want to have a real American breakfast, with lots of calories and coffee. In fact, next to the well-known standard fast food chains, we find a diner that really looks like it has fallen out of time. The interior and staff are from the mid-1950s and the prices are fortunately the same. We continue on the Trans Canada Highway (TCH) along the St. Lawrence River to Upper Canada Village, a museum village that brings to life the structure and facilities of a typical rural small town in 19th century Ontario. Crafts such as sawmills, bakeries, blacksmiths, flour mills and much more are recreated by locals in period costume. 

After five wonderful weeks in Newfoundland, we cross the Gulf of St. Lawrence at the end of May. From St. Barbe, it is only a short crossing of one and a half hours to Blanc Sablon, in the far north of Quebec. We have to take advantage of the French flair and get some fresh croissants in a café. That's it for Quebec because just a few kilometers further on we are already in Labrador and find a dream spot on a lake where we stay for two days. The Trans Labrador Highway now lies ahead of us with a few small towns and otherwise a lot of nothing and endless forests. The highway ends after 1700 km at the St. Lawrence River in the province of Quebec. The most important thing is to have a full tank, as the next filling station can be more than 500 km away. There is only sporadic cell phone reception along the entire route and we use the police service and borrow a satellite phone from the Northern Light Hotel. It costs nothing and connects you directly to the Royal Canadian Mountain Police in an emergency.

In L'Anse Amour, we visit the highest lighthouse in the Atlantic provinces at 33m and spend the night at a trailhead in Red Bay with a great view over the bay. From there, we climb 689 steps all the way up to several beautiful viewpoints. A second trail leads along the sea to countless old whale bones and an iceberg. Red Bay is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In the 16th century, the Basques hunted whales here and also processed them on the spot and transported the oil to Europe. At that time, millions of liters of lamp oil were needed, which was extracted from the whale oil. A 16-metre-long whale skeleton of a northern right whale is on display in the Town Center and there is an informative film about the whalers of that time. 

After reaching the easternmost point of Canada with St. John's, we now have to go all the way back again. The beauty and vastness of this country has to be experienced in the truest sense of the word. The Trans Canada Highway runs through the whole country and is a fast connection from A to B on the main route. However, the real gems lie far off the highway and there are lots of cul-de-sacs leading to the most remote corners, which you then have to drive back again. And everywhere are fjords that stretch dozens of kilometers inland and countless lakes, one more picturesque than the next. There are also a number of offshore islands, three of which belong to France, with euros and everything that goes with them. A round trip in Newfoundland therefore covers thousands of kilometers. But it's worth it. The Newfoundlanders are very friendly and helpful and if you get over your Oxford English quickly you can even understand what they are saying. The landscape is also magnificent. And if you take the weather as it comes, nothing can go wrong.

We now set off on the second part of our Newfoundland trip and leave St John's. We spend the first 250 km on the Trans Canada Highway, TCH for short, and spend the night in Charlottetown, a small fishing village not far from the main road. Once again, we are in the front row right by the water and even the sun comes out from time to time. 

Newfoundland is not a destination for mass tourism and if it is, then only in the summer months from mid-June to the end of August. Throughout the year, there are just about as many visitors here as New York has on a weekend in peak season. We are early in April and have our angora underwear and thick jackets ready. From Sydney in Nova Scotia, it's only a comfortable 6-hour crossing to Port-aux-Basques in the southwest of Newfoundland. The Vikings found their way here around the turn of the millennium, 500 years before the English and French. Long before that, there were still indigenous people, but they were completely wiped out by the colonial powers. The ratio of the 500,000 or so inhabitants to the moose is 5:1, with an upward trend for the moose, which were only settled here at the beginning of the last century. So there is a good chance that we will come across one or two of them on our tour.  

At the end of February, we get our vehicle out of winter storage and prepare it for the next big tour. We have decided to travel North America again. We are hoping for endless expanses, freedom and adventure. We have already seen a lot on our Panamericana tour from 2013 to 2018, but this time we want to drive more off the main tourist routes. MOMO gets a few necessary upgrades after hibernation and at the end of March we bring the vehicle to Hamburg for shipping to Canada. On April 10, we fly to Halifax, the second largest port in Eastern Canada. Halifax belongs to the province of Nova Scotia and most of it consists of an elongated peninsula surrounded by the waters of the Atlantic. During the colonial period in the 17th and 18th centuries, many Europeans settled here, mainly from Ireland, Scotland, England, France and Germany. Today, 36 ethnic groups live in the province, which leads to interesting ways of speaking and special dialects, such as Acadian French. But the main language is English and so we don't have to activate our rusty school French for the time being.