A LITTLE EXPLORING.
Day 96 – At 7 a.m. this morning it was 69 degrees out and quite overcast. Last night, it rained & thundered so hard that it woke us up. The girls are all sleeping now; only Pixie remains a little unsettled. As soon as she realizes we aren’t traveling again today, the suspicious look on her face will disappear.
After lunch the sun came out and the fog that was rolling in, rolled back out. We got ready to leave for an afternoon exploratory drive. Ready to go, I came out of the bathroom and Rob was gone. The car was still here, but the back of the SUV was left open. Hmm, I said. Shortly thereafter, he came back to tell me that he was helping a guy who stopped by and asked if he could borrow our battery. Our Lithium Battery? We don’t think so.
Rob went to their campsite halfway across the campground to see what he could do. The family was packed up and ready to leave the campground but their slides wouldn’t go back in. So they couldn’t leave. The guy figured his trailer battery had died. After telling me where he was, Mr. Fix-It got his emergency battery booster pack from the car and hooked it up to their trailer battery. After it charged for awhile, they were able to get the slides to go back in. Three cheers!
The Provincial Park is on the western side of Burin Peninsula. The peninsula is fairly long and narrow and shaped like a boot. In approximately the center of the peninsula, there is one road that travels from the west to the east and vice versa. There is one road that travels from the top of the peninsula around the TCH, and along the eastern side all the way down to the bottom, continues along the south coast west, then back up again on the western side to the town of Garnish where it ends near the Provincial Park. This is at approximately the halfway point and joins the east/west highway back to the east coast in a loop that is shaped like the shoe part of the boot. There are no roads on the west coast of the Burin Peninsula above Garnish near the campground, and the west coast above Garnish is unpopulated and completely wild with no roads to accommodate vehicles. West coast inhabited towns don’t begin again until towards the top of the peninsula, and tiny villages along the coast west of these small towns do not have roads yet. They can be reached only by a daily passenger ferry, a ferry that doesn’t carry any vehicles. (Much of Newfoundland’s villages were only reachable by boat until highways were brought in as last as the 1960’s.)
After getting a late start, we drove from the western side to the eastern side of the peninsula on the one road that crosses. First we headed a short distance north to the end of the road at Garnish. This was a small community with one side of it facing the Ocean. They had a golf course and the provincial park and some homes. Heading east, we drove through several towns on the way to the east side and the large, beautiful Placentia Bay, avoiding the large town of Marystown, the only big city on the Burin Peninsula. It is here that you can find a grocery store, gas stations, etc. Driving through Winterland, Lewin’s Cove, and Big Salmonier we reached the coast and some really gorgeous scenery. Headlands and cliffs, coves and islands, and small villages that were perched near the road that climbed the cliffs – like Fox Cove/Mortier, and Epworth; and Burin which was a larger town, kind of trendy but charming; and Port au Bras, with a lovely memorial to the 1929 Tsunami victims of the Burin Peninsula.
We got back to the RV around 5:30 p.m. The high today was 84 degrees during our drive; the high at the campground was 72 degrees. The temperature here at the campground has remained close to unchanged since last night, raining or not, day or night. But the humidity went from extremely high yesterday to very pleasant today. Right now (8 p.m.), it is very foggy and comfortable. The girls are settled in completely and seem to know we aren’t traveling in the RV for a bit.