I woke up in the back of my car, checked the time, and realized that I had slept in a lot longer than I should’ve. I still had about seven more hours of driving to go, and had to get out of there as quickly as possible to avoid making it to Gros Morne super late. Before doing so, I took a quick walk along Topsail Beach, mainly trying to spot icebergs, since there was an unusually high amount of them this year.
There was another place in particular that I wanted to stop at on the way to Gros Morne. It was only a half hour detour off the Trans-Canada highway, but was 100% worth it because, well, you’ll see.
Dildo is a small town of 800 people that used to be a fishing village, A few years back, Jimmy Kimmel discovered this place, loved it, and paid for a Hollywood-esque sign of Dildo to be built, which I absolutely had to see. While I was there, I went to the Dildo Brewery, got myself a beer (with a view of the Dildo sign, no less), and took some pictures with my drone.
I made a stop at the post office because I had some postcards to mail and ended up chatting with the lady who worked there. She owned a local souvenir shop in town with her husband, and was born and raised in Dildo. Because of the town’s name, they get some questionable phone calls, but the residents have gotten used to it. She even gave me a couple Dildo postcards as a souvenir!
Fun fact: there’s also a town called South Dildo just in case you didn’t get enough of Dildo 🙂
For the rest of the drive, I passed by some other small towns, like Come by Chance, Gander (which used to be a military airbase), Terra Nova National Park, Grand Falls-Windsor, and Clarenville. It was pretty rainy throughout with not much to see. The main thing I was watching out for though was moose because if you hit one, you’ll die. The moose however, will walk away, barely injured.
I drove all the way until Deer Lake, which was the last main town where you can get services before actually heading into Gros Morne. It was almost 11pm when I got there, so I parked at a random trailhead, then immediately crawled in the back to get some rest.
