Home
Up

Sep 1, 2004

Hi,

We are now back in Nova Scotia after spending 3 weeks in Newfoundland. We ferried over on August 10 and had a very beautiful day. The Gulf of St. Lawrence was mirror smooth so my thoughts of seasickness were forgotten for the day. It was a 5 1/2 hour trip which made for a long day as we were early and spent 2 1/2 hours in line waiting to board. We drove to Pasadena, NF and spent the night.

The following day we drove to Gander, NF and on to St. John's where we spent the day lining up tours and waiting for our daughter, Lynne, to join us. We did a city tour of St. John's and saw Signal Hill where Marconi sent the first wireless message to Europe. We went to Cape Spear which is the furthermost eastern point in North America. We spent time on George Street in St. John's which is a lineup of bars similar to Bourbon Street in New Orleans. We did think it was a bit cleaner than Bourbon Street was the last time we were there.

On Sunday, August 15th we did a boat tour of Witless Bay and saw many sea birds, cormorant, puffins but we a bit disappointed that we did see any whales. Leaving that area we traveled to Clarenville and drove the Discovery Trail which took us to Bonavista light house. Light Houses are very interesting and the quarters for the family much more spacious than we thought. Along that trail, we spotted a moose and her calf. It was a gorgeous drive.

 On August 18, we drove to the Twillingate area and visited the Twillingate Lighthouse. On August 19, we drove to Gander, NF where we visited the Silent Memorial where on December 12, 1985, a plane loaded with 256 people from the 101st Airborne (The Screaming Eagles) lost their lives. A very moving memorial. On August 20, we traveled to Gros Morne National Park. We spent Saturday and Sunday touring the park. Saw the remains of the SS Ethie shipwreck. The beach there was full of round rocks. It looked like a beach of eggs. Further down the road were the Arches which are limestone rocks that have been carved away to create arches. We also saw a moose in Cow Head, NF.

This is the first area in which we saw farming on NF. An interesting thing we saw along the road was local people would fence off an area and plant potatoes or other vegetables in the plot. There were countless numbers of them. Something I found very interesting was the local people would hang laundry out on a line attached to a pulley so they never had to leave the porch to hang laundry. We took a boat tour of the Trout River area which is a landlocked fjord. It was rich in geologic history. Rocks usually found only deep within the earth's mantle are exposed here at the Tablelands, a mesa-like formation forced to the surface by tectonic forces. We drove to St. Barbie where we were able to take a ferry to Labrador and visited the Red Bay area where there had been a 16th century Basque whaling station. We saw a chalupa (small whaling boat) that probably sunk around 1565 and was excavated, preserved and reconstructed.

After spending a day on Labrador, we traveled to the northern tip of Newfoundland and there visited the site of the first Vikings settlement in Canada. This was settled around the year 1000 AD many year before Columbus discovered the New World. The archaeological site was excavated in the 1960's and 70's. There is a reconstruction of the L'Anse aux Meadows area. We spent several hours here and were so impressed with the people who had the courage to settle and live here. It has been determined that the Vikings spent about 20 years here and left because of difficulties with the Aboriginal people. Leaving the visitor center we saw two moose, one of which had antler probably six feet from tip to tip. A very impressive animal.

We spent a day in St. Anthony visiting the museums and home of Dr. Wilfred T. Grenfell who spent his life bringing medicine to the people of western Newfoundland and Labrador. Traveling back down the Viking Trail we saw a caribou in a field near the road. We ended our two weeks with Lynne at Deer Lake from which she flew back to Fort Worth. Dick and I continued on to Port Aux Basques where we visited one more Newfoundland light house. This was a light house and quarters built of granite quarried on the site. The walls were approximately 6 feet thick, built of granite blocks 3 feet thick with a dead airspace of approximately 6 inches between the blocks. Again we were impressed by the living quarters and the people who lived there, everything had to be brought to them by boat and they spent a majority of their time with no contact with the outside world.

On August 30, we ferried back to Nova Scotia. This trip wasn't as nice mainly because it was raining and we couldn't be outside. It was smooth enough for which I was very happy. We are in Nova Scotia for the next week and will then proceed to New Brunswick. Take Care.

Hugs from the Keyes Guys, Dick and Judy