Toutons and Tea in Twillingate

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Happy Birthday to me!  Well today I am celebrating my birthday in this beautiful province of Newfoundland.  It doesn’t get much better than this!  Again we check to see if the icebergs are any closer to shore, but no such luck.  I guess I will just have to come back another time to see them up close. Oh darn. Yesterday Amanda bought a small painting of Salt Harbour so we wanted to go over and check out the harbour in real life.

Driving down the road we stopped to take a picture and a local fellow who was enjoying his morning walk stopped to talk.  He gave us all the local history of the area, which we found so interesting. He told us about Ship Island and how it had been resettled back in the 60’s. It was really quite sad, the residents were given $1,000 and $100 for each child to relocate to the mainland, not even enough to cover expenses.  Some moved their homes across the bay and some just left them to disintegrate. This gentlemen kept his grandfather’s house and uses it as a vacation home.  We could have talked longer than the 30 minutes but we had places to go and things to see.
Salt Harbour was another great little community tucked back in a bay.  Amanda and I found a nice little hiking trail at the end of the road that we just had to go on.  We were hoping to get a good view of the icebergs from here.  Amanda does have proper hiking boots with her today, so I won’t be as nervous.  We climb to the top of the mountain to look out over the bay that is dotted with lots of islands, what a gorgeous view.  There are lots of local fisherman on the water that look like little dots on the expansive ocean. It is such a beautiful day, sunny and 23 degrees and we are perched up on a lookout viewing this wonderful sight. 

Everywhere we have been in Newfoundland a familiar sight is a line of laundry hung out to dry. 

On our drive back we stop to talk to a husband and wife cleaning some huge codfish just by the road.  Again we were offered some fillets but decline this time, we already have a freezer full of fish, besides that we are starting to grow gills. Amanda is fighting a headache and we have tickets to see the Split Peas tonight so we head for home early. We want Amanda to have a rest and get rid of her headache so she can enjoy the show. On our way back we noticed a mussel farm, which had the larger barrels holding the strings of mussels up.  They start with the floating balls and as the mussels grow they change to a mid size barrel and then finally the larger barrel until harvest time.  We got back to Elbroko early afternoon, Amanda and Doug have a rest and I go for a big walk. I walked along the coast and then through a lovely meadow. 

The Split Peas is a group of 7 local women that sing and entertain.  What an amazing show they put on.  
We all thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it, and it only cost $10.  They sing a lot of their own original songs as well as some old familiar Newfoundland songs. 


They sing about mummers, and Swarvin' down the road and My Newfoundland. 
They perform on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the very old Orange Hall, that they call home.  It is a very relaxed setting, they are just enjoying themselves and draw you into their music with the first song I’s the B’y. At break time they served Toutons and Tea.  Oh my, if you haven’t had Toutons you definitely need to try them.  They are basically bread dough that has been fried in oil and served with either partridge berry or blueberry jam, molasses or syrup.  They told us that there are no calories because we are on vacation and the berries cancelled out the oil and dough. Wow, that made me feel a whole lot better, I’ve had way too many meals that were not weight watcher friendly!  The show ended around 9:30 with everyone singing the Ode to Newfoundland. This song is referred to as the anthem of Newfoundland and is the finale of many of the shows. It always brings a tear to my eye to see the Newfoundlanders standing tall and proud as they sing this song about their beloved homeland.  The show was over in time for us to scoot over to the lighthouse to see the tail end of the beautiful sunset.  What a fabulous time we had in this lovely community of Twillingate, and lots more enjoyable memories to add to our backroad memories!

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