To paraphrase the park guide Kouchibouguac is hard to pronounce but easy to love. We are now in the French part of the province and few of the travelers speak English. But they are mostly friendly and fun (and quick to strum a guitar). Best night skies of the trip too.
Although it seems impossible for anyone living on Prince Edward’s Island to be more than twenty minutes from the beach, a good chunk of Cedar Dune’s Provincial Park’s RV population hails from towns just less than twenty miles away. They still commute to work, cook suppers, raise kids, etc. but, for about $30 a day, choose to do so a few feet from a beautiful red sand beach. We noticed this trend a few years ago at a different island provincial park and thought it strange. After a few days here though it seems much less strange as the parks offer a constant sea breeze (and most homes on the island lack AC), a trio of teenage girls who plan activities for the children (something Henna enjoyed), and a soft red world of warm water looked over by a light house and ringed by low grassy dunes. It was at this beach that I first knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Corey. Now close to fifteen years later we get to watch Henna play at the same beach. If only we were so lucky as to have this in our backyard.
In a collection of short stories, Paul Theroux commented that islanders tend to exaggerate the distances between points and it is not uncommon at all for locals to have never traveled just a few towns over. This is definitely the case here where the local teenagers working the Tim Horton’s in Charlottetown had no idea a national park existed thirty miles away. It was only marginally better at the gas station where several people (all locals) gathered around our map to help us navigate our way back to the park. Charlottetown is a small city (about 35,000 people) with two used book stores (yeah!), a comic shop, some history, and a few seemingly good restaurants. East of the city are postcard perfects towns with quiet harbors, bed and breakfasts, and a cool distillery. We spent our first night on the island at Red Point Provincial Park and would have enjoyed our stay better if it did not rain. At the most northeast point of the park is a lighthouse and seal hangout where we spied bobbing shiny black heads in the choppy water. Directly north of Charlottetown is the Cavendish area which is known wide and far for Anne of Green Gables. A cousin’s farm, which was used as inspiration for the book series, has been made into a national park and is a good place to wander to about. The west side of the island is decidedly more rural with Cedar Dunes close to the most south west point of the island. After spending almost two weeks in Newfoundland (where distances are always greater than they seem) tiny PEI is somewhat of relief. You can drive the entire perimeter of the island in a day (but why I am not sure). The largest wild mammals on this island are the elusive coyote and, except for a few thickets of trees, it looks very much like Iowa (except of course for the red sand beaches and lighthouses which are everywhere). At roadside stands and out of trucks parked alongside the ride you can pick out berries, potatoes, scallops, lobster, and mussels (the fish coming right out of Styrofoam coolers). Last night it was locally grown green beans, new potatoes (the first potatoes of the season, they are smaller and more delicate than the next crop), and salmon. Yesterday it was scallops and the day before steamed mussels. The living here is good.
Now on the last morning at PEI I sit in the car waiting for either the rain to stop or the ladies to wake up. It is off to the mainland next and then in a little bit home. Until then the road is our home. Noel
After a 17 hour ferry, a stop at a fortress, three-hour drive and one more hour ferry we arrived on the land of red sand (PEI). Enjoy the photos.
You might be a Newfie if:
All summer long your clothes hang from the line.
The houses in your town have more color than a box of crayons.
St. John’s is simply called “the town.”
The first time you ever saw sidewalk was when you went to town.
You often find yourself walking in the middle of the road.
You think nothing of wandering into a forest to cut down some trees for fuel or to gather some berries for food.
Your garden is on the side of the road in the absolute middle of nowhere.
A stranger asks you for directions and you end up walking with them for a mile.
Another stranger asks you a question and you end up talking with them for an hour.
You own a small business but go broke because you keep giving things away.
You have no idea what the person from the next town is saying. You joke about that with someone and then realize they don’t understand you either.
You are a fisherman. So was your dad. And his dad. And his dad too. Same with his dad.
Everyone you know is a fisherman.
When you are not fishing you are thinking about hunting a moose.
No one ever calls you a CFA (Come From Away).
Afternoon coffee is a mug up.
When toutons are on the menu.
People often call you kind and love to hang out with you. Your just being yourself.
Newfoundland we will be back!
Experiences in Newfoundland are really a nesting egg kind of thing with a causeway leading to an island whose ferry then leads to an even smaller island which, when you get there, makes all that wandering worthwhile. And the most common adjective used around here is magical with places like Twillingate offering both icebergs and whales seemingly within an arm’s reach of shore. Even the time zone, which is a half hour ahead of the Maritimes, has a bit of a Harry Potter quality to it.
From Twillingate we drove a few hours to Elliston which is known for their root cellars and puffins. The latter hang out an island so close you can almost jump to it. Depending on the time of day, you can either spy them hanging out at their own island or venturing onto the main coast (and then resting a few feet away from yourself). Whales are also common so you might have a bit of dilemma over where to point the camera. Afterwards a beautiful sand beach waits for you to splash around in the waves. Considering the icebergs in the distance, the water really is not that cold.
Root cellar at Elliston
We are here in lovely St. John’s. The folks on this island have proved to be the nicest and these nice folks went beyond by escorting us to the best pizza outside of Chicago.
There were no moose living in Newfoundland prior to 1904. That is when the British introduced four moose to the island in an effort to promote better eating habits among the islanders. From that modest stock there are now well over 100,000 moose in Newfoundland. There favorite pastime is to jump in front of moving cars. So it was a little bit scary when the fog rolled in midway through our journey south from St. Anthony back to Gros Morne. While locals and kids on bikes passed me by, I gripped the steering wheel tight and made it back safely to the national park.
Gros Morne is like no park I have ever been. Among the oddities are bays with water so still they look like lakes along with fjords that have been landlocked for tens of thousands of years. Oddest yet are the Tablelands ands which are portions of the earth’s mantle exposed for tourists to climb over. There is no other known place like it.
It is also very much a living museum. Created the same year Corey and I were (1973), it is nestled in a hard-working family fishing world where many of the park interpreters spent summer after summer salting and canning the fish their fathers caught. Within the park boundaries there are several villages that consist of little more than a few scattered houses facing the sea and the equipment needed to bring the fish to market. Many of the people we have met over the past week are fishermen elsewhere on the island who have done this work for generations. Talking with them (especially the older generation) gives one a real appreciation for how hard it is to make a living off the sea. Catching the fish is the easiest part (and is done almost exclusively by the men). You then had to gut them, salt them, wash them, dry them, can them, and then clean the cans for market. One family operation cleared over 100,000 pounds of fish in a single summer. They were paid a cent and a half of pound so $1500 was divided among three families (with a work week lasting every hour of the long Newfie summer day).
The curious thing about Newfoundland is the limited amount of fish ready to buy at market. Fish here is a commodity sent south to Maine or east to Europe. Maybe you keep a little for the home, but there is none to buy at the local grocery shelves. Truth be told there is little else to buy and in the end that might be why we come home.
Had dinner tonight with whales and icebergs in the bay, scallops on my plate. Newfoundland rocks.
Driving a little over two hundred miles north from the Gross Morn area takes you to, as someone else told me, “the land good weather forgot.” The trees, which are by no means tough and sturdy on the south end of the island, become gnarled, stumpy things bent over backwards by the constant salt winds. The population thins out too but there are enough little encampments of people to support a few tiny grocery stores, some motels, and gas stations. St. Anthony, which rests at the top of the peninsula and served as a hub for Canadian-U.S. military radar installations during the Cold War, is noticeably larger but still possesses that stark frontier feel. Polar bears come in late Spring and are sometimes tranquilized and brought back to Labrador when they wear out their welcome (and for that reason we were very polite to everyone we met). Lucky for us there were a few icebergs in nearby Goose Cove to gawk at. But the main attraction was L’Anse Aux Meadows and it did not at all disappoint.
The Norse (and that is a more accurate descriptor than Viking) landed in North America four hundred prior to Christopher Columbus. We know that for sure because they left their mark near the town of L’Anse Aux Meadows. Excavated there was the imprint of their homes along with a ring, some nails, evidence of a smelt ironing operation, and a few other artifacts. There also were several butter nuts and butter nut wood remnants which are not found anywhere on the island (but are, along with grapes, plentiful in New Brunswick and Quebec). Much of what they found fits in neatly to the sagas recorded by Irish monks some two hundred years later. No bodies were recovered in the meadow, but by the year 1000 (and that is the year carbon dating suggests) they were Christians. They would have boiled or otherwise separated the bodies from the bone and then taken the skeleton to consecrated grounds (like there is in Greenland where a European was found buried with an arrow head near his chest that may have been worn as an ornament or could have been more forcibly put there).
The three of us (two Norse ladies and a wannabe) were greatly impressed by all there was to do at L’Anse Aux Meadows. From the guided tour to the recreated Norse outpost (complete with three awesome actors) it was done with dignity and left us with a much better understanding of just how remarkable this world is. Think about it. A band of maybe twenty five explorers stumble upon an entirely unheard of (for Europeans anyway) continent. They almost definitely had no idea where exactly they landed and seem to have lost interest in the land after a few expeditions (Parks Canada believe that over a period of fifty years they spent maybe ten non-consecutive years in the meadow). But they smelted iron, traded and fought with Native Americans, and slept under the stars of North America. Not bad for a bunch of Scandinavian farmers. Noel
Hennacornoeli Days 