If you’re looking for the night club, you’ve made a wrong turn.
The closest such thing at Fishers’ Loft Inn is a Muskoka chair on the lawn, a woolly afghan to keep out the evening chill, a pair of John and Peggy’s binoculars, a snifter of good brandy and a star-sprinkled night sky that stretches out beyond the cove and across the sea.

Here in Port Rexton, on the south coast of Newfoundland’s Bonavista Peninsula, there’s not much else to do after the sun disappears.

Sure, there’s always some production down the road in Trinity, where the Rising Tide Theatre company performs in a replica fishing premises on the wharf.

But a better option is to stay put at the inn, repair to the living room, choose a book from the intelligent collection that lines the far wall, stake out a wing chair and order up a tea tray or something rich and red from the Fishers’ wine list.

It may be delivered by John and Peggy themselves, in which case a stimulating conversation is all but guaranteed, or by evening manager Roxane, who, as a Rex, is a descendant of one of the first settlers in the community (thus Port Rexton.)

The Fishers have staffed their inn with locals, people who understand and cherish the culture, history and way of life. Most have been with the Fishers long enough to be considered lifers.

All of them are descended from English settlers who arrived in the 18th century - the evening cook is a 10th generation Newfoundlander.

Some have been “away,” but were pulled home by the powerful magnetic force of The Rock.

(As local tourism rep Betsy Saunders says: “Newfoundlanders are tied here forever. They could be gone for 30 years and they still call this home. Their heart is always here. And if your heart is here, why be anywhere else?”)

Among the most senior staff, in dog years at least, is the amiable mutt Heike, a would-be yellow Lab who, by virtue of being short one limb (thanks to an encounter with a car), will always be known as “the three-legged dog.”

Despite their 17 years in the area, John and Peggy, too, will always carry a label - “from away.” She’s from Ottawa, he’s an Englishman. They met in Toronto when Peggy worked as John’s assistant on a restoration project at an 1850s courthouse on Adelaide Street.

In 1988, they were living in Peterborough with their two sons when John went to Grand Falls in Newfoundland’s interior on a consulting job. He called home: “You should come out here.”

Peggy packed up the boys, Luke, 6, and Gabriel, 8, and stayed at an inn in Trinity, where she’d be close to the sea. The family was so smitten with the place, they decided to buy a summer home there. They put an offer in on a humble fixer-upper, once a fisherman’s cottage, in Port Rexton.

“We bought the house at the end of March (1989),” recalls Peggy. “It was so grey, there was no view. We came back at the end of June with the kids, the car laden, and had the most wonderful carefree summer. Within a month, we’d decided we were going to move here permanently.

“We could hardly tear ourselves away to go back to Peterborough.”