The Great Atlantic Motorhome Holiday

Twenty nights in a motorhome through Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, and the history on this route is older and stranger than anything else in Canada.

Nova Scotia opens it with its coastal roads and fishing communities, then the crossing to Newfoundland, which is where the trip becomes genuinely remote. L’Anse aux Meadows at the northern tip is the only authenticated Norse settlement in North America, built around the year 1000, which means Vikings reached this coast some five centuries before Columbus sailed.

Heart’s Content holds a different kind of first. The transatlantic telegraph cable came ashore there in 1866, turning a small Newfoundland village into a hub of global communication overnight, and the nearby wireless station was the first to relay the Titanic’s distress signal in 1912. The interpretation centre covers both.

Cape St Mary’s Ecological Reserve is next, where gannets, puffins and other seabirds nest on a stack a few metres from the clifftop viewing point, with humpbacks often feeding below. Gros Morne closes the trip, a UNESCO site where the earth’s mantle is exposed at the surface in the Tablelands, with moose and caribou in the uplands and walking from half an hour to several days. Canadian Affair include the flights, the motorhome and the listed attractions, with campground fees, fuel, insurance and meals separate. The price is per person. Twenty nights sounds a lot until the scale of Newfoundland becomes apparent: it is larger than England with about half a million people, and the ferry crossing alone takes most of a day. Icebergs drift down this coast in late spring and early summer, which is worth factoring into the choice of dates.