Newfoundland (continued)

In the US we tend to pronounce the name of the province with the stress on the first syllable, but locals stress the second syllable (newFOUNDland). Their accents varied as we made our way across the island, from general Canadian (oot and aboot) in the west, to nearly sounding Irish in St. John’s (on the east coast). I won’t belabor this now, as Steve will summarize our trip as usual, with interesting tidbits later.

Now, back to Gros Morne National Park. One of the main things tourists visiting this area do is take a boat ride into the Western Brook Pond. You should know that in Newfoundland, any body of fresh water is called a pond - even this 16km long lake:

As we had recently taken a boat ride into a fjord on the South Island of New Zealand, we passed on this activity. However, we did enjoy the stroll to get to the Pond…

… where we were kindly directed by some other tourists to take a side trail through a lovely woods. There, we found a cute Swamp Sparrow…

… tiny Scottish Primrose…

… and frogs…

… lots of frogs -

As usual, to watch the video above, tap the link at the end of this post to open it in your browser. We couldn’t really capture all the multitude of frogs hopping off the trail in front of us as we walked, but Steve captured a small representation there.

So before we proceeded up to the northern end of the Great Northern Peninsula, we had a nice last evening at the Lobster Cove Lighthouse -

With Steve’s love of history, we had to make the significant detour to the northernmost point of Newfoundland to visit L’Anse aux Meadows. This is the only known site of a Viking settlement in North America, dating to around 1,000 years ago. As we got near, the fog was rolling in…

… but hadn’t yet obscured the remains of icebergs in a cove -

I’m not sure what this sculpture had to do with Vikings, but I liked it -

That was at the beginning of the boardwalk trail through the replica of the settlement -

I included the picture above because it sets the scene of bleakness and fog, but you may want to enlarge it to see more details of the layout.

We both enjoyed our visit very much, and were thrilled to be there on the first day they started offering guided tours (June 1). Yay! We’re finally in tourist season.

We spent the night nearby, finding a nice iceberg in the cove beneath the B&B -

The next morning we did a short hike up to a hilltop overlooking the ocean…

… and coves around us -

All the little iceberg remnants were gorgeous -

As we drove back south, we passed a number of garden plots next to the highway…

… that were being readied for planting, but I couldn’t figure out how that little wooden fence would keep out moose. These plots would increase in number as we neared towns, then dwindle away after we passed through.

There were also huge stacks of wood along the highway…

… but my eye was always caught by the icebergs we drove by -

So I’ll end this note as we head east across the island province, with a reminder of the gorgeous sunsets we had on the west coast -