The-PITTSTOP: Viking Land, Northern Newfoundland

We enjoyed a beautiful ocean sunset at our campsite in Port au Choix. Woke to a glorious morning and we did some tidepool exploring.

Neat fossil in the rock

Mussels and barnacles

Rock Art

Whoa, what was this fossil?

We continued north along the coast and took some photos of a few things we have noticed all over this area of Newfoundland. These roadside gardens, far from any towns are spread along the road. These are peat bog gardens that the original road builders in the 1960's found and locals decided to use them to build family gardens, even though they have to drive 10-50 miles to get to it!

Some other roadside photos --

Another thing we have mentioned before is the massive amount of woodstacks people have, but here we saw humongous stacks along the road. Jack found out that the folks here are given an annual 10 year cord allowance to cut wood. They go into the woods, chop their trees and haul them out to the roadside where they season for the year and then will bring the wood to their property to use the following year. The multiple stacks are all on "your honor" basis and everyone respects each other's wood stacks.

Next stop - Flower's Cove where we walked out to view the Thrombolites. These are fossils of the earliest known life forms in the world and only found here and Australia. They were a unicellular, but together formed large colonies in that look like rock pillows.

We continued north and then east across the northern peninsula to the northeastern tip of Newfoundland. The Vikings from Greenland "discovered" the area 1,000 years ago and called it Vinland and Leif Eriksson's expeditions throughout the area went as far south as New Brunswick looking for timber and iron for their ships. The settlement here is L'Anse aux Meadows (Land of Meadows) and lasted about 10 years before they decided to withdraw due to expenses. They burned the entire settlement and importantly, would not trade iron weapons with the aboriginal peoples here, which probably led to poor relations between the peoples. The archaelogists discovered the site that locals thought was an old Indian encampment in 1960 - and it is the only recognized authentic Viking site in North America.

Leif Eriksson

We celebrated my birthday at an excellent local restaurant, looking out across the bay at the northernmost tip of Newfoundland. We stayed at a nearby campground and yesterday, we drove into St. Anthony's to see the lighthouse and enjoyed seeing two small icebergs in the distance (getting late in the year) and a school of dolphins.

Everyone needs a viking boat in their front yard!

Viking Sod Hut replica used for a Touristy Dinner Theater

Town of St. Anthony

We backtracked south along the western coast to St. Barbe to catch the last ferry to Labrador - a ninety minute sail across the strait in high winds and some medium waves that made it difficult to walk around the ship without holding on. The ferry actually landed in Quebec province, just a couple of kilometers from Labrador. We drove straight to our campground a few miles from the ferry terminal.