Newfoundland

Thursday 9/8

Actually we are waiting for the ferry to Newfoundland, which departs Blanc Sablon, Quebec, just south of the border with Labrador, and arrives 2 hours later at St Barbe, where we will spend the night. It looks like a rough trip as the wind has been blowing all last night and today.

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Now in St Barbe.  Boy, was that ever a waste of Dramamine. It was windy coming across but it was perfectly smooth onboard. Only took 1 1/2 hours to cross. If you are curious, the fare for us and that 54 feet of travel trailer and pickup was $63. Ferrys are great.

9/9

Drove north for a couple hours and got a really beautiful site in a Provincial Park, no hookups but only cost around $10. This is at the very tip of the northern peninsula – you can’t go any further north in Newfoundland.

The park ranger saw 4 moose on his way to the park this morning. There are a few here in the park. No bears here although there are black bears further south.

In the early 1900s,  four moose were brought over from the mainland.  From those four, there are now 130,000!, and Newfoundland has the highest concentration of moose anywhere in the world. I wonder about genetic diversity. I also wonder “Just where in the hell are they?”

9/10

Actually, today we saw a cow with a year old calf – both eating just off the road. She was huge, in fact, moose are the largest hoofed animal in the Americas, some weighing over 1200lbs. The strangest thing about this?, hunting season started yesterday and they give tags for bulls,  cows, and even calves!  Those two had better head for higher ground.

Newfoundland and Labrador were, when we were last here, separate provinces. Now, they are combined into one – NL.

This area is where Nordic Vikings first had a settlement around 1000 AD. Almost 500 years before Columbus. It was discovered back in the 1960s so it was never a part of my education. Nevertheless, surprising. Now a UNESCO World Heritage site. We spent several hours there today at the Interpretive Center.

We had dinner in a very nice place called Catch of the Day. Awesome.

It rained last night and the temp got to 40. Today, bright and sunny with temps in mid 50s but with the cool weather all the black flies are gone. Yay! Actually,  here they all say that Labrador is where they have the black flies – not here. Yeah, right.

These Newfies love camping. A lot of RVs next to homes.  Now, being Saturday, during the night many of the campsites filled with mostly travel trailers like ours.

Animals we’ve seen in addition to the deer, moose, bear, lynx, and fox – we have periodically seen spruce grouse, mainly along roads. They have two separate heards of caribou on the island , each around 3,000. Birds of prey are common, harriers, hawks, eagles, and kestrels. Turkeys were common in the Dakotas.  Waterfowl are not as common as I would have thought, too early for the fall migration, but we’ve seen dozens of different species.

As I read this back, it’s sounding pretty boring, but, we are having a great time.

Sunday

We are actually back in St Barbe, the ferry landing place. We got here while the whole town was having a power outage. We went ahead and set up in the same RV camp. Power came back just before 5PM. So I filled up the car and hauled some water as we may be here more than one day. It’s already raining and wind gusts are forecasted 80-100 (km)(50-60 mph) thru tomorrow.

Nothing else new other than we saw more moose today. Pics coming.

Love to all

M n D