At St Anthony the road runs out of Newfoundland, or nearly. This is the northern capital of the Great Northern Peninsula, a fishing port of about two thousand people facing the cold Atlantic and the Labrador current, and it has been a lifeline for the whole coast since the English doctor Wilfred Grenfell set up a hospital here in the early twentieth century. The Grenfell historic properties still stand, and the story of the doctor who sailed from cove to cove to treat fishing families is one of the best told in the province.
The ride up the Viking Trail on Route 430 is long, honest and surprisingly dramatic. The road leaves the Gulf of St. Lawrence at Port au Choix, runs beside the Long Range Mountains, and then crosses open bogs and stunted spruce, the so-called tuckamore, bent flat by the wind. It is mostly straight, with long gentle swells, so the thrill is in the weather and the space. Moose are the real hazard, and every local has a story of one. Do not ride at night, and on any evening run keep the speed well below what the straight road invites, because a moose is as tall as a bar stool and about as easy to see in the dusk.
St Anthony is the sensible place to fuel, eat and sleep before the last run on Route 436 to L'Anse aux Meadows, where Norse settlers built their turf huts around the year 1000. In late spring and early summer, icebergs drift down from Greenland and sit grounded in the bay off the headlands, white and blue, and the whales come in close in July. The headlands around the harbour are an easy place to watch for both, and locals will tell you where the bergs have grounded this week. The best seafood is simple: cod, shrimp, crab in season, and a mug of tea.
The wind off the bay is cold even in July, and fog is common, so carry a warm layer. The summer riding season is short, running roughly from June to September, and the north is quiet outside those months.