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We headed Eastward to the city of Gander.  We were interested in Gander because of the current Broadway musical "Come From Away".  This musical chronicles Gander's amazing role in helping the US during 9/11.  This is when airlines were restricted from US airspace for about 5 days.  38 airlines were rerouted to the airport in Gander, a city of 9,000 became a city of 17,000.  The citizens of Gander took up the task of housing, feeding, clothing and caring for 8,000 additional people.  The musical "Come From Away" was nominated last year for a Tony for the Best Musical.  It didn't win but is a point of great pride to all the Canadians we met. The story is also told in the book "The Day the World came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland".

Gander was once a huge thriving airport and was important in WW-II.  It was here that planes refueled before crossing the Atlantic.  Now that  jets don't need to refuel, there is little airline activity.

Here is the international lounge.  It is literally frozen in it's mid-century decor.  In the past people like Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Albert Einstein came through here.  Now it is empty and waiting like an old movie set.

We went to the North Atlantic Aviation Museum to see other aviation aspects of Gander.  Quite an interesting outside display of a DC-3 crashing through the museum.

This was the other side of the building.

Here is a picture of the planes on 9/11 on the Gander runway.  Gander is the only city outside of New York to have a piece of the steel supports as a memorial from the World Trade Center.

Many people of all ages told us that we should see the memorial to the Silent Witnesses.  We headed out of town down a rutted dirt road not knowing what we would find.  There we saw this memorial to members of the 101st Airborne unit who died when their plane crashed just after taking off from Gander airport in 1985. They were returning from a humanitarian mission in Africa to spend Christmas with their families. The statue of the soldier on the left is looking towards their home at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.  Silent Witnesses alludes to the fact that only the trees and sky were silent witnesses to the deaths of these very fine humanitarians.  The people in Newfoundland still choke up when they talk of this horrible crash and it was a Canadian military group that created the memorial.  The place is so very peaceful with a natural running stream and wind in the pines.

We pushed onward to the East to see our friend from our last trip Freda Stroud in Glovertown. Here we are with her sitting on her "Chesterfield" or sofa.  We had a lively lunch filled with many words we had to check the meaning of in our Newfoundland dictionary.

We were on our way to Terra Nova one of the large National Parks in the middle of Newfoundland.  We saw something large and dark cross the road and we both thought that it was a Newfoundlander dog.  Upon closer inspection, we were pretty excited to see that it was a black bear!!!!

From an outlook we could see the village of Gambo.  This was as far east as we were going.  We then turned northward to the town of Twillingate famously known as the Iceberg Capital.