NEWFOUNDLAND – BIDE ARM & RODDICKTON.
Day 39 – It was warmer this morning when we got up, 44 degrees & very cloudy. We packed up the RV and drove it into Bide Arm about 10 minutes away from the campground. There is no dumping station or water at the Park, so Bide Arm is where we have to go to take care of these things. We dumped the tanks and filled up with fresh water from the spigot at the Ashton House (as instructed to do so by the Town Clerk when we checked in).
While waiting for the water tanks to fill, Rob was looking around at the Ashton House property where we were parked. He saw a sign on the front of the House that said, “Ashton House. I Was Towed.”
Ashton Heritage House, Bide Arm, NF
“I Was Towed” was a reference to the Outport Resettlement Act of 1969. The Resettlement Act’s purpose was to consolidate small outport communities into larger settlements to improve social and economic prospects. Some 300 rural communities were vacated and 30,000 people were relocated to larger communities, greatly reshaping settlement distributions in outport regions. During the resettlements, many buildings were moved from their original locations to their new settlement. In 1969 the Ashton House was towed on a barge from its initial location in Hooping Harbour to Bide Arm. It is now a museum on the waterfront in Bide Arm.
Model of Ashton House being towed by barge to Bide Arm, NF
Ashton Heritage House, Bide Arm, NF
Ashton Heritage House, Bide Arm, NF
We returned to our campsite all dumped & filled with water for a longer stay. We unpacked, set up camp again, took our showers, had lunch, and did a bunch of food prep for our next several nights’ Fish Taco dinners. Thank you again, Sophie, for your recipe! The sun came out for about 5 minutes, then disappeared into the clouds. It rained some in the afternoon and the high today was 57 degrees.
After the food prep, we went into Roddickton to take care of business. We got some Canadian currency at the ATM, went to refill the propane but had to just leave the empty tank because no one was available at that time to fill it up (we’ll pick it up tomorrow, hopefully filled), and went to the town building at the Green Moose Interpretation Centre to pay for four more nights at Armistice Park.
Our plans keep changing due to two factors: we’re waiting for our mail to arrive from the mail forwarding service (according to the USPS online tracking site, it was held up at Customs in Montreal for a few days and has now cleared Customs and is somewhere in Canada); and Pistolet Bay Provincial Park, up by the Viking historical L’anse aux Meadows site at the north edge of the Northern Peninsula, is still not open. They’d been scheduled to open the last week in May. That was postponed to June 7 due to all the snow & damage from the rough winter. Now it might open on June 14. So…..we’re staying here until the mail finally gets here, then probably moving on. We hope to come back to Pistolet and the Viking area later this year, making a side trip on the way back to the ferry crossing at Port aux Basques. There is so much to see in Newfoundland, and we’ve barely scratched the rocky surface. We can’t stay here at this campground forever, no matter how pretty the area is.