St. John's Visit

We moved on Friday to the St. John's area. We found Butter Pot Provincial Park to be in the middle of where we wanted to tour and the price was right for a campground. We had already bought the park pass where we came on to the island and had used it a couple of times. So our camping fee was only $13 a night. They were full so Ahhhh we were sent to overflow down at the day use swimming beach. We have a view of a lake with loons and no swimmer's. We went into St. John's to mail the package of parts back to the states, got our email parked in Staples parking lot and then drove downtown for dinner. We had a beautiful sunset too!

Saturday was a drippy day but we went to Brigus for their Blueberry Festival. The roads are really rough off the TCH and my neck is suffering a sort of whiplash so we didn't do the whole peninsula liked we planned. Instead we came home and did laundry.

Sunday we fueled up, got our email again at Staples and headed down the Irish Loop around the Avalon Peninsula. It was over 200 miles of driving and Bob had to do it all.

We stopped and hiked 1.8 miles thru a nature park and saw Artic fox
We saw another of their metal lighthouses. Not even worth taking a picture. Some pretty scenery and some really changing scenery. This is a picture of the bay and a high plateau
and this is a picture of the barrens on top.
There was a side road we took to the southern most point in Newfoundland and since we had been to the northern most point and probably the eastern and western we took it. We sure are glad we did as we saw a female caribou first,
then two HUGE bull moose, and then a small group of 5 more caribou with one male with antlers.
It was worth the side trip. Continuing up the east side we hit nasty fog and had to drive slow so we didn't get up close and personal with a moose. It was a long day as we didn't get home until almost 9pm.

Monday we went back into St. John's. We toured Cape Spear and the lighthouse there. It is the eastern most point on North America. That's me standing far east. It was foggy but got worse as we left. We next went to Signal Hill. Marconi sent his first message from there but it had been used for centuries before that for signalling the town what ships were approaching. We drove around downtown. Water Street is the oldest street in North America. I felt like we had gone back to San Francisco during the hippy era. The names of some of the shops and what they sold certainly gave that feeling.

Tuesday Bob worked on an inverter for the car. We watched a loon family on our lake. We then left and headed to Argentia where we will take the long ferry back to Nova Scotia. Our plans to extend by 2 weeks were written in jello and they melted along with all the gloomy, drippy weather we had. We pulled right in and made camp at the ferry. We were up until almost midnight as someone pulled up to the ticket offices as said there was a ferry going out at 3 am. Unfortunately that person was 24 hours late for her ferry ride. We will be heading out Thursday morning at 7 am.