RAIN, WIND, COMPUTERS AND PIZZA.
Day 134 – It was a dreary day today, but certainly not a hurricane and not a tropical storm. Thank goodness. It was 54 degrees this morning when we got up. It made it all the way to 56 before the temperature started dropping. It was raining on and off all day. In the early afternoon, it got quite windy. Still, NOT a hurricane!
We stayed inside all day except for a drive to St. Lunaire to pick up Pizza from the Nymphe Cafe. It will be dinner tonight (right now it’s 4 p.m. and we just got back with the pizza). We needed to get out. We were going stir crazy, both of us working on the computers all day. Now we’re back to work. Rob has solved the hard drive problem by transferring lots of data to two external hard drives. He’s now beginning to work on a couple of days-worth of pictures. And I’m continuing to work on the blogs. Maybe we’ll be able to get something out later today? Tomorrow morning we’ll be leaving the Northern Peninsula, heading back to Port au Choix and the Caribou. We’ll be there three nights, then we go to Gros Morne National Park for almost two weeks. For your viewing pleasure, the girls would like to star in today’s blog post.
Some more Newfoundland historical information:
The First Europeans. “Brendan the Navigator, a fifth-century Irish monk, may have been the first European to explore the area. He sought Hy-Brazil, the “wonderful island of the saints”, and later accounts of his voyage, recorded in the medieval best-seller, Navigatio Sancti Brendani, describe a land with coastal topography similar to Newfoundland’s.
Atlantic Canada’s link to the Vikings is more certain. Driven out of Scandinavia, it’s believed by overpopulation, Norse seafarers settled in Iceland and began to establish settlements in Greenland. Around A.D. 1000 they sailed in long stout ships, called knorrs, southwest from Greenland and down the Labrador coastline, and established a temporary settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows on Newfoundland’s northern peninsula. There they built at least eight houses and two boat sheds of cut turf, and lived off the land. It isn’t known how long they lived here, but they stayed long enough to construct a forge for crafting implements from iron ore they dug and smelted here. It may have been hostilities with the native people that drove them out. The remnants of their settlement remained unrecognized until the 1960’s.
Newfoundland, as a place-name, originated with the Italian explorer, Giovanni Caboto, better known as John Cabot. Sailing westward from Bristol with a sanction to claim all lands hitherto, “unknown to Christians”, he sighted the “New Founde Lande” in 1497 and claimed it in the name of his employer, King Henry VII of England. His first landfall probably lay in the northern part of the Island. He and his men explored the coast and also sighted Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia before returning to England. In the summer of 1997, celebrations in St. John’s and across Newfoundland marked the 500-year anniversary of the event.” from Moon Handbooks, Atlantic Canada, 5th Edition, 2009
For more detailed information about Pistolet Bay Provincial Park, Raleigh, NL, click here.