Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Day 43 & 44 – St. John’s and Irish Loop road tour, Newfoundland

Day 43 – It is Sunday in St. John’s and it is another misty, drizzly day but we will make the best of it.
Leo went out to take pictures of downtown St. John’s even though light rain was falling. This was to be his last chance as we are determined to leave St. John’s and its poor Pippy Park campground tomorrow. In the evening we went to the Newfoundland & Labrador Folk Festival. The rain had stopped, so we hoped for a dry evening but did go prepared and took our raincoats along. That is something we have learned here: you never leave without your raincoat (or umbrella). That is, unless you are a Newfoundlander, many of whom walk around in the drizzle and rain as if the sun was shining.
We were able to put our chairs on a fairly good spot on the soaking wet grass with a full view of the stage. We got there just in time to see Sylvia Tyson, a band whose name escapes us, the famous Figgy Duff, and Shanneyganock. We thoroughly enjoyed the last two bands and even bought some of their cds. At the end all the volunteers working the festival were asked to get on stage to sing, together with the whole crowd, the ‘Ode to Newfoundland’. The rain did stay away for most of the evening. We only had a few minutes of light drizzle and that was it. By the time we got back to our trailer it was midnight so bedtime it was for us.

Day 44 – Irish Loop road tour.
This morning we packed up and left Pippy Park Campground (a campground I would not recommend to any one. This campground got a rating of 0 out of 10 by us). We only had to drive half an hour or so to get to our next campground just west of St. John’s and it is very new and nice.
After we had lunch we decided to take one of the road tours again, this time one of the ones on the Avalon Peninsula taking us to St. Shott, the southernmost point of the Peninsula. The weather was still foggy but dry and rather than staying ‘home’ we took a chance again and left.
Again we got lucky as the weather cleared up for us as we got closer to the coast and the sun decided to shine for Leo and his pictures. We finally met our first moose close up and luckily Leo got a picture or two before a very kind Newfoundlander stopped next to us to make sure we had no car problem and thereby chased away our moose. The animal seemed to know a car with Alberta license plates would cause him no harm, but when he saw one stop with Newfie plates, he decided to hightail it into the bush.
This very kind Newfoundlander and his wife did offer us to meet up with them in St. Vincent however to do some fishing for cod from shore. Once we got to St. Vincent and caught up with them they just gotten out their rod and low and behold about 10 minutes later he had a nice cod on the line. The wife of the fisherman offered us the fish for supper (we declined) so the fisherman started to ‘clean’ the fish for us. First he kind of cut off the head partly, and then he cut open its guts and took out its inners. The poor fish was still wiggling about while all this was happening, another reason I could not eat that fish!
We drove on and were treated to another kind of scenery here, tundra. We also got to see some caribou just grazing off the road a bit. Later in the afternoon the mist came up again and was thick enough to take the view away of the scenery around us.

We hope you will enjoy the pictures of St. John’s and the festival and those Leo took on day 44 of the Irish Loop road tour. The pictures can be found here.