This was the first reservation we made for this trip back in December – in fact, the first date we picked was already sold out - seven months in advance! There are two ferries most days to Port aux Basque from North Sydney: 11am-ish and 11pm-ish. We opted for the 11pm-ish since we didn’t want to “waste” a day on a 7-hour ferry ride.
We arrived at the ferry terminal pretty early – maybe 6:30pm – and wandered around and walked towards the ferry. We didn’t see any signs telling us that there were restrictions on where we could walk, so we just walked to the ferry to see it up close. No one stopped us; in fact, a couple workers waved as we walked by. We kept thinking, “Strange we are the only ones curious to see the ferry up close.” Well, eventually security did spot us and a guy came to tell us that we were in restricted space. He was cool about it and asked how we “got in.” We said that we just walked in – no one was there to stop us. (Apparently, it was a shift-change.)
Photo of Outlaw Brad......
After hanging out a few hours, we were finally loaded onto the ferry. We were in the first lane of cars being loaded, so off we went...
Our first thought: "Oh, great, we will be on this deck."
Nope, we were in a line that was being directed to lower deck.......
But then as we started down the ramp, the ferry workers stopped the car in front of us since they had a pet in the car and pets cannot be on the lower deck, so we had to back-up on the down ramp, then proceed down again.......
....where we had to back-into our spot, grab our stuff, and head upstairs to our "stateroom....."
........ to our room for the night - which made that tiny room in Nova Scotia look spacial! 😆
But it was a helluva lot better than the non-stateroom option for sleeping! (Also private, a place to store our stuff, and our own bathroom!)
Since we were one of the first cars/people on the ferry, we meandered around to check out the ship, chatted with a couple fellow passengers, and watched the first 15-minutes or so as we pulled away from Nova Scotia.
We went back to our stateroom around midnight - 6ft Brad took a shower in the teeny-tiny shower - and we slept amazingly well until about 5:30am when we had the alarm set to see the sunrise and our approach to Newfoundland. Oh, we had the cabin directly in the center of the front of the ship - here was the view from our window the next morning:
We grabbed some tea and coffee, and went to the top/observation deck to watch the sunrise:
And to watch our ferry, called the MV Highlanders, pull into Newfoundland, first passing an outgoing ferry.
Our first views of Newfoundland.......
Then it was time to start driving off the ferry. Now one would have thought that since we were first on, we would be first off - nope! We were one of the very last ones off, but it did give us the opportunity to see others depart:
Finally - our turn - back up the ramp
Off the ferry......
Onto the open road of Newfoundland!
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