Starting to head east now

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Today we are leaving the Northern peninsula and heading over to Deer Lake and then on to Twillingate.  We need to get the oil changed in the truck as we have already put on 5,256 kms in 21 days.  We do get around don’t we!  I did look up how much the air fare was to fly from St. Anthony to Blanc Sablon, Quebec and I couldn’t believe it.  $295 round trip per person, or a total of $590 round trip for the two of us.  We paid $60.50 round trip.  Now that’s a deal!!!   

We left St. Barbe around 9:30 a.m. after saying goodbye to our new friends Nancy and Terry and planned to meet up with them in July to go and visit Dave and Janie in Paradise.  The temperature was around 9 degrees, cloudy and fairly windy.  Our first stop was the national historic site in Port au Choix. We hiked 3 kms back to Phillips Garden where there was an archaeology dig going on.  

The archaeologist on site came right over and talked to us for about 20 minutes and gave us all the history and showed us around the site.  It was very interesting.   Phillips Garden is one of the largest known Dorest Palaeoeskimo sites in the Canadian north.  2 large settlement sites have been discovered in the area, one of them dated back to between 100 and 500 B.C. and the other between 100 and 600 A.D.  There are approximately 68 homes on the site of which they have excavated 24.  

When we were there they were excavating a fairly large home which they suspect would have been occupied by several families.  From here we decided to walk the 3 or 4 kms along the cliffs of the ocean over to the Point Riche Lighthouse.  Oh boy was it beautiful.  There was a very strong wind coming off the ocean so we had to be very careful not to get too close to the side.  We watched some Lobster fisherman checking the traps and re-baiting them.  

Our hike was beautiful, right along the ocean up on the cliffs that had been carved away by the ocean.  Some of the rock formations were pretty cool. This time we remembered to take the binoculars with us and could see whales feeding in the distance, it was awesome.

Point Riche Lighthouse was originally built in 1871 and replaced in 1892, and still stands there today.

There was a local gentleman sitting in his car looking through binoculars when we walked up. He started talking to us.  He was looking for his son’s return.  He was out 11 miles fishing for Turbot which was only a one day event.  We asked him how far back to the visitor centre he said about 1.5 miles.  He told us to hop in he would give us a ride back.  Silly us said no that’s OK we’d walk, not thinking we were walking into the wind the whole way back.  We were exhausted when we got back, our lips were dried out like prunes and our skin was so sticky from the salt air. Oh well, it was an awesome hike and Dougy even walked the whole 9 – 10 kms and I definitely got way more than my 10,000 steps.  We left here about 3:30, pooped and hungry.  We stopped for some “Lupper” around 4:30 at a lovely restaurant overlooking the bay in Cow Head.  We arrived at the Gateway to the North RV park in Deer Lake around 5:30 and settled in for the night.  They had high speed Internet which gave me a chance to get all caught up on my blog and my emails.  We are planning on camping at a provincial park up around Twillingate so will probably be off line for a while.  But I will be back.  Stay tuned.

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