We had gone out to watch puffins by twilight, but impulse drove us into a crowd gathered near the Cape Bonavista lighthouse in Newfoundland. "Oh, why not?" asked my husband, David, slipping into line with nearly 100 other cars on a warm June evening. As we queued into the happy cacophony of balloons and beeping horns, clapping came from the back of our van. "This is the coolest day ever," marvelled our daughter, Madeleine, 4.
With the sun sinking over an alley of icebergs, the motorcade journeyed past saltbox houses, colourful clotheslines and babes in strollers, to a joyful celebration on Legacy Wharf. This was Discovery Days, Bonavista's annual salute to history. Who would have thought our family of five would drive 2,500 kilometres through Canada's easternmost province and end up in a parade, celebrating 510 years since Giovanni Caboto landed? It was exactly the unscripted experience we were looking for when we signed on with CapeRace Cultural Adventures, a company that gives you a car, a key that fits the locks of three restored coastal homes and sets you off exploring the Avalon and Bonavista peninsulas.
Beautiful places to stay
The mystique of staying in different Newfoundland homes appealed to me as much as the chance to cut costs by driving from our Nova Scotia home and easily transporting the necessary paraphernalia for our three young daughters, then ages four, two, and nine months. We began the circuit at chic Hipditch House in St. John's Battery neighbourhood, where we were wowed by its big harbour views, and moved on to a delightful 1930s outport house in Heart's Delight, before we bedded down at our last stop, a 19th-century fisherman’s home in Bonavista.
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