Day -5:  Airline travel can go so wrong. Parking the car at PDX, our carrier’s auto-texting system notified us our flight would be late. The buzz-buzz of similar texts arriving grew so familiar that, by the following morning, I no longer detected new ones. They were just part of the background.

Day -4: started off rocky with more flight delays, but smoothed out as soon as we landed in Portland, ME.  Our checked bags were already there since they fit on the last flight the previous night (we couldn’t get on that plane).  Then our car showed up promptly, with 3200 miles worth of bugs on front, and we peeled out for the ferry dock, 700+ miles away. We had two GPSs on the dash, one garden variety unit and one Special Commercial Vehicle Tracking and Dispatch System from Renee’s work. The two GPSs disagreed about whether we’d make the ferry at 23:45 that night. I was optimistic, ’til we were cresting some mountain pass in Nova Scotia and a wall of fog clamped visibility to nada. Can’t haul ashes if you can’t see.  But the wall was thin, and as the night came on, the traffic was thin, too. 300km of wet, dark, unknown roads to cover on a deadline.  How dreadful.  🙂

We made the ferry.   Not our original boat, of course – the airline snafus had put us six hours late for that – but there was another, smaller ship queued for the late sailing. A possible problem lurked with the change-of-schedule. These are long runs, 7hrs on the short route and 14hrs on the long, and vessels are serious seagoing stuff. You don’t “just show up” at the dock, you must have a “booking”. And we didn’t. What we had was a missed prior ferry booking, and hope.

Top marks to Marine Atlantic. They bent the language of the contract and let us aboard. We chomped on nachos and fell to sleep in the cabin they granted us.

Day -3: Off the boat and rolling, a mere 921km driving miles to St. Johns, following the main road all along the top of the island. No problem except exhaustion, but we swapped drivers often and got to the city by 5:25 p.m.

Note that Newfoundland has its own time zone, one that’s offset a half-an-hour from those in the U.S.   When it’s 8 a.m. in Portland, Oregon, it’s 11 a.m. in Portland, Maine, then noon in New Brunswick, and finally 12:30 p.m. in Newfoundland.

No moose sightings yet.

Beautiful setting in Flatrock for the rally school.  Tomorrow is tech inspection.

All of teams that we spoke to in the grand touring class are equipped.  But they are all running B boxes with an average speed display that their cars have .  None had ever seen a Timewise 798a Rally Computer. 

Wednesday was lining up to be more of the same.  Mechanical problems grounded our plane.  But we finally got into the air in chicago.  we got to portland ME and our car arrived 15 minutes later.  A mad dash across New Brunswick and Nova Scotia but we arrived at the ferry 6 hours late.  Options: rebook on the Friday night ferry or purchase a new passage on the 2345 weds ferry.  The travel gods smiled, they just let us on the ferry.  Another mad dash across the island and we have arrived in St Johns, Newfoundland.

More agonizing airport antics this morning, then, when we arrived in Portland, Maine — all lights went green. Our lost duffles appeared,and then a bug-fronted red car pulled up at the curb. A few words of gratitude and we split for the ferry. Rollin’

Mechanical problems have delayed our flight to portland me.  I am not making this up

Hit the “reset” button last night. Bangor flight cancelled… as you’d expect. But this morning our plane is at the gate in Chicago, so we may be just 18 hours behind. Good thing they’re not timing us yet.

 

3 delays before we left Portland OR ate up our connection time. Heavy rains in Chicago put us in a holding pattern for an extra hour.  We missed our connection to Portland ME.  We are in Chicago waiting for a new flight to Bangor ME.  It too is delayed.  Current plan…fly to Bangor, get rental car, drive to Portland ME, get our car from Karen and Simon, drop off rental at airport, drive straight through to North Sydney NB to meet ferry at 330 pm wednesday.  We only have about a 2 hour buffer at this point.

Still on the ground at PDX. I promise I am not the cause for the delay; I’m on my best behavior.
But this does threaten to scramble the next few steps on our trip – and the ferry tomorrow won’t wait.

In February 2008, we set out to do the AlCan 5000 Winter rally. We weren’t even sure if we’d do the rally until we crossed the start line in Kirkland, WA. We rallied all the way to and onto the Arctic Ocean near Tuktoyaktuk in the NW Territories. We finished up in Jasper, AB.  We made some lifelong friends on that rally.  I have a feeling that at Targa Newfoundland, we’ll do the same.

A little gift from our Canadian friend.

Tomorrow, we head out to Portland, ME. It’s the first leg of the transit to Targa Newfoundland. Our car has already made it to Buffalo, NY. Thanks Simon and Karen Levear for driving it out. Thanks Sue Colisch for house sitting while we’re away.

Start times are posted for the Sunday Prologue legs.