Travel when you want to be someplace can be a joy. Travel when you have to be someplace rarely is. This trip has been almost entirely the latter. I’ve almost entirely been dealing with the emergency¹ that diverted me off track a couple weeks ago. I’ve gotten very good at planning travel but doing it at the last minute really limits your choices.

As a society we’ve invested a lot of money in the extremes. Think of travel as a chart of time vs. cost. There’s a lot of stuff in the corners: luxurious cruises or package tours which slowly meander across the globe (slow, expensive), first-class long haul flights or private jets (fast, expensive), overstuffed discount airlines with flimsy plastic seats and inconvenient airports (fast, cheap), and bargain basement bus lines which take forever to get anywhere (slow, cheap).

I’ve lamented before the lack of options in the middle. Imagine train trips which take three days to get from one end of Europe to the other with no transfers, comfortable private rooms, and food you wouldn’t be disappointed to find in a mid-level bistro. Imagine an thirty-six hour flight by airship from New York to Vancouver, relaxing on a comfortable couch sipping a hot chocolate while you watch the dawn slowly light up the Rocky Mountains. There’s got to be something between first class and steerage.

As it is, I’ve managed to hit the worst of everything on this trip. It hasn’t been particularly fast, because getting to the far east coast of Canada from Europe inevitably involves flights with transfers, often more than one.² It’s been last minute, so I’m paying through the nose for all of it.³ And of course, nobody told me there’s two cities named after John the Baptist in the east of Canada, so I booked my flights and landed in Saint John only to discover I was supposed to have flown to St. John’s.⁴

There’s nothing like sitting in an airport frantically Googling trying to fix your itinerary. There are no flights between Saint John and St. John’s, and if I had gotten a rental car it would have involved nine hours of driving plus a fourteen hour ferry.⁵ I settled on a 6am flight to Montreal the next morning and then transferring to a flight to St. John’s. Air Canada was kind enough to rebook my return ticket⁶ and I just crashed for the night in Saint John.

So I did eventually get to St. John’s. It’s an odd place. It’s built on a lot of hills and the architecture is sufficiently reminiscent of the Bay Area to be known as the “San Francisco of the East,” although it’s only about 5% of the size.⁷ That similarity continues in the scenery and the weather; St. John’s is in the middle of what feels like endless pine forests and gets exactly the kind of foggy, blustery, changeable weather you’d expect along the coast in the Pacific Northwest.

It’s billed as the oldest continuously inhabited city in Canada⁸ and became a boomtown from all the fishing. It got rich back when salted cod became a key trading resource in the 17^th century, eventually forming a key part of the “triangular trade” which shipped salted cod to southern Europe, wine and olive oil to England, and supplies back to Newfoundland.⁹ St. John’s has gone through a number of boom and bust cycles depending largely on the fishing trade, although it’s typically been more boom than bust. In the 1960s St. John’s had the highest number of millionaires, per capita, of anywhere in the world.¹⁰ And recent history has seen a real effort to diversify away from fishing.¹¹

It’s an independent-minded place, which you might expect if your population descended largely from fishers who spent months at sea. Newfoundland only voted to join Canada in the 1949.¹² Thus there’s a National War Museum there celebrating specifically Newfoundland’s contributions to World War I and World War II. It was closed for renovations so I couldn’t visit which is too bad, because that history is surprisingly interesting. Newfoundland was one of the key assembly points for convoys across the Atlantic and saw a significant amount of German activity as a result.¹³

I only had three days in the city and was busy most of the time. I could easily have spent a week or two. The architecture throughout the city was lovely, with brightly-colored rowhouses only slightly spoiled by a number of horrific brutalist and International Style architecture scattered around from the 60s.¹⁴ The real draw is the countryside, though. It wouldn’t have taken much to entice me out on to some of the trails, and I did manage to get to the tip of Cape Spear, the easternmost point of North America. There’s rocks and fog and sea. I don’t know that you need much more than that.

I’m currently somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic preparing to land in Paris and, assuming everything goes smoothly, catch on onward flight to Berlin. I’ve got about a week before I catch another ungodly long flight — this one down to South Africa — and then a month before another grueling series of flights starts again.

I’ve dealt with the emergency which had me in St. John’s, so that’s all sorted. Everything’s fine except for me, strung out from all this travel. If I had stuck to my original plan I’d have landed yesterday and be getting on a bus for a larp in a few hours. I’d never have survived.

I can’t believe there was a time decades ago where I’d willingly hop a seven hour flight to spend a weekend somewhere. Now I’m on edge and out of sorts for at least two days after arriving. It’s encouraged me to be a lot more deliberate about how I travel. This kind of travel, frankly, sucks. But sometimes we get boxed in. It happens. I’m just looking to get my feet back on the ground, get my bearings, and spend a little time recovering before I set back off.

Next: Berlin to Warsaw
Prev: Paris (CDG) to Saint John (YSJ)

Footnotes

¹ I keep saying emergency but I’m trying to convey the urgency, not the importance. This had to happen, and had to happen suddenly, but it’s more annoying than anything else.

² This one flew to Newark, then to Toronto where I spent the night, then onward again the next morning. At least the return flight went to Montreal then direct back to Europe, although I had to catch another flight from Paris to get to Berlin.

³ This does need to be put into perspective. The existence of round-trip ticket from Europe to North America for about 1000€ less than two weeks before the flight would have been nearly unthinkable thirty years ago. It’s only expensive because I’m sure I could have booked this ticket for 500€ if I had started looking three months ago.

⁴ This was, of course, my fault. But it doesn’t feel like I was being set up for success, here. When you search “st john” on the ticket site the first four hits are “Saint John Airport,” “St Thomas Cyril E King Airport,” “Henry E Rohlsen Airport,” and “Fredericton Int’l Airport.” “St. John’s Airport” is fifth, and off the bottom of my screen.

The middle two are listed because they’re close to St. John in the Carribean, and Fredericton is listed because it’s close to Saint John. Saint John shouldn’t be coming up at all, since the name of the city isn’t St. John but Saint John and the residents are tetchy about that. But the airport is misentered in the ticket site as being in “St John, NB, Canada” and if you’re not aware of the existence of both of them — and if you’re not a resident of Canada or Maine I doubt you would be — it becomes an easy mistake to make.

⁵ The best option might have been to catch the bus to Halifax and gotten a direct flight from there, but even that’s a six-hour bus ride and I had already missed the only bus leaving that day.

⁶ Minus a $150 change fee

⁷ It’s also known as “The Rock,” a nickname made famous by the opening song to Come From Away. The musical’s about Gander, a three-hour drive (or 40 minute flight) northeast of St. John’s, but all of the airports in the area saw dozens of international flights redirected there in the wake of 9/11.

⁸ Probably spuriously; Cabot claimed the area in 1497 as fishing grounds but records are spotty and it’s unlikely there were people living there consistently until at least the 1630s. Which would likely mean, ironically, Saint John is older.

⁹ The only “triangular trade” I was familiar with is the infamous one bringing enslaved persons to the New World, sugar and rum to Europe, and manufactured goods to Africa. But don’t worry; plenty of traders from Newfoundland just sailed low-quality salted cod south along the coast to sell to plantation owners in the West Indies and sailed rum right back to Newfoundland.

That trade route lasted long after slavery was abolished, which should tell you something about how surprisingly little changed for the workers. As late as 1889 the trade was still so lucrative that the Bank of Nova Scotia opened a branch in Kingston, Jamaica.

¹⁰ Even more impressive when you consider $1 million in 1965 would be worth $10 million today.

¹¹ Advances in fishing technology and gross mismanagement of the cod stocks resulted in the collapse of the cod industry in the 1990s, and what was supposed to be a two-year suspension has turned into a near total moratorium on fishing cod to the present day. It’s unclear if it will ever rebound.

¹² In fact, at the time, local polls showed nearly 75% support to join the United States instead, stymied only by the fact that the United States wasn’t interested.

¹³ Ranging from attacks on ships — 23 were sunk by U-Boats — to infiltration attempts by German spies. German spies had enough trouble passing as Americans; I can’t imagine how they must have sounded affecting a Newfoundland accent.

¹⁴ St. John’s isn’t so big that there’s space for skyscrapers, so there’s a limit to the damage.