When you are saying those two words with similar cadence and so that they rhyme, you're saying "Newfoundland" correctly. I'd been saying it incorrectly in my head ever since I was even vaguely aware of it's existence...and it's been ridiculously difficult to correct myself. This is another place I've always considered wildly exotic and I can hardly believe I'm here. I loved exploring the province capital of St. John's, with its colorful buildings, cozy streets, and narrow harbor opening into a lovely bay/port. The first shot is the view from Signal Hill, and the second shows Signal Hill when the city is seen from the opposite direction, from the café at the top of The Rooms.
About a half-hour outside the city is Cape Spear, the most easterly point of North America. Which obviously has a lighthouse--two, in fact, since they upgraded but left the old one standing, much like at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. As you can see, it is blustery and chilly here. Didn't really expect otherwise, but it definitely doesn't feel like what I think of as mid-June 'round these parts! Anyway, I've now made it as far east as I can possibly drive, and there's nowhere to go from here but west...
In addition to Cape Spear, we did plenty of exploring of the area around St. John's, including seeing the beach (and its amazingly colored rocks) at Topsail, taking a short but gorgeous hike to the point's edge at Flatrock, and being gifted with a gorgeous rainbow in the bay at Pouch Cove.
We've also been eating well, including eating plenty of local partridgeberries.
On another day, we tackled the Bonavista Peninsula. The distances here are pretty forbidding, because something that may be 75 miles away as the crow flies is likely to take 3.5 hours to reach by car when you have to drive all the way off of one peninsula and then around to another. This effort was worth it, though, to see the town of Bonavista itself, Elliston (famous for puffin-viewing, though I don't have a picture of the ones we saw, and root cellars, which I couldn't imagine would be all that interesting until we found ourselves driving past dozens of them, built everywhere into hillsides), Maberly (where we walked the first 2-3 kilometers of a 17-km coastline trail), and the picture-perfect town of Trinity.
I'm not done with Newfoundland yet, but my mom pretty much is, and it cannot go without mention that everyone we talked to about Newfoundland warned us up and down and back and forth that the whole island is CRAWLING with moose and that they are a serious road hazard and we should never, ever drive after dark because of them; they are extremely active at dawn and dusk. We even got a stern lesson from a native Newfie we met in PEI about what to do if unavoidable moose collision should occur. (Try to throw yourself sideways so your head is below the dashboard; the legs are long and it'll probably come at you through the windshield.) But damned if we haven't driven 9 hours straight across the island plus twice that in circles around several of its many peninsulas over the course of five days, and how many moose have we even seen? ZERO. My mom is seriously dejected about this, and it's a sad thing to see. Not that we wanted to court disaster, but we started even purposefully going for long (slow) evening drives at sunset, on well into the dark of night, seeking out the suckers. Nothing. Just taunted over and over again by signs like this along the roadside:
Granted, I'd much rather not see a moose at all than run into one, or have one run into me (we've heard plenty of stories about that, too).
And moose or no moose, it's been glorious in Newfoundland. The sweeping landscapes; the gazillions of highland lakes surrounded by evergreens; the endless, windy coastline; the wild, remote feeling of being here, like we're at the end of the earth (and in a way, we are)...I wouldn't trade it for anything.
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