More than a few months back while planning this voyage to Canada, Merry Jo remarked that while in Newfoundland there existed a possibility to visit France..say what? Seems that off the west coast of Newfoundland there are the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, which are a territorial overseas collectivity of Franceāso says Wikipedia. parlance, although you are in Canada, you can take a ferry ride and find yourself in a place where the primary language is French, the euro is the main currency and, in our case, where the food was fantastic. More on that later.
As a side note, for those of you really paying attention, youll note that this blog entry is from France....it is, but the physical location is in North America...well, we needed additional consultation with Ali, the esteemed founder of TravelBlog. Seems this may be the first blog from St. Pierre and Miquelon on TravelBlog and we could not properly place the blog, hence the assistance. Now that we settled it.....off we go.
Logistically, it was a bit of challenge to get there. Not because of the distance between St. Johns and Fortune where we got the ferry. Or the
ferry tickets which we purchased months in advance. The challenge was to get a rental car to get us there. In the post COVID world, rental cars can be in short supply, we started working on getting the rental car over four months ago. We were concerned as we already had made the airline ticket and ferry ticket purchases. Multiple phone calls and several months later, we secured our wheels on off we went. The ride was smooth and relatively short. The owner of the bed and breakfast met us at the ferry and a few minutes later we were at a cute house up the hill from the ferry dock.
Turns out, we really were in France, not only because of the euro, but also because of electricity. Dave did not bring any converters as he was of the opinion that due to the proximity to Canada that the same electrical current would be in play..but this was not the case. Although almost all modern day appliances do not need a power converter, hair rollers do.and therein lies the blunder on Daves part as Merry Jo uses..yep, you guessed it electric rollers.
an history of the island you will have to google it, but the readers digest version is that they were owned by France, then Britain and in 1814 they were given back to France to settle a debt. These islands were not seen as valuable at the time. Eventually, the islands became prosperous due to fishing. In 1903, the island toyed with the idea of joining the U.S but nothing came of that. This is not an occurrence in the earlier days of North American history. But thats all in the rearview mirror now...this island is quite French and darned proud of it!
Another interesting quirk was that St. Pierre is on a different time zone than Newfoundland. When you leave the U.S., PE Island and Nova Scotia are one hour ahead. Then when you travel to Newfoundland, you move another 30 minutes ahead. When you head west about ten miles off the coast of Newfoundland, St. Pierre sets their clocks another 30 minutes ahead. Why? Probably because they can and dont want to dither around with this Newfoundland approach of just nudging the clock 30 minutes ahead of its Maritime neighbors. A little head spinning, but
We spent our two days wandering about the smallish island, taking in museums, sampling some fine local brew, and enjoying the fine cuisine that our bed and breakfast owner provided us. He is a trained chef from Paris, who went on to work on some cruise ships before landing on this island and we were the lucky recipients of two meals that foodies like us have great appreciation for. Two days (or in our case a day and a half) is just about right to take in the island unless you are a hiker and have the opportunity to also visit the neighboring island of Miquelon. We might have done that, but the ferry only runs once a day and didnt fit into our plans.