test blog #10

If you read wmtc when Allan and I were in Newfoundland, you may remember my friend "NCF," Newfie Campaign Friend. We met NCF's mom - who insisted we stay for dinner and spend the night - and visited the birthplace of her grandmother, which just happens to be a National Historic Site, the Cape Bonavista Lighthouse . NCF sent me these photos, sent to her from a friend back home. They were taken around Bonavista Bay, Newfoundland. Click to enlarge. I didn't find any stories online about this incident, but it is mentioned in a CBC story about another polar bear sighting in Central Newfoundland: Conservation officers caught two polar bears over the weekend — one in Cape Freels near Lumsden, the other in Bonaventure on the Bonavista peninsula. Rebecca Jeffery, a wildlife biologist with the Newfoundland and Labrador government, said at the end of March that while sightings of polar bears may be up, that doesn't mean there are more; they might just be moving in areas wh...

Photos from our trip to Newfoundland are up: here . For more context, you can click on the category "Newfoundland trip" ; each set is linked in the appropriate post. Allan chose a small representative sample from the zillions of pictures we took in each place. I still have to add some descriptions, but hopefully it will give you a feel for what we saw.

We do have photos from Newfoundland, I promise. I am under the gun on the Spinal Network project, and struggling to maintain some down-time (exercise, reading) and my sanity. Getting photos organized and online is usually my department, but this time it's Allan's. So you'll see the photos... at some point. Yesterday I started reading John Gimlette's Theatre of Fish , a memoir - travelogue - meditation on Newfoundland and Labrador, so this seems like a good time to cross something off my long to-write list. If you visit the west coast of Newfoundland, I highly recommend spending a day or more in Port Aux Choix , especially if you're interested in native peoples, ancient history and archeology. And while you're there, you'll want to see if Jeannie's Sunrise B&B has any vacancies. In Newfoundland, we stayed in both bed-and-breakfasts and motels. The B&B's were all lovely, and some were outstanding. The nightly crabfest put on by our wacky hos...

Wouldn't you know it? The weather is brilliant today - warm and completely sunny. Ah, well. With a morning to kill in Deer Lake, we drove to a craft studio in the nearby town of Pasadena. This was Meyer's Minerals , a shop that makes jewelry and other objects from local stones such as labradorite and marble. We had seen labradorite in all the gift shops, but I didn't care for it - and now I discovered why. The stuff sold in the gift shops is mostly cheap imitation, coated with beeswax. The real thing, cut by a craftsperson and polished to a high gloss, is beautiful. The labradorite jewelry was out of my price range, but there were earrings made of other local stones that were more reasonable and really nice. I bought another pair of earrings: an abstract shape of a polar bear, cut from white marble. It used to be really hard to buy myself things on our trips - I would agonize over any purchase and Allan would try to talk me into it. It wasn't the money - it was buying s...

Happy Canada Day! This morning it was only misting, so after partridgeberry pancakes in Woody Point, we went to The Tablelands for a guided walk. This is one area where you really want to have some interpretation, or else it's just a lot of rocks. Two young Parks Canada guides really brought it to life, using props and analogies to explain basic geological concepts and introduce us to the strange fauna. We learned about how so much of the earth's mantle got exposed here, and why people like to study it. We saw plants that normally grow in the arctic, a few carnivorous plants, and some stunted junipers, which are more than 100 years old but only a few inches tall. It was pretty interesting, although I find it difficult to really conceive of things that happened 650 million years ago. We went to the Discovery Centre, which is the visitors centre on the south side of the Park, and much more of an educational centre than the centre at Rocky Harbour. One great exhibit had photograph...

[Monday, June 30] Yesterday's little sea kayaking adventure was on Bonne Bay, a beautifully scenic little bay surrounded by the mountains of Gros Morne, and home to several small towns - Norris Point on one side, Woody Point, Shoal Brook and a few others on the other side. A water taxi can shuttle you back and forth in 15 minutes, but it takes an hour and a half to drive on the mountainous roads from one side of the bay to the other. From our kayaks, Christine pointed out The Tablelands, which from our vantage appeared as a reddish-brown, bald mountain. Gros Morne National Park is home to a large number of geological oddities, one of those being the area called The Tablelands. It's a barren, rocky expanse where more of the earth's mantle is exposed than any place else on earth. I don't know what that means, but if the weather clears up, I'll find out tomorrow morning. From the visitors centre in Rocky Harbour, we made a few phone calls and found a room - actually a ...

[Sunday June 29] We had a terrific day, made even better by great weather - sunny with some puffy white clouds, warm enough for a t-shirt and a light jacket, and no rain or fog . After breakfast we had a bit of running around to do a little laundry (ran out of short-sleeved shirts!), but timed everything perfectly for the boat tour of Western Brook Pond. This is one of the main attractions of Gros Morne, and it requires some advanced planning. You need an advance reservation, but you can't purchase your ticket when you make the reservation (not sure why, possibly weather?), so you make two trips to the ticket office. The ticket office is in a hotel in Rocky Harbour, and the entrance for the boat tour is about 30 minutes away. You park there and walk a three-kilometer trail to the boat dock. Part of the trail is boardwalked through bog. Later in July, there are three or four boats a day, but right now there's only one, and it was completely sold out. The parking lot was full and...

[Saturday, June 28] We had a fun day and I think we have a spectacular day ahead of us. I don't usually blog after drinking this much wine, but I'll give it a go. We left Port au Choix with many goodbyes, hugs and well-wishes. Jeannie's Sunrise Bed and Breakfast is a special place, and I want to write a separate post that perhaps Jeannie can use for her website. For now I'll just tell you something about our host. Jeannie grew up in Port au Choix, one of 17 children. Of the 13 that are still on this earth, seven live in Newfoundland. Jeannie owns and runs her B&B with love and pride. She does well - but the season is only four months long. In the off-season, she works in Alberta as an oil-patch cook. "Like modern-day slavery, it is," she says. In Alberta, Jeannie works 14-hour shifts, on her feet the entire day, the only break an hour or two in the afternoon. She works for 21 days, then has six days off. Jeannie has done this for the past three years, and...

This is a very interesting place, and a beautiful one. If you are ever driving the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, I highly recommend a day's stop at Port au Choix. After breakfast at the B&B, we went back to the Visitors Centre for a video and a better look at the artifacts there. These are among the best preserved prehistoric artifacts you will see anywhere, thanks to the area's alkaline soil. Also, the Dorset Indians and the Paleoeskimos were expert toolmakers who knew how to best exploit the rich resources they found. The arrowheads, toggle harpoons, needles (made of antler), sled runners (made of bone), spear heads and all the tools displayed were so perfect and fine, quite impressive. Excavations began in this area in the 1960s, after a local resident found skeletal remains while digging a basement. It is still being excavated, and the work could continue for decades without ever being complete. As the climate changed, cooling and heating and cooling again o...

After my two-second whale spotting and our decision to take a boat tour in St. Anthony, we gave up trying to find anyplace to hang out in town. We picked up some food in a supermarket and went back to our room to get warm and dry, blog, and watch the Red Sox game online. But our frustrating and annoying day wasn't over yet: bad weather caused our host's satellite connection to fritz out. Sigh. We got up very early for a 9:00 boat tour. It was cold, windy and still raining, but we were bundled up and ready. And the boat was cancelled. Sigh. As it turned out, we didn't need to be in St. Anthony at all. We could have stayed in L'Anse aux Meadows, saved ourselves a lot of driving back and forth, and probably hit a ranger tour at Burnt Cape. Annoying. But you know, these things happen. L'Anse aux Meadows was terrific, and we had no way of knowing how the rest of it would work out, and obviously no control over the weather. So we stripped off a few layers and hit the road...

[Wednesday, June 25] This morning we learned that we can stay in this B&B a second night, if we don't mind sharing a bathroom with our host, which we don't. So after breakfast, we moved our bags upstairs, cancelled our reservation at the motel next door, and drove to L'Anse aux Meadows , about 50 km away. (We passed the turn-off for it on the way to St. Anthony yesterday.) As you drive out to L'Anse, the landscape becomes very barren - rock, moss, low-lying plants, almost like tundra. We passed a moose on our way to the visitors' centre. He was busy feeding and took no notice of people staring at him from a distance. He was still there, still eating, when we came out. L'Anse aux Meadows was the first location ever listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site . It was the first point of European contact with the New World, and also the first site of iron-making in the New World. The Vikings came to this place four times over the course of 10 or 20 years, 500 years...

[Sunday, June 23] I forced us to get out early this morning, which means I'm the driver for a several hours before Allan is fully awake. It was sunny and warm, but that proved to be deceptive. This was a driving day. We weren't sure how far we'd get, but were planning on staying somewhere on the Northern Peninsula. The idea was to get up to L'Anse Aux Meadows as quickly as possible, then take our time getting back. Newfies pronounce the site name in English: Lance-Oh-Meadows. The Trans-Canada was empty and fast, as always, and the scenery was green and beautiful. There is so much water here - bay, inlets, ponds, creeks, streams. Water and rock, water and rock. At Deer Lake we picked up the 430, which runs along the western coast of the Northern Peninsula, from Deer Lake to St. Anthony (said "Sinnantiny"). Route 430 also runs through Gros Morne National Park, and the scenery becomes very dramatic there, with ridge upon ridge of green mountains marching off into...

[Saturday, June 22] This was our last morning on the east coast of Newfoundland, and our second consecutive sunny, warm day, likely a record that we won't see broken. Before we headed out, I wanted one last look at the massive iceberg that was still hanging around the harbour. As we checked out of the motel, the desk clerk said she was up by the lighthouse the night before, and of course she saw a whale. "Comin' right up out of the water, it was." Is everyone really seeing whales when we're not around, or is this an elaborate trick the locals play on the mainlanders? After checking the iceberg - still there, still huge - we drove down the peninsula to Boyd's Cove. In that town, there's an interpretation centre about the Beothuks , the aboriginal people of Eastern Newfoundland. The Beothuks (pronounced "bee-othic," to rhyme with "gothic") were a culture of migratory hunter-gatherers who lived on and near the coast. Two hundred and fifty...

We didn't get an early start this morning, but there's something about these lazy seaside towns that discourage rushing. But it's a glorious warm and sunny day, something to be treasured here, and you do want to stay outside as much as possible. After breakfast, we drove around Twillingate's little harbour to the tour boat company that has the best reputation. Cecil Stockley has been in business 25 years, about 15 years longer than there has been a regular tourist trade in Twillingate. We booked a 1:00 boat, then headed farther down the road, just to see what was out there. Not 50 feet later, as the car came up over a hill, we saw a huge iceberg sitting out in the bay. It's a remarkable sight. It seems completely out of place, like it dropped from the sky. We drove further out, thinking we could walk onto one of the headlands for a good view, but the berg disappeared. The roads are winding, and there are so many more inlets and coves than you think, you can't e...

[Saturday, June 21] Saturday morning, and most of the day, was chilly and drizzly. Everyone here talks about the weather all the time. Even taking into account the usual small-talk, this seems unusual. I imagine when you live in a place where the weather is constantly changing, and where a warm, sunny day is a minor event, and then throw in the influence of a maritime culture, where weather could mean life or death, it makes sense. And everyone has been complaining about the weather, too. It hasn't seemed so bad to me - we've usually been comfortable with a light jacket, and only once had to really bundle up - but when you consider that it's late June, perhaps they've got a point. It was only when fellow guests at the B&B complained that it bothered me. Hell, you don't come to Newfoundland for the weather. And if sunny weather is that important to you, then wait for July and put up with the crowds. Grumble, grumble. This mild irritation is the perfect lead-in to...

[Friday, June 20] After Florence cooked us a full breakfast, including homemade bread and jams, we walked down the street to Ryan Premises , a national historic site. We weren't expecting much, just a town museum and something about the fishing industry, but it turned out to be absolutely fascinating, a must-see if you visit Bonavista. Ryan Premises is a group of buildings on the harbour, which includes the home of the Ryan family , who owned much of the town, and pretty much owned the fishermen and their families, too. It houses the Bonavista historical society, an collection of artifacts from generations of town families. The best part of Ryan Premises is an interpretative centre telling the story of the fishing industry in Newfoundland, from its beginning in the 1500s to its demise in the early 1990s. (There's a separate exhibit on sealing.) From it, I gained a much deeper understanding of the history and culture of the province. The exhibit includes a National Film Board mo...