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Bernadette Shea and her sister Dolly, both from northern Ontario, spoke a few times over the years about travelling across the island of Newfoundland. It was something left sitting on the bucket list, until one day Shea was listening to the radio.
It was the CBC and a story of a nurse who had hitchhiked from Vancouver to Halifax.
“I’m listening to this and thinking my God that’s the best thing I ever heard,” Bernadette Shea recently told CBC Radio’s Newfoundland Morning.
“I just went to the phone, and I called my sister Dolly and said ‘Do you still want to go to Newfoundland?’”
It had been a long time coming but Shea was ready to cross the island, with one stipulation: they hitchhike rather than drive. It was 2012 and Shea was 60 and her sister was 72.
“You know at 72, she never questioned it. She said ‘I’m in. I am in.’ I picked her up at the airport four days later,” she said, explaining both women were looking for an adventure.
What followed is now captured in Thumbin’ the Rock: A Newfoundland Hitchhiking Odyssey, a newly released book written by Shea.
“We were an oddity on the side of the road,” she said, noting the two women were pulling an old grocery cart filled with supplies in the stretches where they walked alongside the Trans-Canada Highway, with Shea carrying a guitar on her back.
“We were not about to hurt anybody or hold anybody up. We just looked like two old women on the side of the road who needed a ride. And you know, Newfoundlanders have big hearts,” she said. “It wasn’t difficult getting rides at all.”
Shea says the decision to write a book based on their experience was prompted by an encounter with an intake nurse. (Submitted by Bernadette Shea)
Early on in the trip, she said one driver thought they may have run away from a seniors’ care home.
Shea said apart from the preliminary exchanges each time they were picked up, with remembrances kept in notes the pair made along the way, the drivers also shared stories.
After the trip, Shea said she sat on the stories for a dozen years, then she went for a medical appointment where she and the intake nurse were making small talk.
“She said, ‘Tell me your best adventure ever,'” Shea recalled, adding her thumbing it across Newfoundland instantly came to mind.
The nurse asked where she could buy the book.
“I said you know there is a book here,” she said.
The book is available now, published by Somewhat Grumpy Press, a Canadian independent publisher founded in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia in 2020.
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