Port aux Basques

We are in a campground not far from Port aux Basques. We will take the ferry on Wed. to Sydney Nova Scotia and then head to PEI for about a week. WE really enjoyed our time here in Newfoundland. Ernest has been healthy this whole trip so far and he is still walking lots. Well that is about it for today, if we go for a drive or something tomorrow I will do a post for it.

Driving home from our two nights away!

It seems funny that we say we are going home when we are just going to the motor home wherever it is parked! Here are a few photos of the gardens planted alongside the road and a few other sights I found interesting, They have lots of wood piled for winter, most everyone burns some wood. We see it by the roads, some cut into burning lengths and some are just delivered and not yet cut. They had sleighs by the piles so I guess they load the sleigh and pull it home to burn. There are also big piles stacked up buy the homes.


This is a nice one that Ernest took!

Thrombolites at Flowers Cove

Lying where waves break on the shore are the thrombolites which resembles bun-shaped boulders but are actually the fossil-like remnants of algae and bacteria growth. Though extremely rare today, these living rocks were the only for of life on earth from 3.5 billion to 650 million years.
Ernest took some really good photos from a different angle! He is truly becoming a "Japanese Photographer"!! Here are his photos!

Norstead (Newfoundland)

Norstead Village recreates a port of trade reflective of the Viking era (792-1066 AD). It is situated on the outskirts of L'Anse aux Meadows. In the boat shed there is a replica of the SNORRI, which adventurer Hodding Carter built and used to retrace Leif Ericson's voyage.

L'Anse aux Meadows (Newfoundland)

On a summer day around the year 1000, a substantial Viking expedition from Greenland landed on the shores of what is now L'Anse aux Meadows- a community located at the tip of the Great norther Peninsula in western Newfoundland. Under the leadership pf Leif Eiriksson, the group between 70-90 people established an encampment that served as the base for exploring south throughout the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Although it was a rainy day I really enjoyed seeing this site which is now a National Historic Site of Canada. In the following photos you will see the mounds which are remnants of of eight 11Th century Norse building. The recreation of the sod houses gives you an idea of what the buildings of the Vikings were like.

Labrador

We decided to go see Labrador while we have the chance. It is only a one and a half hour ferry ride and the cost was not much, $17.25 for Ernest and car and $7.50 for me (each way). We stayed in a Bed & Breakfast in Red Bay, about 60 km from the ferry which is where the pavement ends and the (dirt) gravel road begins. In the 1500's the basque whalers had established a major whaling enterprise and Saddle Island in the Red Bay was the centre of the operation. More than 1000 men worked at Red Bay harvesting right and bowhead whales. There is a shipwreck on the beach on Saddle Island that was raised from the bay and I think they said there are three more ships sunken there but they are leaving them where they are. I like the way they fence their gardens. This garden below is fairly close to the house but there are a lot of gardens planted along the highway and not very close to the town or their homes. I guess they are just watered by rain and the fence keeps the Moose out although it does look very strong. Maybe the moose do not eat potatoes, beets, etc. because that is what they mostly plant (root veg.) I will put the photos of the highway gardens in the Newfoundland Blog because they plant the same way here and I have some photos of them.

We saw five Icebergs so that was exciting for us. The "bergs" are not huge but big enough to be exciting to us. Their color changes depending on how the sun is shinning on them.

As usual we spent most of our time looking at the barrens and then snooping through the little villages here. The barrens are full of ground cover type plants and some berry producing plants.

Gros Morne The Arches

Today we drove to what they call THE ARCHES it was a great day and we even had a little sleep in the car by the beach! The arches are just north of Gros Morne Park so we drove through park to get there. I saw one Moose, he was crossing a stream but we were going too fast to get a photo. It was a nice sunny day although when we were by the ocean the wind was blowing. There was a bit of a haze in the sky so some of the photos look hazy. I just had to take a quick snap of two little kids running down to the ARCHES to gather rocks, you will see them in the slide show.