500 Newfoundlanders ended up booking the same Caribbean cruise in ‘total fluke,’ reports say

• 500 passengers on a Caribbean cruise were from Canada’s East-coast province, reports said.
• The Celebrity Apex ship hosted a special party for the Newfoundlanders.
• One passenger said it was amusing to hear the distinct Newfoundland accent when walking around the ship.

Passengers aboard a Celebrity Apex cruise to the Caribbean this month were surprised when it turned out that 500 were all from Canada’s easternmost province, said reports.

The cruise, which left Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on April 6 to sail around the Caribbean, hosted 3,000 guests of which 250 couples, came from Newfoundland, or were Newfoundlanders living in other parts of the world.

In pictures from the voyage, the contingent can be seen wearing t-shirts with the Newfoundland and Labrador flag on the front and draping the flag over their deck chairs.

Passenger Pam Pardy, told CBC News that she had been amused by how frequently she heard the distinct Newfoundland accent and local phrases when walking around the ship.

“You get your lounge chair and the girl next to us dropped her sunglasses, and she goes, ‘Oh me glasses, I can’t leave they’ — everybody understood what everybody else was saying,” Pardy said, per CBC.

She told CBC that she had booked the trip more than a year in advance, though she later learned from her travel agent that a large group of Newfoundlanders had also booked on to the same cruise.

“From what I understand, it was just a total fluke,” Pardy said.

Pardy admitted that her first thought of vacationing on a ship with her fellow Newfoundlanders filled her with dread. “I was kind of like, ‘Oh God, that’s going to be horrible,” she told BBC News.

But the sense of community between the guests, Pardy said, was special and unique. “There was something familiar and comforting, but at the same time exotic,” she told the BBC, adding the weather in Newfoundland is “a real big drag.”

On the last night of the voyage, the Newfoundlanders gathered on the deck to take a group picture and sing the Ode to Newfoundland, the province’s official anthem.