NEWFOUNDLAND – A SUNNY DAY!
Day 37 – We were up earlier this morning, ready to enjoy some sun. It was 40 degrees, clear & sunny at 7 a.m. We were not disappointed. We packed our lunches & left at 10:00, happy to see the fixed tire was still holding pressure. Flowers had appeared where yesterday they were just tiny buds in the gravel.
Wildflowers! Armistice RV Park, Bide Arm, NF
We headed northeast to the places we saw yesterday and to another group of tiny towns we hadn’t seen yet. Check out today’s count: Caribou 3, Moose 4, Icebergs (at least) 11! We saw the Caribou first. As soon as they saw us, they took off running so the pictures weren’t that good, but I did get an action shot of the elder. This sighting was followed by several different Moose sightings, and we got pictures each time. Still, in most cases the pictures were taken through the car window, some when we were moving. So far, the Moose have always been alone and the Caribou have always been in groups of anywhere from two to four.
Caribou near Roddickton, NF
Moose near Roddickton, NF
Something we’d noticed awhile ago, even before we reached the Northern Peninsula – large piles of chopped wood, nicely stacked in clearings by the road. At first we assumed they were stacks ready for the lumber trucks to pick up for shipment elsewhere. But normally those piles are not so neatly stacked and they are of almost entire trees, not smaller, pre-cut wood ready for use in a wood stove. We had no idea what life would be like in such isolated places. After reading a couple of books since we’ve been here (“Tsunami, the Newfoundland Tidal Wave Disaster”, which took place in 1929 on the coastline of the Burin Peninsula, by Maura Hanrahan; and “The Farfarers: A New History of North America”, which challenges the conventional notion that the Vikings were the first Europeans to reach North America & Newfoundland, by Farley Mowat), we have a much better picture of how it must have been (and, to a certain extent is, still). In the 1920’s the man of the family would have to leave his wife & children home several times yearly when it was warmer for a week or two to chop wood. Then he’d have to chop it smaller to make it easier to haul, and he’d have to get it back home. Huge piles of wood would be piled up at the homestead in time to get through winter. (The same goes for food and supplies – it all had to be stored in advance to get through the long winters.) Meanwhile, fishing is how they made a living so he had to work the sea whenever he could. Anyway, back to the wood – there are piles of wood stacked near the roads where people have stockpiled them ready to be transported to the villages. They use trucks to transport the wood when the roads are open, and snowmobiles hauling home-made sleighs full of wood when the roads are still snowed in.
Never too early to start preparing for Winter. roadside, French Shore, NF
Snowmobile and sleigh for hauling wood, near Croque, NF
Okay, back to the sightseeing: first, we drove to a road we hadn’t taken yet, Route 438. The road was not paved and the scenery, although still very nice, was not as good as the scenery on the road to Conche. More trees had been cut down and the tops of many of the Spruces were thin & scraggly. Also, there were less snow and less lakes & streams. Very rugged, we were surprised to come across an opening in the woods where many older trailers and campers were parked – a boondockers heaven. There are very few campgrounds in this area. People have found a place to stay (pretty much off the grid), and it looked like many of them are here seasonally or for longer periods of time. We drove on, eventually reaching the town of Croque. “Croque was once the capital of the French Shore, and is now home to privately-owned historic waterfront properties”, according to the Northern Peninsula East Heritage French Shore Corridor tourist brochure. We’d expected to see rows of very old buildings, nicely preserved with plaques by the front door annotating their age and history. Nope, just a normal-looking small village.
Historical building, Croque, NF
We drove to the end of the road to see St. Julien’s and Grandois, the other two villages on the map. Charming little towns and oh, those Icebergs. We really couldn’t see where St. Julien’s ended and Grandois began, but both combined, they were still very small, and lovely. From the
Northern Peninsula East Heritage French Shore Corridor brochure, “The people of the North East Coast are hardy and self-reliant, living off the land and sea. The smallest wonder of the Northern Peninsula East is Grandois. The harbour and surrounding islands were once French fishing stations and were permanently settled by Irish fishermen. For many years Grandois was a stopover for the fleet of schooners on their way to Labrador for the summer cod fishery.” A lovely fishing town that looks like time stopped long ago, it is located right on the Ocean with small coves & islands, and the Labrador current delivers the Icebergs from Greenland and the Arctic Circle right by the towns.
Click any picture below to see a slideshow.
We turned around and drove back 26 km to the paved road (Route 433) and turned south for another 38 km, turning back onto Route 434 and the road to Conche and Southwest Crouse. It was wonderful as we could clearly see the Icebergs and new ones had become visible since yesterday. (We’ve found that unless stranded in a cove, Icebergs travel rapidly down “Iceberg Alley” – the place to see Icebergs being carried by the Labrador current.) On the way to the great introductory view to Conche, we stopped again at the lookout at Sailor Jack’s hill and Rob took the stairs up while I again hobbled around below taking pictures, too. There are amazing waterfalls coming down the mountain across from Conche. There are some bushes growing with red/purple colors, no flowers yet – these twigs are everywhere and are turning more colorful by the day. Could spring be finally approaching in northern Newfoundland? Time will tell.
We had the time to stop at the French Shore Interpretation Centre in Conche. It is one of the last buildings as you leave Conche. We highly recommend this stop (allow several hours, especially if you want to really look at and study the French Shore Tapestry). The Tapestry was hand-stitched by local women. It is 217 feet long and took them 20,000 hours of labor. For more information about the history of the French Shore and/or the Tapestry, please visit this link: Http://www.frenchshore.com/en/welcome.htm.
We took lots of pictures of the Tapestry. It was amazing. Unfortunately, as we were leaving the building we saw a sign asking that people not photograph the Tapestry due to copyright issues. We apologized to the woman who was at the welcome desk and asked if she’d like to keep our pictures. She said, no problem, please just don’t publish them. Oh well. We are keeping all the individual pictures of the Tapestry but won’t be putting them in the Blog, just posting the basic shots. We spoke with the woman, who happened to be one of the women who worked on the Tapestry. We got the whole story about the collaboration between a French artist who drew each individual frame, his wife who photographed his artwork and then with colored pencils and the help of her husband, colored each frame in detail with instructions for the embroidery team. This was mailed from France to Conche where the ladies were meeting to work, in between their own family duties & jobs. Twenty-thousand hours later, the project was complete. (The project is on-going; they have just finished a group of individual tapestries about the Treaty of Utrecht. These tapestries are on display at the Interpretation Centre now. They are also part of a traveling exhibit which is sent to museums.)
I had been curious about something we’d seen at several of these small fishing villages: painted, white crosses on the fishing shed doors. I thought at first that there sure were a lot of very small churches in these towns. Or maybe they were painted there to ward off evil spirits? I asked her about the crosses. She said that 99% of the people around there were Roman Catholic. The crosses were to bless the fisherman as they went out to sea.
The Centre also had two floors with displays. One large room showed the history of Cod fishing in the area. There was a scenic hillside climb behind the Centre with steps up the hill to a viewing platform. Rob climbed up to get pictures of the village of Conche, and several other items outside of the French Shore Interpretation Centre.
We headed back to the RV; we’d been gone most of the day. The sun had been disappearing behind more clouds, but we got the best of the day for pictures. It was warm, with a high of 56 degrees today, not southern Florida, but we’ll take it. And to put a great end to our day, as we approached the campground, a large Moose was standing in the road. He ran off but we got a couple of shots.
Moose near Roddickton, NF
Moose near Roddickton, NF