Friday 28 pm

Still trying to get to L'Anse aux Meadows. The Vinland Motel recommends I try the Grenfell Interpretation Center - which I do. There I meet G, who suggests coffee. I pick my dry and dusty tongue off the floor at the mention of caffeine and follow him to the cafe on the lower floor. G is a busy chap - Coastguard radio, with a selection of local organisations, songwriter, fossil hunter, beer mat and old comic collector, rider of skidoo, motorbike and a unicycle, magician to children, father of a beloved young daughter.

"Listen!" he says, but I know when I'm beat - he talks for a living.

He can't manage LaM - he's on call - but escorts J and me round the Grenfell House, left intact nearly a hundred years ago, down to Lady Grenfell's silk underslip. It's a house to covet, and enormously expensive to maintain, but it's on the tourist trail. Then on to the Rotunda - the best hospital foyer ever - floor to ceiling ceramic tiles, making huge abstracts of the country, the sea, the people. Unglazed in dark browns and grays, shot through with glazed metallic blues and reds. It's a giant circular sculpture, rather - and we're inside it. I run my hands, blind, over the knobs and fissures on the central pillar. Created late 60s/early 70s, I believe. Of the period and utterly stunning within a very institutional exterior.