About 20 or so years later, we were four Gerards looking at the world globe and planning a summer trip to visit the new St. Lawrence Seaway. Nancy remembered seeing a photo of cars driving on a highway that went under the seaway while ships were overhead! We all wanted to drive our big old station wagon under a ship at that special place on the seaway.

Young Walt, studying the globe, said, "Mom, it’s only an inch from there over to where Daddy went during the war." Thus began our family’s love affair with Canada’s Atlantic Provinces. That inch on the globe began with an overnight ferry trip to Port Aux Basque, Newfoundland, which natives pronounce "new-FOUND-land."

Nancy had been seasick all night, and a steward said, "Yep! She’s pitchin’ a bit," meaning the boat, of course. We drove off onto solid rock. Most of the buildings looked like plain, white-frame barns. Solid rock was everywhere. Men were pounding caulking into cracks in their boats or painting them. Chub and Walt visited with them, but I couldn’t understand their choppy way of talking.

Chub soon called me: "Come to see this fellow’s fishing shack."

The man handed me the "fish" - a dry, flat fish he took from a tackle shelf. I handed it back but then realized he was showing me how to soak it overnight to get the salt out. He insisted that I have four or five of these big flat, wafer-thin fish as a gift. I wasn’t even excited about having even one! He was right, though. We learned to soak and prepare his flat, dry fish several months later.

"Fish" meant cod. We had seen them at every dwelling - pinned up on clotheslines, drying like diapers on wash day. He had a winter’s supply stacked around his fishing shack. Fearing that Nancy and Walt wouldn’t enjoy the fishermen, the noisy saw mills and the barren campgrounds for a full week, we arranged for an earlier return reservation.

In our first campground, Nancy and Walt learned to pump water out of the ground and pour it back, "trying to fill up the lake." They met a couple of kids and taught them to pump, too.

Noisy sawmills at Bowater’s paper mill created mountains of sawdust while making paper from the endless logs they floated down the river. Men danced on the floating logs as they guided them with long, hooked poles to keep them from bunching up. Native kids were picking berries along the roadside.

Our kids swam in Bowater Lake, and they were just getting acquainted with others when we had to break camp. Their homes and tiny gardens were on side roads, and one family had a brown-and-white spotted pony.

Too soon we had to catch that ferry back and head for home. Chub and I returned with friends and enjoyed two weeks in a rented housekeeping cabin several years later. Every visit brought more reasons to love Canada’s easternmost province: Newfoundland.