Travels with Gunther and Kara

Monday morning we were up and started getting ready to leave about 0800…we were done and out of the campground by 0915 for our 150 mile trip up NB-11 to Dalhousie NB…where our destination was Inch Arran RV Park right on the water in downtown Dalhousie.

It was a good travel day…and then it was a bad travel day.

The first 10 km or so out of the campground the road was pretty rough…so we just went 35 instead of the legal 50 mph speed…once on NB-11 it was smooth sailing all the way to Dalhousie…good weather, little traffic…and Connie was pretty happy about the way things were going.

On arrival at the campground though…things took a turn for the worse. We backed into our waterfront site 18, hooked up power…and it immediately tripped the breaker. After a half dozen or so tries including bypassing our Progressive Industries power management system…which checks both the pedestal and the rig for a whole series of faults…Neil plugged into the next site over 30 amp plug and it worked fine. So we left it plugged in there and asked the campground what they wanted to do about it. They decided it was a bad breaker, told us to stay plugged into site 19 over night as it was unused, and they would fix it in the morning…Monday was some sort of bank holiday here in Canuckistan. Unfortunately…they wasted an hour of our time before they figured that out. We tried to just change over and go into site 19 since it worked…but the curmudgeon in charge declined to do that as she would have to…her words…jumble the reservations and make 3 phone calls to let people know their site number had changed. Didn’t seem to be that hard to us…just put whoever was supposed to be in 19 in 18 after they fixed it…but I digress.

We headed out to the local pub for brews and dinner…and found out that it was permanently closed. We saw another pub…but it was also closed. We spotted a third…but it was closed as Monday was New Brunswick Day hereabouts. At that point we gave up, picked up a pizza and headed home to eat it and have a beer. Turns out we should probably have done something else as the pizza was barely adequate…but we wanted pizza so we gave it a go…had some leftovers we kept for lunch.

Tuesday morning…the electrician showed up and replaced the breaker…and we plugged back into site 18’s pedestal. Waited the 2 minutes and 15 seconds while our Progressive said everything was OK…then it tried to close the relay to put power to the rig and the breaker tripped again. The electrician checked site 19 that worked…and said that the only reason it worked was because site 19 didn’t have the GFCI connection to the breaker connected…and that the problem was clearly in the rig.

To further investigate…Neil opened all of our circuit breakers except the main incoming breaker and tried again…again the pedestal breaker on 18 tripped immediately…but it clearly ain’t the rig as nothing was connected with the breakers open. I guess there could theoretically be an issue with our cord reel or power cord…but if so then the fault should have been detected by our Progressive EMS.The real problem methinks is that the electrician didn’t want to have to fix it in a drizzle, he had already made $250 just to show up and replace the breaker and wasn’t looking to do any more work.

For those who are mystified by this electrical stuff…GCFII stands for Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter…it’s the kind of outlet that is in bathrooms and kitchens. Turns out that under the Canuckistan electrical code all outside wiring less than 6 feet above the ground has to have them. What the GFCI does is look for any problem in the ground system…in and of itself a ground fault isn’t a problem but if there is any other ground on the circuit then you get arcs and sparks and potentially electrocute yourself…GFCI outlets are required in bathrooms and kitchens due to the proximity of the outlet to water…if there was a fault in the real ground system and the outlet was touched with a wet hand then the person’s body becomes the ground and…as we say in the bidness…bad things happen. We’ve never seen campground pedestals that have GFCI requirements down in the US…but since we were hooked up to 30 amp power at Richibucto with no faults in the rig it’s most likely not us but something in then campground wiring.  

So we hooked back up to 19…and told the campground to solve the problem. Don’t know what they’ll do…we again offered to move over to 19 since we had paid for a premium waterfront site…haven’t heard anything from them yet. Guess the folks supposed to park in 19 this afternoon will be pissed when they get here unless the campground solves the problem. We’ve verified as best we can that it’s not on the rig…power worked fine yesterday morning and while it’s possible we developed an electrical problem between 0900 and 1300…it’s not very likely.

Stay tuned for further developments…in the meantime let’s put in a couple of photos.

Two shots of the lighthouse right here in the campground from yesterday just before sunset…one was taken with Neil’s iPhone 6s+ and the other with his Nikon…those darned smartphone cameras are getting pretty darned good photo wise.

Right offshore are a set of rocks…plenty of shore birds nesting on them.

Ok…power update. About 1100 the guy with the duty in the office today came down and told us we could move over to site 19…gee, I thought that was too hard…but at least we got the ok to move to a site with power that works. The only drawback was that it was drizzling so we spent the next hour or so moving 1 site over and getting re-setup in the rain. After that we had our leftover pizza for lunch and have plans to try the pub thing again tonight…but we’ll take along the address for a backup or two over in Campbelton 10 miles or so west of here. According to this French Canadian lady who talked to Neil the Salt Waters Lounge we saw the sign for yesterday has food…assuming that she understood his question correctly.

Interesting things found on the net.

The Church of the Chicken.

So the bar is closed I guess.

Can’t say I did know.

Cyas.

Well…I wish we could tell ya we dun did a whole passle more Fun Stuff© here at Richibucto Village…but Ida be lyin’ to ya if I did. We pretty much dindunuffin while we were here.

Thursday we stayed home and did nothing. Friday we got up early…like zero dark thirty what the heck am I doing up this time of the day early…so that we could head back up to Kouchibouguac National Park to the Bog Trail…which supposedly had some nice wildlife if you were there early in the morning.

Having had some issues with roads and street addresses up here…we mostly put GPS coordinates into the navigation system in the car…then it normally finds the right roads to get there. So heading up…we punched in the coordinates for the Bog Trail parking lot…and then promptly found out that Little Red’s nav system has roads in it that simply don’t exist in reality. We figured this out after we passed what we sort of thought was the right road…but continued another 6 or 8 km up the road before deciding that yes, that was in fact the right road and turning around.

Heading down the correct road now…we eventually gave up on the GPS since our review of the park map said that the parking lot was at the end of the road…so we just ignored all of the suggested turns and we got to the Bog Trail…where we headed a few hundred yards down the trail to the observation tower…where we could see precisely zip, nada, nothing, zilch, nyet…you guessed it…nuttin.

We grabbed a couple of photos from the tower for you though…it was cloudy and murky that morning…but not a single example of wildlife of any sort did we spot. Nope…not a one.

We turned around after that and retraced our path to the campground…we had to pass on stopping by the fresh seafood place for something for dinner since they didn’t open until 1000…and we were back home taking a nap in the recliners by 0730…that was after a 40 minute transit each way and the walk out to the tower.

We sat out under the awning for the remainder of the day…had a nice chat with Marcel and his wife whose name escaped us…he’s in the Army up here and is retiring in 4 years with plans to become full timers. We talked for a couple of hours…their biggest concern was whether his pension and her salary…she can work on the road and is only mid 40s so can’t retire yet…would be enough to live on. They plan to winter down in the US somewhere and spend travel seasons up here in Canuckistan…on learning what their income would be we assured them they had more than enough cash flow to finance a really good RV lifestyle.

It’s been hot in the afternoons here…so in the interest of keeping the windows open and not running the A/C to cool us off Neil’s been cooking outside. We had pork medallions with wine, lemon, garlic and caper sauce served with roasted garlic parmesan mashed taters one night, steak another night, and halibut another night…we’ll end up the week with grilled chicken over Romaine lettuce with balsamic-honey dressing tonight.

Tomorrow we’re off on a 150 mile transit to Dalhousie NB where we’ll be in site 18 at Inch Arran City Campground…literally again right on the water about 4 sites down from the lighthouse. Connie’s got some stuff planned for there and we’ll probably do laundry as well.

Interesting things found on the net.

This past week Apple, Inc became the first company to reach market cap of $1 Trillion US…not that market cap really means much as it’s just the product of the number of shares outstanding and today’s stock price. However…Apple also had another record breaking profit this quarter…making once again a metric buttload of cash…and once again made about 90% of the entire smartphone industry profits. In light of this…Business Week pranked themselves by re-running a headline they originally posted back in 1996.

This seems like a pretty creepy greeting card.

Really?Who wouldathunkit?

In other news…a major new announcement from NASA.

Old people complaint.

From the mouths of babes…

Cyas.

Tuesday we had a short travel day…only about 120 miles so we didn’t really get going on departure preparations until 0830…which saw us pulling out of Pine Hills RV shortly before 1000 for the trip. We had an easy time early…heading back down to the Confederation Bridge back to the mainland…where we paid a toll of $71 for the rig and  $47 for the car to get back across the 12 km long bridge. Once across we continued on NS-16, then NS-15 and NS-11 until we got off the exit to Richibucto with fine roads all that part. Once off the highway…it got a little dicier for the leg down NS-505…it was a bit bumpy as it had a lot of patches on the roadway but overall it wasn’t too bad and it was only the last 10 km or so before we turned onto the beach road Cap Lumiere for the last km or so until we arrived at Camping Cap Luminaire for a 5 night stay. Again…as we were in Cow Head NL…we’re right across from the beach although this time instead of overlooking the harbor the view is straight out into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. There’s a bluff about 40 or 50 feet high down to the beach and it’s a sandy beach for a change so hopefully we’ll be able to get out there one morning so Connie can catch a couple of rays.

The closest civilization is Richibucto Village…which has like 12 people in it I think…with the next closest being Richibucto itself…at least the latter is big enough for traffic lights, grocery stores, and a few more amenities that we might go take advantage of. Luckily…we knew ahead of time that we would be out on in the near boonies so we brought enough beer and groceries to make it.

We quickly got settled into site 37… a nice level grass pull through site…and after lunch went about our setup chores. Neil had found and corrected a slight problem with our water supply shortly before we left PEI…although we had good pressure and flow at the spigot the inside flow and pressure were lacking…they started off when you turned the faucet on at poor and got worse from there as the pressure in the system bled off…there was a flow restriction somewhere. We have a dual water filter setup outside…first is a sediment filter that gets changed on a 3 month basis and second is a charcoal filter that’s normally a 6 month change. He had changed the sediment filter shortly after we arrived at PEI…which improved the situation just slightly…and it was about due anyway…but hadn’t done the charcoal one as the sediment one while looking like it was time to be changed wasn’t really that bad. But with the continued lack of pressure and flow he started at the spigot and connected one thing at a time checking flow to see what might be up.

Regulator on spigot only…good. Added hose to filter…good. Connected filter and checked filter output…no good so he says to himself “there’s the problem.” Since he had already changed the sediment filter he temporarily removed the second filter and it’s canister and checked flow…good. So it was something with the second charcoal filter. It looked fine and there was nothing else in the canister or head to cause an issue so he replaced the charcoal filter, screwed the canister on and checked again…filter output good. He skipped the hose to the softener and softener and checked the final hose output where it connects to the rig…good so problem is solved. Hooked back up and voila…pressure and flow inside restored. He still needs to back flush and regenerate the conditioner as they’re due August 1…but will leave that until next week when we’re on city water instead of well water…well water is fine for doing the job but he feels better about the extra usage for the operation when we’re on city water instead of a more limited flow/capacity well system. From an engineering standpoint doing it on a large well system like a campground has would most likely be perfectly fine…but it just seems more courteous to wait to him.

We didn’t do anything the remainder of the travel day…took a nap and had leftover pasta casserole for dinner…although we did walk down and look at the beach.

Wednesday we drove into Richibucto and went to the visitor center then drove out to Kouchibouguac (pronounced coochee-boog-wack) National Park Visitor Center to check the lay of the land…Connie found a hike we’ll probably take later in the week and a soap making operation and beach boardwalk we’ll check out as well. We then sat outside under the awning in our recliners with a cold drink and our iPads most of the afternoon…it was quite pleasant in the shade with the breeze blowing…before heading inside for leftover grilled chicken, stuffing, freshly baked garlic knot rolls, and grilled green beans for dinner.

Wednesday…it rained in the morning as scheduled…so after coffee Neil made us a nice open faced bacon and fried egg sandwich for breakfast then chilled out…we had mostly planned this week as rest period anyway with another a whole lot of Fun Stuff© scheduled…we’ve been at it pretty steadily since we got into Newfoundland and a few days doin’ nuttin’ seemed like a great idea to us. Of course…we’re doing pretty much the same thing next week although she does have a few more things scheduled…but nothing really strenuous at all, sunrise at the lighthouse, sunset at the mountain…Happy Hour on the veranda at the beach bar…really hard stuff like that ya know.

Neil grabbed a few photos around the campground…used only his iPhone today.

A couple of views of our site 37…the first was taken with a new iPhone camera app he’s trying out named Obscura 2 and the second with the stock iPhone camera app…he needs to read the manual on Obscura and figger out ‘xactly how it works…as the sky in the second one is much more true to what it looks like this morning.

It had stopped raining by the time he went out there…but the clouds haven’t broken up and were still providing a pretty dramatic background. You can see in the last one out on the horizon how the overcast is. beginning to clear and turn into a blue sky day.

A shot of the still operational Cap Luminaire Light…it’s right opposite the campground entrance and marks Cap (or Cape) Luminaire.

The private beach owned by the campground and the tiny harbor here at Cap Luminaire.

In the afternoon…we headed off for a couple of activities. First up was a visit to the Olivier Soapery…which makes hand made cold process soap. Basically you melt some fat…they use a combination of olive oil, cocoa butter, and beeswax which makes the resulting soap last longer…and melt it. Then they add a solution of sodium hydroxide mixed with dye and it undergoes a chemical reaction with the oil making soap. They also add essential oils or fragrance oil…the difference being whether they’re naturally produced or artificially produced in a chemical process…and then pour it into molds. We watched a demonstration of soap making and then Connie…naturally…bought some.

Next up was the Richibucto River Winery…we had a nice tasting…and again naturally…Connie picked out 8 bottles to take with us…strangely enough Neil will naturally help drink it. They were only about $150 Canadian or a little over $110 US which for 8 bottles of wine including 3 bottles of the expensive fortified wine…it would be Port except it’s not made in Portugal so they can’t call it Port. 

After the winery…we headed home where Neil made a gourmet meal…it was warm so he cooked it outside on the camp stove…pork cutlets with lemon, garlic, wine, and caper sauce…mashed taters with roasted garlic, butter, and Parmesan cheese, corn casserole with shallots, cheese, and green chiles, and the remainder of the bottle of Clos Du Bois Chardonnay wine that we opened to make the sauce on the pork. All was amazingly good…we ate outside as it was still warm. We’ve had the windows open but it was in the lower 80s this afternoon…so we turned the A/C units on for a couple of hours to suck out some of the residual afternoon heat.

More Fun Stuff© is scheduled for tomorrow, Saturday, and Sunday…I will report on that later.

Interesting things found on the net this week.

Typical progressive/liberal idea here…let’s ban plastic straws because they’re single use and bad for the environment…then let’s individually wrap our bio-degradable paper straws in plastic that will get tossed into the same place the plastic straws that were banned used to get tossed. Yeah…that’ll help.

Spoken by a person who knows the true value of alcohol.

How does one get elected as a Senator without passing basic high school civics and understanding the definition of the word treason.

No Senator Dumb Ass from Oregon…but maybe being from Oregon is indicative of something…here’s the definition of treason…and it ain’t your sore loser BS.

The truth about this whole collusion thing…is actually pretty simple…despite both the President’s continual tweeting about the “rigged special prosecutor” and the other side’s defending the righteousness of Mr. Mueller and his charge…all of that is primarily a bunch of political BEP (bovine end product as I’ve mentioned before).

First off…the sole idea behind any political campaign…especially these days…is to win the election…and it’s been proven far too often that mud slinging works. Sure…Trump did it…but so did Ms. Clinton…and while two wrongs definitely don’t make a right…handicapping yourself and handing the election to the other side is political suicide.

Second…and let’s look at this from the other countries point of view…I’m sure that from as the Russian government sees it they have a preference who wins our election…just like we have a preference who wins theirs. And while Russians don’t get to vote in our elections…as Americans don’t get to vote in theirs…in any political process it’s certainly not illegal for anybody to advocate for the candidate they prefer. While it is illegal under US campaign and election law to disguise funding sources for political action committees promoting a specific candidate as opposed to general committees promoting any particular agenda…those groups doing the latter are subject to the same limits, requirements, and scrutinies as the former groups are. All politicians have PACs that both support them directly and those that support particular agendas and hence have fewer legal requirements…and all politicians and their political professional operators understand the laws…and pretty much all of them bend the requirements and go right up to the line of legality…I’m not justifying that, just recognizing that politicians are first and foremost self serving scum.

Finally…and most important…not a damn bit of any of that actually fricking matters…the only thing that matters is votes cast on Election Day. It doesn’t matter if the Russians wanted Mr. Trump to win or if the any other country wanted Ms. Clinton to win. What matters is the number of votes…and unless Mr. Mueller and his supporters on the left have some proof that the Russian government actually interfered with and changed the vote totals…then all this talk about collusion is primarily a case of sore loser griping…just like it was primarily a case of sore loser griping when President Obama won election and reelection with all the BEP the other side said about him.

Sorry ‘bout the rathole…I started just to call out the idiocy of Senator Dumb Ass.

And finally…Neil really likes this one.

Cyas.

We had originally planned a visit to another lighthouse Sunday morning after Mass…but Connie woke up feeling poorly and it was raining so we blew it off and just came home after Mass. Our other scheduled activity for Sunday was a visit to the Irish Pub downtown for an early dinner and then the show Anne and Gilbert in the evening.

First up was dinner at the Olde Dublin Pub and Claddagh Oyster House…they share the same building and menu although there’s a separate kitchen in the pub upstairs for patrons up there. We started with a dozen Malpeque oysters on the half shell…these are smaller than what you would normally get in either the Outer Banks or the Gulf of Mexico coast but are pretty sweet and tasty…and at $1CN each quite a bargain…along with that Neil had a Guinness and Connie a Harp Irish Ale. Next up…we split a lobstah stuffed mushroom appetizer…I can confirm that there was cheese, buddah, and cream involved in addition to mushrooms and lobstah…then we ordered first 6 to split and then another 3 for Neil ‘cuz he was still hungry bacon wrapped scallops…again these were smallish but they were very tasty and were actually scallops as opposed to the fake ones made out of shark that you typically get. The way you can tell that they’re real scallops is that they’re not uniform…the ones punched out from a shark steak are uniform on size and thickness whereas real ones are variable. Connie had another Harp but Neil switched to Redbreast Irish Whiskey straight up with a dash of water in it to bloom the flavor and cut the harshness.

Turns out there’s a lemon shortage in Canuckistan…we talked about it with Ashley the bartender and another couple of other couples dining at the bar…because you meet a much better class of bum sitting at the bar dontchaknow…they had heard that it was a either a result of the retaliatory tariffs that were placed on US goods after the recent import tariffs the government imposed…or that there was a freeze that limited the lemon crop in California. Based on the fact that limes and oranges are readily available…and since the freeze area they talked about was pretty far north in California up by San Francisco which isn’t where the citrus groves are…I would guess it’s either the tariff or something completely unrelated. Anyways…since there were no lemons we had to squeeze lime wedges on our oysters…and we’re sold on using limes instead of lemons…they actually are better than lemons on oysters.

Here’s a shot of Ashley the bartender…holding up one of the aforementioned oyster seasoning limes for us.

Overall a really great meal…kinda on the pricey side but that’s because of the Irish whiskey…but the food was great, the company great, and we chatted with several other interesting folks at the bar. In fact…it was so good we went back Monday evening for more.

After that we walked ‘round the corner to The Guild which is a local playhouse…where we had prime seats 3 rows back right in the middle of the stage…for a production of Anne and Gilbert…which is sort of a sequel to Anne of Green Gables after she grew up. Gilbert was a boy in her class who teased her at first then later helped her manage the bullying children in the class after Anne was orphaned and adopted by the Cuthberts who owned a farm in PEI named Green Gables…later in life, at least according to the sequel…they fell in love and naturally lived happily ever after. It was romantic comedy with a cast of 22 that we counted…and was actually a lot more entertaining than we thought it would be.

Monday we headed off for our last day of PEI Fun Stuff© before heading out to Richibucto Village 120 miles up the coast from Charlottetown on Tuesday…after we pay the over $100 Canadian toll to get off of PEI.

Our first stop was at the Point Prim Lighthouse…which is the oldest lighthouse on PEI…it’s 61 feet high and was in service from 1841 to 1969, it had 13 keepers over the years with Angus Alexander Murchison being the longest serving at 35 years. It’s different from any other lighthouse in Canada save one…as it’s circular and constructed of brick…it’s counterpart with this construction is Fishgard Light in British Columbia.

Sorry ‘bout the number of lighthouse pictures you’ve had to see the past month…but the DLETC hasn’t found any waterfalls and since her hip has been hurting the hiking opportunities have been scarce lately.

Point Prim is south and east of Charlottetown…after finishing up there we headed back through Charlottetown and then north to the campground…where we dropped off a few groceries we picked up on the way…then stopped and had ice cream for lunch…it was Mint Chocolate Chip Swirl for Neil and S’Mores for Connie…both were good, we decided that we could afford to have ice cream for lunch every once in awhile. Then we entered another section of PEI National Park up along the north coast of the island where we stopped by to see the Covehead Harbor Lighthouse right on the beach along with another couple of flowers. This light is still in operation and is smallish at only about 27 feet high…although it’s 20 feet or so above the beach so that increases it’s effective height.

With that…our day was done and we headed back to the rig. Neil put the grill and flagpole away in preparation for our travel day tomorrow…then we had a shower and Connie washed her hair as it was time again for that…then headed out to dinner and an early night of it.

Interesting things found on the net.

Cyas.

So…just to note a couple of items from the news this week before I head on.

Tragically…there was a mass shooting incident in Toronto this week…and this is in a country where handguns are 100% illegal and long guns (rifles and shotguns) are regulated much more than we have down in our neck o’ the woods. I’m not turning this into a political thing…but it’s become clear over the past 15 years or so that progressives/liberals/Democrats/whatever you want to call them really want to overturn the 2nd amendment through nibbling around the edges since they’ll never have the votes to pass a constitutional amendment overturning it…but if this can happen in a country where handguns are 100% illegal…then why in the heck do they think that that overturning the 2nd amendment would reduce gun violence in the USA. Toronto has the highest murder rate in Canuckistan…and again handguns are 100% illegal up here.

Second thing is a ruling this week from the 9th Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. In a 2-1 vote…and this is far and away the most liberal Appeals Court District in the USA…held that open carry of firearms is constitutional despite state laws to the contrary. Don’t have any idea why that particular count supported the 2nd amendment that liberals hate.

Third…some dumb ass down in Sweetwater FL decided to park illegally in a handicapped space at a store and run in to get some snacks. Another citizen came up and was explaining with no violence to his girlfriend in the car that they were parking illegally. The dumb ass came out…ran up and pushed the citizen to the ground…and then got shot for his efforts under Florida’s Stand Your Ground law…and is not at this point being prosecuted. The dumb ass chose to make a discussion a physical altercation…and the citizen apparently thought his safety was threatened so there you go. Dumb asses girlfriend said that the citizen was “attacking her”…clearly disproved by the surveillance video…and that she had a right to park wherever she wanted. Idiots.

Me…we own a couple of long guns that Neil inherited from his grandfather and uncle…and have never really had any desire to own any more firearms…particularly as we occasionally travel north across the border and taking them into Canuckistan is either illegal or very hard…but Neil’s said for years now that if they ever try to overturn the 2nd amendment he’s going out and buying one of those scary looking guns that aren’t really assault weapons before the ban takes place. Anyway…Neil as a former Navy guy who took an oath to uphold the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic…sort of feels strongly about what the Constitution says. He’s perfectly fine…well, he’s actually not but at least it would be doing it the right way…if a constitutional amendment was passed to overturn or limit the right guaranteed by the 2nd amendment.

On a non political note…take a look at this video that our friend Ray Danet sent us…Millennial Video…the video is here. This girl is…15 years old from Beverly Hills CA and currently has a $1,000 a month allowance and is demanding two things. First is that her mother raise her allowance to $2,500 a month since she can’t live on $1,000 a month…and second is that her mother buy her a $231,000 Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen for her 16th birthday. Her reasoning is that her mother has a Bentley so she owes her a suitable vehicle. Dr. Phil suggests she get a job and the snowflake bursts into tears. She doesn’t even go to a regular high school…since she was traumatized at her old school…so she’s taking online classes to get her GED. Now the main problem here is that her parents are 100% responsible for her entitled behavior…since they’ve raised her this way…but can you get the nerve of this spoiled child…I certainly can’t. Daughter will have a rude awakening one of these days Ima thinkin’. What a complete pair of losers…both mother and child.

Ok…enough of that…let’s talk about more Fun Stuff© here in PEI.

Wednesday…we had a trip planned down to Southside to visit the the College of Piping and Celtic Performance Arts of Canada…basically it’s a high end place that teaches bagpiping, step dancing, highland dancing, fiddling, and drumming to anybody that wants to show up. They have an evening concert during the summers…but it’s 30 miles from here and we didn’t feel like coming home at 2200 in the dark after it so we went to the mini-concert and demonstration at 1100 instead. We saw demonstrations of highland dancing…which is the typical sort of dancing Scottish lasses in kilts do, step dancing which is sort of a cross between clogging and tap dancing, bagpiping, and drumming. All in all…it was pretty decent…and in addition to learning all about the various parts of a bagpipe…like it wasn’t actually invented in Scotland but rather in the Syria in the Middle East and that it has reeds in it very similar to the double reed that a bassoon uses…we learned the answer to a question I know has been burning in Neil’s mind since he asked Connie if she knew the answer. Anyway…everybody knows that Scottish men go commando (i.e., au natural) under their kilts…and he wondered if the same was true for Scottish women. Turns out the answer is no…at least for women in kilts dancing Scottish dances in PEI…I’ve no idea bout whether it’s true in Scotland proper…mebbe we’ll find out the answer to that one of these days.

After the demonstration…we headed down to the waterfront in Southside and had lunch…a couple of sandwiches we brought with us…and then a beer…Gahan Brewery Red Ale which is brewed right here in PEI…it was good but a bit more hops flavored than we prefer. After that we headed home and made rigatoni casserole out of leftover bolognese cream sauce, mozzarella cheese and burned in the broiler Parmesan cheese…along with some red wine it was excellent…and we’ve got another casserole of it in the fridge for later in the week…although he will probably grill a steak tomorrow.

Here’s the entrance to the College of Piping.

Outside the college building…Connie got this shot of a carved wooden bagpiper.

On the way back to the RV park we passed this beautiful golden field…Neil got a shot and processed it because it was really cool looking. On further research…we determined that this is actually a field of canola…which is processed into both the canola oil we use for cooking and as a source for ethanol which is used as an additive for car gasoline.

A shot I forgot to post yesterday…this was taken at the Northport Rear Range Light…it’s a Great Blue Heron…they’re everywhere ya know. Haven’t really seen one since we left Fort Myers…but you can pretty much find them wherever you go.

Connie took a short video of the canola field blowing in the wind while Neil was getting photos…you can see it here. They really looked pretty cool blowing in the 20-30 knot wind.

Thursday was chores day…it was raining on and off all day so it was laundry, haircut, and groceries…then a nice steak for dinner…unfortunately Neil had to cook it inside but it was still tasty.

Friday Connie got her nails done…and then it was lobstah boat ride and lobstah dinner time…

Captain Mark ‘splaining crab parts.

Connie posing with a rock crab…they actually live on sand.

Connie and a lobstah…this ain’t the one she ate for dinner.

Connie pulling a pot…got it first try.

This is Larry the Lobstah…he’s a 9 pounder…she didn’t eat Larry either. Larry was in the pot Connie is pulling in the shot above.

After our crabbing and lobstah pot pulling demonstrations we had a PEI style lobstah dinner…this means it’s cooked and then stuck in an ice bath to stop the cooking process and served cold…with butta’ of course…along with some tater salad, a bun, and coleslaw.

We were out in the harbor area or a couple of hours before motoring back to the dock and heading home for the night.

Saturday we were off early on a trip around the eastern coast of the island…most of it was via a Points East Road…catchy name eh? Along the way we got some shots of lighthouses, cliffs, and flowers.

This one is still operational but is located on private property…don’t know how that works.

This one is decommissioned.

But has some nice cliffs right outside of it.

There are tree swallows nesting in the bank.

East Point Light…this is the farthest eastern point on PEI.

Sailboat heading out for a sail.

We’ve got 2 more days here in PEI…tomorrow we’re heading downtown after Mass in the AM for dinner and a show about Anne of Green Gables…the famous novel set in PEI. Then Monday a drive the Ann of Green Gables National Historic Site and getting ready for a short (125 mile) travel day on Tuesday.

Interesting things found on the net this week.

Ladies…this is a fake lesson, trust me. Don’t follow these instructions.

Cyas.

Monday morning we were up early at Cranberry Campground for our 213 mile transit over to Prince Edward Island (PEI). PEI is a crescent shaped island about 200 km long nestled along the northern coast of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick at the southern end of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. It’s known primarily for potatoes and…of course…the novel Anne of Green Gables.

We had a pretty good trip over…although we got slightly confused by our GPS units and ended up needing to make a couple of U-turns in order to get on the right road to our destination at Pine Hills RV just north of Charlottetown about in the center of the island. Well…the first U-turn was caused by Neil’s GPS…it was zoomed out a bit far and didn’t really show the details of an interchange we needed to navigate through…he only saw two roads on the screen and we needed to take the one that curved right…we had seen a sign a mile or two back that indicated Charlottetown was the left hand branch. We took the wrong one…and about 5 seconds later he figured out the issue with his GPS…when he zoomed in more it showed all the detail and confirmed that we were on the wrong road headed to Southside instead of Charlottetown. We quickly figured out we needed to turn around…and luckily there was a wide spot just after the interchange where he could easily turn around in the road…we wanted a minute or two until there was a gap in both directions and got turned around. He had Connie come around front so we could have two sets of eyes reading the signs and looking at the GPS units…and she took the wrong exit again…she caught it quickly and told him on the radio not to come down here…but as the guy in the old song about the Streaker said…it was too late…we were headed back towards the bridge off of PEI. So we needed to make another course reversal…luckily again a mile down the road there was a seafood store with two entrances into the parking lot…so we quickly turned in one and out the other…and found ourselves once again approaching the original interchange where Neil’s GPS tricked him. This time we went the correct direction…and amazingly enough when you don’t have the GPS zoomed out too far it shows you the whole interchange including the correct way through.

We continued on another 20 miles or so to Charlottetown…then headed north around the bypass road to Brackley Point Road and thence north 10 miles to the campground. We quickly got checked in and headed to our site…they told us it was a pull through 50 FHU site…it was actually two back in sites that butted up against each other that they use as a pull through…but hey, it works. We pulled all the way forward to get on the most level portion site…which actually turned out to be almost perfectly level despite our original thought on looking at it that it would be a difficult leveling job. Little Red is parked in the unused portion of the second site behind the rig. Neil had to get the guy next door to move his car temporarily…although the site is long the road was pretty narrow with a lot of trucks and cars parked along it and while he could probably have gotten in just fine sometimes it’s easier to get the car to move instead. The owner was happy to assist though which made it an easy peasy parking maneuver.

We got setup and then headed out to the local pub named Outriders…where we had a couple of brews and dinner…we were originally going to have left over bolognese sauce from the night before but Connie was out of sorts after the double U-turn thing so he bought her a brew instead.

Looking at our schedule and the weather forecast…which changes almost hourly so it’s hard to really figure out what days to do Fun Stuff© and what days to do laundry, groceries and other chores…but we decided to head out Tuesday morning. Before we got here…she had a drive planned around the northwest end of the crescent that forms the island (the horns of the crescent point north)…this area is…strangely enough…named North Point. Anyways…on the way in after the pub we stopped by the office and picked up some of the local tourist propaganda…and after some deliberation the DLETC announced that the drive around North Cape had been replaced by the Epic Technicolor Six Lighthouse Extravaganza…it’s the same road but we had some actual destinations along it instead of just a drive around the coastal road.

So off we went after breakfast…Connie had planned a lunch stop for us…but something went wrong with her calculations and instead of getting there at 1200 for lunch we didn’t actually get there until 1330…which means that after lunch dinner would mostly become a non-thing. No worries…we’ve done that before and we’ll do it again…but Neil had really hoped for a normal lunch this time and had even talked to her about it…but somewhere between the google mapping and figuring out how long the various portions of the drive would take things got confused.

So the…well I’m just going to skip calling it the Epic Technicolor Six Lighthouse Extravaganza and use ETSLE instead as I’m gettin’ tuckered out just typing all of that…anyway the trip included stops at Cape. Egmont, West Point, Howard’s Cove, North Cape, Tignish Run, and Northport Back Range lighthouses. All of these are still operating except the Tignish Run light…and construction dates ranged from the 1865 until 1978…and the lights here actually have some differing physical characteristics so they could actually be recognized during the day as compared to some other areas we’ve been in.

So…off we go on the ETSLE we go…and the drive started out as sort of an adventure.

Ya don’t know what those last two mean? Huh? Surely you do…it’s simple. Why it was over the river and through the woods…but we definitely didna make it to grandma’s house…no sir-ee…no grandma’s house here. Instead we got to Cape Egmont light…we didn’t stay there very long as we discovered a ridiculously huge number of ‘skeeters there…so we got a few shots brushed ourselves off, got into the car, killed a couple that came in with us, and headed back up the road…hoping that the ret of the day would go better bug wise.

Cape Egmont Light

Naturally Connie found some flowers.

While Neil grabbed a couple shots of the cliffs down to the water on the seaside of the light…the bugs didn’t really get bad until we came around to this side…there must have been a bog somewhere over there they were breeding in.

Second stop was West Point Light…right on a sandy beach so it was the tallest one of the day as it didn’t have any land height adding to it to help get the light higher off of the water.

Next up was Howard’s Cove Light…this has got to be the smallest lighthouse we’ve ever seen at 19 feet tall…and it doesn’t really look that tall.

A couple of shots of the harbor at Howard’s Cove…we saw a lot of boats up on blocks like this in yards away from the water…they were either stored there or were getting worked on or something. We wondered how they got them back and forth to the water until we saw the specialized trailers they use to move them. They’re essentially flatbed low-boy trailers but instead of picking the boat up and driving the trailer underneath there are movable wheels on top of the trailer that conform to the hull…these wheels have tires on them so the trailer can essentially back under the boat from the bow and pick it up off of the ground . I presume they then back it down a ramp and float it off just like you do on a 16 foot outboard boat from it’s trailer. All of the ones we saw had cradles mostly in the center and rear portions with boards stabilizing the bow…those get gradually removed as the trailer backs under the bow and the boat is picked up off of the cradle then winched forward on the movable wheels to get it fully loaded. We didn’t see one loading but the standard support arrangement as seen here and the one we did see completely on the trailer make this really the most likely method. I wouldn’t have thought you could pull a 45 or 55 foot boat like that onto a trailer without a crane…but obviously they do it as we saw several boats and trailers moving around and not a crane in sight.

There’s a cute 20something Nova Scotia gal with a short bright red dress and matching unmentionables under it sitting on this rock near the light…she was having troubles keeping the dress down in da wind. Ya don’t see here? That’s because she jumped off before he could get the camera out…and he didn’t want her boyfriend to beat him up…but use your imagination and she’s there…trust me.

Up at North Point there are an awful lot of wind turbine generators…we saw at least 300 or so of them. Each one is about 210 feet tall and has 3 blades like the one displayed before. These are 3,000 kilowatt (KW) generators…the same electrical out put as the ones Neil used to have on his submarine back in the day…3,000 KW is enough for at least 250 US houses with standard 100 amp service…and probably double that since most homes outside the US have much less than 100 amp service. I don’t know what Canuck homes have in them…but Italian ones that normal people live in have 20 or 30 amp service only…so if the ones here are 50 amp service that would be about 500 houses per generator. The 300 or so number of towers the we estimated would be about 900 megawatts total…or enough for about 75,000 homes at 50 amp service…and 900 megawatt would be about average compared to the output of a power plant which typically run 500-1,500 megawatts.

North Point Light

Connie got a closeup of the light rotating.

These are called inuksuks…they’re person shaped rock cairns that are constructed by native people in the arctic regions of North America…because there are few natural landmarks in arctic regions. Nobody is sure whether they’re used for navigation, as a point of reference, a marker for travel routes, fishing places, camps, hunting grounds, places of veneration, drift fences used in hunting or to mark a food cache. There were no information signs here…so it’s not clear whether these are ancient inuksuks or modern reconstructions…but given the number located in one place I’m guessing the latter. Size ranges from a foot or so tall up to about 4 feet…and they’re fastener free, relying solely on gravity and friction to remain upright.

Neil really liked this one the best…it’s about 18 inches tall.

And there were hundreds of ‘em I tellya.

Better photo of the North Point Light taken at the right moment to get the light in the shot…took 4 or 5 shots to get it perfectly straight on.

After lunch…which was a burger for Neil and seafood chowder for Connie…we found a place that has shrimp free chowder for her and Neil figured out how to get a decently cooked burger in Canuckistan. They have this ridiculous national health department rule that says burgers must be cooked to 180 degrees…which essentially means every bit of juice is boiled out and it’s practically jerky. Your standard medium burger that is still pink inside in the US is cooked to about 130-135 degrees max and even a well done one in the US is only 155 or so…180 is just crazy. However…if you tell your waitress (or waiter as the the case may be) that you want it cooked as close to pink as they are allowed to make it…then they cook it to what we would in ‘Murica would call medium-well…not pink but still with some vestiges of juice left in it and at least edible as opposed to a burnt cracker.

Then it was off to Tingish Run Light…this is the only one that isn’t still operational and the only one we should have skipped. It’s been turned into a day use area…and of the 15 or so shots we took this is the best one as far as being people free goes…sorry, can’t do nuttin’ about the cars, swing set, and picnic tables.

Yeah…we didn’t think much of it either.

Our last stop of the day was at Northport Back Range Light…which was pretty nice. This one is more interesting than your standard lighthouse though as it’s part of a range. Normally…a lighthouse is a single point of reference that you take bearings on. A Range consists of a pair of structures…usually flat rectangular panels about 20 feet square that are painted the same color and usually with a vertical stripe in a different color…anyway the two structures are positioned so that a line drawn directly between them and extended out into the water marks the center of the channel. The one in the back is higher so when you’re out at sea you can see both of them and you simply line them up as you drive from sea into the restricted shallow water areas. By looking at the two rectangles…you can instantly tell whether you’re left or right of the range due to the offset of the higher rear range compared to the lower front range…or whether you’re on the range and hence in safe water if they line up. Most ranges Neil has seen in the past are not lighted as they’re typically used in river passages that are only navigable in daylight hours when you can see the range markers. He’s never seen one that actually indicates the way in from deep water at sea…but as he thought about it it makes sense that for a relatively narrow channel in from the sea that needs to be navigable 24×7 using lighthouses is actually a great idea. The lighthouse was the rear range for vessels entering Northport (and Alberton) from the south and there would have been a seafloor mounted light south of the lighthouse at a lower height…so that from sea both the rear lighthouse light and the lower front range light could be seen. Simply line up the two lights vertically and your vessel is on the correct course and position to safely enter the channel mouth. Once inside the channel entrance the bay widens out and once can use multiple navigational aids on both sides to accurately fix your vessel position…then pass the front range marker either right or left as the channel is designed and proceed into port.

Here’s an image of the Nantucket Harbor range lights from wikipedia that will help explain how the front and rear ranges are used…in this image the range line passes to the right side of the photographer’s location at sea…so his vessel is to the left of the range and he needs to come right to remain in safe water depths.

Here is an image of a chart with a range marked on it…you can see the two range markers at the top right on the land, the purple line leading south shows the safe path through the center portion of the channel. Once inland…the range is not always ahead of your vessel, depending on whether you’re going in or out the range markers may be either ahead or astern of your vessel…the principle is the same  though, stay on the range and you’ll stay in safe water depths. Channels which have significant nearby shoal water or numerous turns in the channel have multiple ranges. For instance…the Cooper River in Charleston SC where Neil was based has about 20 different legs in the channel between the entry jetties and the Navy base and about 10 or 12 of the ones with the closest shoal water have range markers. San Diego Harbor on the other hand has no ranges at all for getting into the submarine base at Ballast Point but if you continue on around the river to Naval Station San Diego there are about 6 channel segments and 3 ranges as he vaguely recalls. Very handy ranges are…very handy, particularly in deep draft ships like a submarine or most other warships.

Anyway…this light is now the rear range light…it was formerly the front range light but the old rear range was demolished and the old front range became the rear range of a new range …from looking at google maps and the location of both this light and that of the former rear range light…he’s pretty convinced there’s something amiss with the range as lining up the old front and rear range markers doesn’t provide any useful navigational information and he couldn’t find the location of the new front range marker…but maybe he’s not fully understanding the layout. Perhaps the lighthouse ranges were only used at longer ranges from land to guide shipping closer to port where they could visually pick up additional navigational aids and fix position before actually entering the harbor. It’s a mystery though…geographically the marked positions of what are named the new rear/old front range and the old rear range don’t make sense from a navigational point of view…the line from rear to front then goes inland into PEI and not out to sea. I know…way more than you really cared to know about range markers. 

Now if you’ve been counting carefully…and you have been counting carefully, haven’t you…then your count would be six lighthouses so that means we’re done…right. 

As Billy Mays (of Oxyclean and many other commercials fame) would say…But wait, there’s more. Bonus Lighthouse!

This one is over on an island just north of Northport…it’s the Cascumpeque Light over on Sandy Island and marks the entrance past Sandy Island to Alberton Harbor just north of Northport.

Interesting things found on the net.

Everybody knows exactly what bears do in the woods…this is where they do it.

RV humor.

Librarian humor.

It starts early…borrowed this one from RandysRandom.com

Cyas.

After our long day on Tuesday we took Wednesday off as it was supposed to rain all day. Slept in…didn’t get up until 0730…had breakfast and pretty much did nuttin’ all day. Can’t really say much more about the day…it ended up not raining until later in the afternoon but then rained pretty hard most of the night.

Thursday morning…it dawned partly cloudy and we had a shorter day planned…a lighthouse, drive along the coastal road a bit and lunch at Neils Harbor. So we headed out about 0930…we wanted to make sure that lunch didn’t get too late since Neil had pork piccata planned for dinner…one of our favorite dishes but it’s a pain to make as it generates a lot of dirty dishes…didn’t want to be too full from lunch to enjoy it.

Our first stop was at the Saint Paul Lighthouse…which turned out to be a bust lighthouse-wise but we got some nice photos nearby so it wasn’t a total bust. The lighthouse is steel and has been moved several times over it’s lifetime…including about 10 years ago when it was moved to it’s present location at a small museum and although it’s near the water it’s way too far inland along the river it’s on to be useful as a navigational aid.

We got a photo of it anyway…then headed back inland about a half mile or so and got some nice photos of the fishing boats along the river along with some reflections on the pretty calm water today.

Next up…we headed down towards our lunch destination at Neils Harbor…along the way we followed the coast road for a few miles…got stuck in one construction zone for 15 minutes or so but we did get some nice photos as we progressed.We also stopped for a short hike at White Point out to the end of the point…maybe a mile or so total.

Once back at Neils Harbor…we headed to the Chowder House right next to the lighthouse for lunch…corn and crab chowder with a couple cans of iced tea…the chowder was decent but not great and it met the goal of making sure we weren’t too full from lunch to enjoy dinner.

After lunch we got a few photos of the waves breaking over the rocks just outside Neils Harbor and a shot of the lighthouse and harbor entrance at Neils Harbor since it was a clear day as opposed to the way it was on Tuesday on the east side of the island.

Our last stop of the day…the local library for some slightly faster than the campground internet connectivity…between our two laptops, two iPhones, and two iPads we had over 100 applications to update. So we spent almost two hours there catching up on email, downloading apps, and various other connectivity required tasks…and we even learned something along the way. There was a teaching seminar for a group of kids in the 10 year old range…they were talking about acids and told them that battery acid like in your car battery has a pH of zero. We said…nah, it’s only about 2 or 3, nothing gets to 0 on the pH scale. So we googled it and turns out they were almost right…sulfuric acid which is considered a strong acid and is what is in your battery has a pH of close to 0 but never actually gets there. Who knew?

Ok, on to photos from Thursday.

Saint Paul Light…yeah…we didn’t think much of it either.

Boats along the river the lighthouse is near…Dingwall River we think

Shot of the coastline as we headed toward White Point…most of the coast of Cape Breton Island is like this…steep cliffs right down to a rocky beach…there are only a few sandy beaches we’ve seen here.

About halfway out White Point looking back toward the cove.

There was an old cemetery out near the point…it had about 3 dozen obvious grave markers in it but only these two had any markings on them…the remainder were just blank stone markers. Guess you had to remember where grandma was buried back then.

A couple of small rock islands right off the end of the point…covered with shore birds. We missed seeing a juvenile Bald Eagle take one in the air and eat it for lunch but about 10 minutes or so. Darn the bad luck.

Views from White Point.

Really clear water…and the depth drops off pretty fast as you can see.

More flowers by Connie…she’s getting the hang of that depth of field bokeh thing.

The rocks down near the shoreline here are about 10 inches in diameter and as smooth as glass from all the wave action over the centuries.

Rocks outside Neils Harbor. We really liked both the water splashing up on them…

As well as the resulting temporary waterfalls after the wave receded.

Neils Harbor light and harbor entrance…the harbor is just around the point where the light is.

They got these signs all over up here both in Cape Breton and there were over in Newfoundland too…and they’re all damn lies I tellya.

Ok, on to Friday…our last day here on Cape Breton Island before we continue westward into Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island (PEI). We were out the door by about 0930 or so headed for our first stop of the day at Mary Ann Falls…this was deemed to be the adventure portion of the tour as it was 6.5 km up a gravel road…but it was far from the worst gravel road we’ve been on up here in Canuckistan…in fact it was a pretty darned good gravel road. We arrived at the parking lot just as the only other car there was leaving…so we had the place to ourselves for about 40 minutes…it was about a 120 foot descent down the gravel road past the parking lot then another 60 feet or so down the stairs to the base for photos. We turned off the Cabot Trail less than a kilometer from the campground and were almost immediately onto the gravel road heading up. Mary Ann Falls is the highest volume waterfall in the park according to the brochure…it’s about 60-70 feet tall overall but the creek it’s on is only 15 or so feet wide at maximum so it’s not really that much volume anyway.

After our 40 minutes or so alone soaking up the ambiance…just as we were about done…a couple more folks showed up so we hiked back up to the parking lot and headed back down the gravel road…passed 4 or 5 cars coming in so obviously we hit it at the right time for solitude. Once we were back down to the Cabot Trail we headed north 8 or 9 km to our second waterfall of the day…it’s located at Black Brook Beach…which incidentally is where Black Brook drains into the Atlantic…most of the beaches with sand here are at brook or river mouths and the flowing water has carried silt and sand downstream from the mountains to form a sandy beach instead of the more common rock beach. The falls itself is not on Black Brook but on Still Brook just north of the beach…it falls about 20 feet or so over an abrupt edge basically onto the beach.

On the way back down from Mary Ann Falls we got this shot looking southward along the coast.

Then once at Black Brook Beach some shots of both the waterfall itself as well as ocean swells breaking over the rocks.

Connie got this one of a swell breaking and splashing up over the rock almost perfectly timed…it’s the best shot of this variety we got here.

Next stop out into the ocean is either Iceland or Ireland.

Both a close up and a wider view of the unnamed falls on Still Brook…after the single drop you an see it sort of dribbles through the rocks down onto the sandy beach and then runs off into the ocean.

And with that our work here at Cape Breton NP is done…we went home for lunch then we’ll head down to the library to post this, get some more apps downloaded, and probably do some more planning for our time at PEI next week.

Interesting things found on the net this week.

Good advice.

You have to make it so you enjoy your job.

We need this app too…anybody know where to find one?

Cyas.

Several of our readers emailed us since we storm evacuated from Saint John’s and wondered if we were OK…we’re fine and the storm was pretty much a non event for us except for the rain and fog on our first day from Saint John’s over to Grand Falls-Windsor. But we were tired after working hard in Saint John’s to get all we needed to get done there done and after the 2 day 520 mile drive to Doyles on the west side of Newfoundland…so we just stayed home all weekend and dindunuffin as they say…well, nuffin ‘cept laundry cuz our hamper was full.

Monday we were up early for our transit to Cape Breton Island…and even though it was only 110 towing miles we were out of the campground at Doyles by 0730 or so for the 30 mile transit down to the ferry terminal at Port aux Basques. We arrived on schedule…Connie stopped at Tim Horton’s for breakfast…Maple Pecan Danish, yum…and more coffee…and got quickly checked in with the ferry folks…we were the second RV in line which meant pretty early boarding. We really didn’t care about early boarding…but early boarding means early disembarking and since we had about 80 miles to go after we got off the ferry early disembarking is what we know in the bidness as a Good Thing© for reasons which will become clear shortly. 

We loaded about 1030…and while the first two liner-upers let Connie get right behind Neil with Little Red so we would disembark together…separate means we have to meet up on the road and while we had planned for that ahead of time not having to link up is mo’ bedda ya know…anyways, the guy actually parking us on the ferry made her get out of place behind him and she was 2 rows over and 2 vehicles back. 

We got up to the seating deck and had lunch…then read books on our iPads ad took a nap…there was nothing to do as the entire trip over was in reduced visibility due to fog…it was rarely more than a half mile or so of visibility and the Blue Puttees was sounding fog signals the whole way over. We got into the pier about 1800 and headed down to the vehicle deck. Luckily…we were exiting out the bow of the ferry this time instead of the stern that has a wider door…so instead of offloading 1 column of vehicles at a time they offloaded one row across the ship at a time…Neil got out first as he was in the middle lane and Connie got out just about 5 or 6 vehicles behind him. She took one wrong turn as we headed west on the TCH or Trans Canada Highway…which is NS-105 in this part of the country…but quickly got things sorted out and we made the speed limit of 100 kph all the way to our turnoff onto the Cabot Trail…we had another 60 miles or so to go on there to get to Broad Cove Campground.

The first 40 miles were pretty nice…some curves and up and downs but the road was good and the speed limit was 70 or 80 kph most of that part. Unfortunately…we ran out of good road the last 20 miles…many more sharp curves and short but steep hills…and even a bunch of switchbacks to contend with. Yuck! Luckily sunset isn’t until 2045 so even though we arrived about 2050 it was still pretty light as we got checked in and headed to our selected site 7 for 5 nights. Turned out it’s a pull through…we thought we would have to back in when we made the reservation. However…since it was getting dark by the time we unhitched and we were tired…all Neil hooked up was power and left water and sewer for Tuesday morning. We did have to clean up our second kitchen disaster in the past 3 weeks…first it was the milk carton that tipped over and dumped milk all all over the inside of the fridge. Today it was a jar of jelly that fell out of our pantry…the glass was all busted up but fortunately most of the jelly remained in a single blob that he picked up for her…then we scrubbed the floor to finish cleaning up. The 30 minutes that took was the real reason behind not doing water and sewer last night. We had a cheese omelet for dinner and went to bed.

With 4 full days here in Cape Breton Island…and with rain forecast for all day and night Wednesday…we headed out to do the Cabot Trail on Tuesday about 0900. The Trail is about a 180 mile loop around most of the northern half of the island…with the top 1/3 of the loop mostly along the shoreline and the lower 2/3s of the loop mostly inland. Folks have suggested to us that it should be done in both the clockwise and counter clockwise directions for best viewing but that the counter clockwise direction is the better of the two. So that’s what we set out to do…circumnavigate the Trail counter clockwise. We quickly figured out after our first 2 stops that the entire east side of the island was fog bound…we talked about whether we should give it up for another day but decided to continue at least until we got to the west side of the island before giving up.

About an hour after we left we headed inland across the top portion that isn’t on the coast…and an hour or so later we arrived over on the western side of the island where it was pretty clear. There was still some haze out on the horizon so it wasn’t all the way to beautiful…but it was a heck of a lot better than the east side was. Our first stop on the west side was for lunch at the Rusty Anchor Cafe right on the beach…lobstah roll for Connie and deep fried haddock sandwich for Neil…both were good although the fish sandwich was too tarted up really…it had bacon, shrimp, garlic mayo on it and he left the guacamole and tomato off…it was decent but really didn’t need all that extra stuff. We had a couple cans of Breton Brewery Red Ale to go along with it and then continued our journey west and south along the island for another hour or so. When we got to Cheticamp right at the southern border of Cape Breton Islands NP…Connie said that she was Cabot Trailed out…so we pulled over and regrouped. It was about 100 km back the way we came but that would be mostly along the water and we would be doing it the other direction. Continuing on around the way we were going it was about 200 km back and almost all inland…since we like the water views better we turned ‘round and headed back. We got stuck in the same 4 or 5 construction/flagman/single lane sections that we had on the way over…but there would surely have been some on the southern half anyway. We stopped by a grocery store on the way home in New Haven…right north of Neil’s new favorite village…then headed the last 15 km back to the rig, arriving home about 1610.

Ok…let’s get on to the photos for the day.

Our first stop just a couple klicks north of the campground revealed this.

Straight out of the camera shot…it was actually more foggy than this visually.

Cleaned up a little in post…too blue but the best I could do with it.

We headed north a few more minutes and found Neil’s favorite new village.

It even had his very own lighthouse…the ocean is visible…well, it would be except for the fog…right behind the light.

Connie got a shot that shows the maple leaf on the top of the light…Neil didn’t even notice it there…and her version shows both it and gives a more realistic idea of what the fog was like.

And some rocks outside the lighthouse.

Connie found some flowers…Neil’s got to teach her to either find ones away from the fence or to select an appropriate wide open aperture so that depth of field is less and hence the background gets blurred out…the technical name for that is bokeh.

Really cool withy the fog that condensed out into droplets on the flowers though…

Here’s another version of the first one…Neil did some Photoshopping on it to simulate what bokeh would be like…it’s not exact but as you can see it makes the subject stand out a bit more.

And Neils Harbor has…naturally…his very own harbor. He thought about going down and showing this guy his license to prove his name and extract a lobstah royalty from him.

After continuing around to the west side of the island…these were taken from our table on the veranda at the Rusty Anchor.

After lunch we drove up over the top of Kelly Mountain…well it was actually a ridge…as we headed south along the shoreline.

Right at the center of this shot the white area near the shore is the parking lot of the Rusty Anchor…the next shot is a zoomed in one from the same location so you can see where we ate.

Looking the other direction from the top of the ridge…here’s a pano of the Cape Breton Island Highlands for which the National Park is named.

Another very far away shot…the little cove at the bottom is named Fishing Cove and is where the Celtic people that first populated this island went to fish…it’s the least developed area in the park…the only way in is about a 10 mile hike downhill from this point to the beach there. There’s a small primitive campground with a limited number of permits issued to go there…but there are no services. No water, toilets, trash, or anything else…you must pack in your water and pack out all your trash. The next shot after this is a zoomed in shot of the camping area at the beach. This is very similar to the Kalaulau community on the north shore of Kauai that we took some photos of years ago when we visited that island…again a very primitive campground at the end of a long hike down a valley from the top of the ridge to the shoreline.

Some more shots as we headed south down the coast.

The road just up from the beach you can see is the Cabot Trail.

A rock formation known as La Bloc…no idea why.

Looking the other way from La Bloc.

Just south of La Bloc are these two small…well, probably 40 feet high…rocks sticking up out of the water. Just on the other side of the cove is the town of Cheticamp where we ended up turning around.

After stopping by the grocery store in New Haven just north of Neils Harbor…we did stop for one more shot of our new favorite village…you can see the lighthouse and the harbor is just in between the top topmost rocky points in the photo. About 90 degrees to the right from this shot is a nice beach…located naturally on Neils River as it empties into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.

So that’s it for photos.

I can say that the Cabot Trail is probably worth it…but you need a really pretty day weather wise or else you get crummy views and pictures. Apparently fog is pretty common this time of the year…so perhaps coming a little later in the summer or earlier in the spring would be better. As to doing it both directions…sure, we saw different views on our way back home and that’s probably worth doing…but we would stick to the northern 1/3 of the Trail as that’s the only part with coastline involved…everything south of where we went is inland and the mountains aren’t really tall enough to be impressive…all the ones we saw were tree covered to the summit like most of the Appalachians are…and that’s just not as dramatic a skyline.

Tomorrow we’ll probably stay home…since it’s forecast to rain. There’s a ranger talk at the outdoor theatre in the campground at 1900…assuming it don’t get rained out.

Author dedication in an ebook we saw.

Looters.

Dogs have owners…cats have staff.

We know some RVers like this.

And finally…

Cyas.

With our work in Eastport and the Terra Nova NP area complete…we headed out Monday morning for the 175 mile drive down to Pippy Park. It was an uneventful drive on a nice warm day…we arrived about 1300 and quickly got checked in for our 5 night stay in the full service loop 4 site 156. Once we were setup…Neil put in a new sediment water filter cartridge in our filter setup…the old one was orange from all the crap in the water up here even though it was only a bit over 2 months old…and put 50 gallons of water in our fresh tank in anticipation of a couple of things…first was to have enough for the 3 day transit from St. John’s back over to Doyles over night, then the ferry to the mainland and the last 80 miles to our next real stop in Cape Breton Highlands National Park. The second was to have water in case of issues with Hurricane Chris. On our arrival it was still motionless southeast from Cape Hatteras NC about 300 miles but it was supposed to intensify to hurricane strength 1 and then proceed northeastward…staying offshore of the US and Nova Scotia but possibly making landfall in Newfoundland…albeit it would only be an extra-tropical storm by then as it would weaken in the cold North Atlantic and would be out of the tropics and hence not a tropical storm anymore but still a cyclone…before it headed out into the North Atlantic to die.

At our arrival…all of that was still days out and the track not very specific…so we figured we would stick to our original plan of leaving Saturday morning for the 2 day drive back to Doyles just north of the ferry terminal then take the ferry and continue onto Cape Breton Highlands as scheduled. However…we did change the order of our planned activities just in case. The storm was forecast to arrive Thursday sometime so we made sure that all of the must-do stuff was scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday.

The Garofalo’s pulled in to Pippy Park about an hour after we did and parked 2 sites down…so we continued the NHOG Rally, Newfoundland Edition with them…and as it turned out they followed us to Grand Falls Windsor on Thursday, and Doyles on Friday as well.

Monday evening we headed downtown to the O’Reilly’s Irish Newfoundland pub…where we had some very good brews from the local Yellow Belly Brewery…St. John’s Stout for Neil and Irish Red for Connie. He had some moose nachos for dinner…they were excellent…and Connie had Newfoundland split white pea soup…which was more the consistency of very thick stew than soup but whatever…she said it was good. 

Tuesday we headed up the northwestern arm of the Avalon peninsula…St John’s is on the southeast portion of the peninsula…for a visit to Harbor Grace where Connie’s great grandparents were married and her grandfather baptized, then on to New Perlican where they may…or may not, but it is where her great grandmother who was a Peddle was from…have resided, she’s not sure from her ancestry.com research. We included a visit to the village of Heart’s Content…where the North American end of the first transatlantic telegraph cable was located…after all we needed to do something Neil was interested in and she always tries to do that. We sandwiched lunch in there and got back to the rig pretty late in the afternoon.

Wednesday morning…the track of Hurricane Chris which was up to category 2 instead of the previously forecast category 1 had firmed up and it showed landfall on the Avalon peninsula where St. John’s is located…with some uncertainty that it would actually make landfall as opposed to skirting close by…but it would still be an extra-tropical storm with a defined eye, lots of rain, and winds up to about 60 knots with gusts another 15 or 20 higher than that. Since we were on exposed ground at Pippy Park, and given the potential loss of power and water services due to the storm, and given that we would have to spend most of Thursday and possibly Friday inside the rig sheltering from the rain with the slides closed to reduce our windage area…we, well actually Connie…decided to “choose wisely” as the aged knight said and leave town. Not to worry…Neil agreed with her but said he was going with her desires…although his precise statement was that if he thought she was being insufficiently conservative he might overrule her. We called Sanger Memorial RV Park in Grand Falls-Windsor and moved our reservation from Saturday night to Thursday night, called Grand Codroy RV Park in Doyles and switched our Sunday reservation to Friday through Sunday and decided to just stay in Doyles for the weekend. We’ll do laundry and potentially run down to Port aux Basques for dinner and a brew one night. With both of those reservations firmed up…we headed out for Fun Stuff©.

We first visited Signal Hill in the downtown area to see the Signal Tattoo…which is a military parade of sorts as well as the Cabot Tower on top of Signal Hill, then stopped by the local Catholic diocese offices to see if she could track down some more genealogical records for her various family trees…mostly she was looking for more info on her great grandparents and their children. Unfortunately…those records don’t exist. Back in those days the civil authorities didn’t keep any birth records and the church with the Catholic records in it burned to the ground years ago…so no joy on that front. Signal Hill and the Tattoo were pretty outstanding though.

In the afternoon…Neil dumped tanks and stowed water and sewer connections and we hitched Big Red to the rig…it was supposed to be raining starting at 0400 Thursday morning and it’s much more pleasant to hitch up and do the utilities when it’s not raining and blowing.

We then headed out again to downtown for dinner…stopping first again at O’Reilly’s for beer, dinner, and so we could get Screeched In…more on that later…and since it turned out O’Reilly’s had run out of Screeched in Certificates we instead ended up at Christian’s Pub for the Screech In Ceremony.

We checked the Chris track when we got home…and it turned out that the rain wasn’t starting until about 1000…so we could have hitched in the morning but since it was done we still planned on an 0800 departure to get out as much ahead of the rain as we could.

After our 0500 alarm went off…it continues to amaze us that even though we’re retired we still set an alarm probably half the time…and a lot of time it’s at ungodly times like 0400 or 0530…crazy talk Ima tellin’ ya…anyways we had coffee, a cinnamon sticky bun we bought at Sobey’s when we picked up a few groceries, finished up our remaining pre-underway checks and were on the road and out of the park shortly after 0800 for the 275 mile drive to Grand Falls-Windsor. It’s a nice drive…at least the road is pretty good…but the weather turned out to be abysmal. Instead of starting raining at 1000…it started just about 0900 and varied from just a few sprinkles to tropical downpour amounts of rain…although again I guess that’s actually extra-tropical downpour. Fog, some wind although not really too much and a really grueling driving day. The storm was still several hundred miles from us…but the bands of clouds that spiral out from the eye kept passing over us and we would go from relatively dry weather to fog and rain you could hardly see cars through and back to dry in the space of 10 or 15 minutes.

Tomorrow (Friday) we’ll continue on to Doyles and spend the weekend at Grand Codroy RV Park then head on down to Port aux Basques arriving about 0900 Monday for the 1145 departure of the ferry. Docking is scheduled at 1800 Nova Scotia time and we’ve another 80 miles of driving to get to the campground…so it will be dusk-ish by the time we arrive. I may post again over the weekend…but then again I might just wait until we get to Cape Breton instead…ya never know.

Ok…on to the photos.

Immaculate Conception Church in Harbour Grace. This is no longer in use (another church has been built) but has been declared an historic property. It isn’t the church that Connie’s great grandparents were married in or her grandfather was baptized in, because that one burned down in 1889, but it is on the same site.The local diocese is soliciting bids to sell or lease the property for “repurposing.”

A statue of Mary in front of the former cathedral.

View from the front of the church. This is the view that Connie’s great grandparents would have seen coming out of the church after they were married.

The Heart’s Content Lighthouse…the village is named due to the heart shaped bay it is located within.

Over in New Perlican…here’s a street named after Connie’s ancestors. There are still Peddle’s living in the town according to the ladies at the Cable Station Historic Site, but she’s not aware of any that we needed to go meet.

Shots of the small…very small…village of New Perlican.

Note the colored fishing shacks at the head of each dock. The houses in St. John’s are all brightly colored like this too. Its a Newfoundland tradition.

The site where the first transatlantic cable came ashore…it was actually the fourth attempt that succeeded as the steamship Great Eastern carried the cable from Ireland to Newfoundland, anchoring in Heart’s Bay to send it ashore.

The cable station…which remained in service until the mid 1960s when it was retired. When it was open a cost of a telegram to England cost 20 pounds sterling for 20 words, 100 characters maximum, spaces don’t count, numbers have to be spelled, and the to and from names count.  The original operators were British but eventually were almost entirely replaced by Newfoundlanders.

A repeater from the cable…about 4 feet long and 1 foot in diameter.

The pipe that protected the cable as it transitioned from the floor of the bay across the beach to the cable station located just across the street.

Wednesday we drove up to the top of Signal Hill for some photos…including this cool fog bank you can see as we look south-southwest. 

The entrance light to St. John’s harbor…they get cruise ships and large container ships into this harbor as it’s the only deep water port on the eastern side of Newfoundland.

Cabot Tower…built in the late 1800s for the 400th anniversary of the landing of John Cabot as I related a couple of blog posts back…it was used as a wireless signal station during World War I…or the Great War as it’s known up here…and also actually was the station that received the SOS from the SS Titanic after it struck the iceberg in April 1911.

Panoramic view of St. John’s harbor…the entrance is to the left and the light in the photo above is about 200 yards past the end of the channel you can see…the harbor proper is center and right. As I said…this is an excellent harbor…albeit one that’s pretty difficult to get into.

A closer view of the entrance…looks like plenty of water for ships to pass through, right? Well…appearances are misleading as the following images show.

A cropped in version of the above with a couple of important things to note.  Atlantic Ocean to the left, harbor to the right. In the center of the frame is a red marker on a rock…remember Red Right Returning? There is deep water right up to the far side of the marker but on this side it’s maybe 2 feet. The red circle at upper left center shows the location of the green buoy that marks the left side (inbound) of the channel…again the buoy is in deep water but about 8 or 10 feet on the far side of it there’s a shelf that extends just about the entire width of this photo. So incoming shipping has to pass through the channel between the green buoy marking the shoals on the left and the red marker marking those on the right? How wide is that?

Here’s another shot…the boat coming in is about 18 feet long…so that means that the entire width of the channel from green buoy to red marker is maybe 100-120 feet. A container ship has a beam of 80ish feet and a cruise liner a little more depending on the size of the liner…so the crew, well actually the harbor pilot with the assistance of probably at least 2 tugs and the bow thrusters that most modern ocean gong vessels have…has to thread a 700 or 800 foot long 80-100 feet wide ship with a 26-30 foot draft through a narrow channel about 100-120 feet wide and maybe 1,500 feet long before it widens out into the harbor. If you look straight up from the boat’s location to the far shore…you can see portions of the ledge that extend almost out to the green buoy. Obviously they do this a lot as there are 6 or 8 vessels in port in the panoramic photo above…but it’s carefully done, requires a harbor pilot and tugs, and isn’t done in anything remotely approaching bad weather or nighttime. If the seas or wind are high…the shipping has to just wait outside the harbor. 

Two things from this shot…which is about 200 yards or so further into the entrance channel than the red marker in the above shots…the narrowness continues until the harbor widen out. Second is the cannon at the King’s Battery… the point right down the center of the channel and although there are only 6 of them they would have turned any wooden vessel that tried to force entry into driftwood. 

Shots from the tattoo…it’s performed in honor of the members of the Newfoundland Battalion that served under a total of 4 flags during it’s history. The performers are all college age re-enactors.

Connie got a shot of them firing their muskets.

Neil on the other hand…put his camera in burst mode and got a nice sequence of the firing…you can see the muzzle flash in the second one and the blast from the artillery piece in the background in the last.

They then fired off one of the mortars up on top of the hill you can see in the above shots.

With that…our day was done…so we headed back and finished up the pre-underway chores I talked about before…then headed out to first O’Reilly’s and then Christian’s Pub for the Screech In ceremony. You’ve probably been wondering ever since back at the beginning of this post…so Ima gonna tell ya about it.

You see…to a Newfoundlander…they are extremely proud of their heritage, history and culture. St. John’s is one of the oldest settlements in North America and the folks here have a long history of fishing…and of selling their fish to people down in the Caribbean islands in exchange for rum. They also believe that there are only two types of people in the world…Newfies and CFAs…that stands for Come From Aways…or outsiders. However…being friendly people, and thinking that everybody wanted to become a Newfie…they wanted to have a way for CFAs to become Newfies, or at least  an honorary rum Thusly…they needed to establish certain requirements, ceremonial rites, secret handshakes and the like to go along with that. So’s they got to thinking and decided that three things needed to be involved…first up is cod since fishing for cod is the oldest industry in Newfoundland…second is rum since they brought it in from the islands and hey, who doesn’t like drinking shots of rum in the bar…and third you needed to learn some of the Newfoundland language.

First up…the language. Now most of what we learned has to remain forever secret…except for those who’ve become honorary Newfies by completing the ceremonial hits and receiving their official Royal Order of Newfoundland Screechers certificate. However…the one Newfie word that is allowed for CFAs is ah bye…it means Yes and is a general reply to just about any question from “how’s the weather” to “did ye catch any cod today” to whatever else one Newfie might ask another. We learned other words as well…but as I noted those must remain a mystery for CFAs.

Next…you must kiss the cod…and by cod they mean an actual used to be swimming in the ocean whole cod. There was a piece of sautéed maple bologna to go along with it.

And finally…a shot of Screech Rum…which is the locally distilled stuff…no, we didn’t drink all of these but there was one for every former CFA taking part in the aforementioned ceremonial rites. We had people from as far away as India in our group…and even 3 year old Casper (the son of Leisha and Dimka the Indian folks) participated…although he got gypped and got no Screech…just some sugar syrup.

Connie couldn’t resist getting another kiss o’ the cod along with our master of ceremonies…aka the bartender…who is an actual Newfie.

We’re official!! Connie thought that she shouldn’t have to kiss the cod as her ancestors were born here…but you’re either born a Newfie or you’re a CFA…not any more though.

With that our day was done and we headed home…I already talked earlier about the trip over to Grand Falls Windsor.

On to interesting things found on the net…although none of these were actually found on the net this week…they all came from our camera.

The menu from O’Reilly’s…notice the part over on the left about there being no strangers, only friends you haven’t met yet…Neil’s been saying this for years.

Only in Newfoundland would they name a village Dildo.

Only in Newfoundland 2…where they actually have 3 liter bottles of booze…these are the aforementioned Screech Rum…biggest darned booze bottle ya evah dun seen…Oooh Wee, it be wundermus as Justin would say. (Google Justin Wilson if you don’t get the reference.)

And finally…these 20somethings pulled in yesterday evening to camp for the weekend. I’m not sure what is going on over there as it’s 3 guys and 1 gal in a 24 foot class C…but hey, whatever. Anyway…they were out having breakfast this morning at 0737…as you can see they’re having Beer…the Breakfast of Champions! Score! One of the has no shirt, another is dressed only in a towel, one is wearing pajama bottoms and a t-shirt, and the young lady was dressed in only a thin lace swimming suit coverup…sans suit.

What were they thinking?

Cyas.

After our relatively late night in St. Andrews for the Viking Feast…we started getting ready to leave about 0800 for the first day of our 2 day transit to the eastern side of Newfoundland…and were o the road shortly after 0900 for our 288 mile transit to Deer Lake where the highway known as the Viking Trail joins back up with the Trans Canada Highway (TCH)…the former is a 2 lane road with 90 kph speed limit (56 mph) while the latter is a 3 lane highway at 100 kph (62 mph). The TCH is also less curvy, it’s more of a freeway with some at grade crossings than a standard highway like the Viking Trail is…and it’s a lot better maintained…it’s mostly indistinguishable from the better highways down in the US. The weather was gorgeous…no rain or fog and not really much wind for most of the way…we only stopped twice for bathroom breaks and once for a sandwich in a coastal overlook and pulled into the Gateway to the North RV Park about 1500 or so.

Unfortunately…on entering the rig we found that our carton of milk had toppled over and leaked about a cup and a half of milk. Naturally this went pretty much everywhere…so instead of a leisurely afternoon in the recliners we spent the next hour or so emptying, cleaning, and restoring the fridge. We normally get milk in the plastic jugs with a screw top…but the older style paper carton was all that was available when we bought it last…Connie thought she had adequately stowed it so it would stay in place but the barrier bars we put in the fridge to hold things on the shelves slipped and it toppled the opposite way from what one would think…it fell over on the shelf spout down instead of backwards into the door which would have been spout up.

We consoled ourselves with a beer and some barely adequate dinner at the local pub…

Next morning we were out of the park in about 30 minutes since we only hooked up power for overnight. After a quick stop for diesel fuel and gas…almost $400 CN total…have I mentioned that gas and fuel are expensive up here…we hopped on the TCH for our 222 mile trip over across the island to Eastport…the last 10 or so were on a smaller road into the town and campground alongside one of the many lakes in Newfoundland…I think there are even more of them here than Minnesota claims to have. On arrival at the Harold W. Duffet Shriner’s Memorial RV Park…he musta been some sort of honcho in the Shriners up here as he’s got at least 2 RV parks bearing his name.

The second day’s transit was again a nice easy day…with no more milk spillage so we were able to rest up after getting here…and after a short rest we tried to go have a beer over at the Inn at Happy Adventure…which is a hotel, restaurant, and bar nearby…in fact it’s the only one nearby. We got there about 1545…the door was open so we figured we would have a brew and go home to cook a steak Neil had taken out. They…however…weren’t open for business…despite 3 employees milling about the reception area and nobody at the 5 seat bar. We told them we only wanted a beer…and the incredibly lazy and unhelpful 20somethings told us to come back at 1700, but we couldn’t have dinner as they were fully booked. This was said with a snooty attitude…clearly if the owner had been there he/she would have been happy to pour us a brew but the children just couldn’t be bothered. No matter…we have beer at home for just these sorts of emergencies so that was what we did. A couple of frosty ones later we had steak, taters, and a glass o’wine.

With only 3 full days in Eastport…we had our work cut out for us in the Fun Stuff© department. Friday was a planed driving tour around the Gander peninsula, Saturday a tour through Terra Nova NP to the town of Bonavista at the end of the Cape Bonavista…both of those are in the 230-250 mile range total so they would be pretty full days…and then a visit to Terra Nova NP itself on Sunday after Mass and lunch…that’s a shorter day since we’re traveling again on Monday.

So we headed out about 0900 on Friday…and I wish that I could say something about how the Gander peninsula drive was great…as it was recommended to us by several friends…but it was uniformly unimpressive. First off…it was rainy and cold most of the day…several times it rained pretty hard, secondly there was a considerably greater amount of road construction than we’ve seen so far, and thirdly there’s just not really much to look at.

We passed through a couple of nice towns…Musgrave Harbor was supposed to be the nicest one…but it was basically a dump…not worth the effort to get there. The highlights of the day were supposed to be lunch at a place named Cafe by the Sea and a visit to the Beothuk Interpretation Center. Cafe by the Sea…which one would think would be located…by the sea maybe…but you would be sorely mistaken…was basically a diner with mediocre food and no beer. Slightly better than a Waffle House or Denny’s but not much.

The Beothuk Interpretation Center was pretty nice though…by the time we got there it had stopped raining and wasn’t too windy. The Beothuk were one of the native peoples tribes that inhabited this area right around the same time as the old Leif landed over on the other coast about 1,000AD…although they never met each other. The site is on an old archeological dig…there is fresh water, a large smelt run in the spring, a nice bay with a beach to bring canoes into, and an above the beach shelf to build a village. The archeological types aren’t sure if this was a permanently inhabited village or a fishing camp only but based on the dwelling remains are pretty sure it was the former. There are the remains of 11 wigwams here…but not the typical one one would see in the American west…they’re actually closer to a Viking longhouse in construction than a teepee. To build one you construct a circular fence of vertical sticks with branches woven through them about 3 feet high. The center is then dug out to a depth of about 3 feet and the dirt used to build up a mound outside the fence for insulation. Then logs are placed over the walls in a conical shape meeting in the center and covered with birch bark, sail cloth, or deer skins.

There are no actual dwellings left…but 4 of the 11 have been fully archeologically excavated and then reburied…there’s a museum with artifacts from the digs, some cultural stuff about the Beothuk, and a reproduction of one of their birchbark canoes. The Beothuk were known by the Europeans as the “red Indians” due to the ochre that they colored everything with…ochre is basically ground up iron oxide containing rock…think dirt from say Monument Valley…mixed with animal fat and used to decorate everything from clothing…all of it…to makeup to canoes.

The Interpretation Center main building…vaguely reminiscent of the design of the wigwams.

Replica of a period birchbark canoe created using somewhat typical technology. Note the red ochre coloring on pretty much everything.

Pretty much of a bust and a wasted 220 mile drive I think…but you never really know about these things. Sometimes you think it will be great and it’s not, sometimes you think it will be meh and it’s actually pretty great.

We were pretty sure that Saturday had to be better…and it was.

Starting off with the weather…which was beautiful. Warm, up to about 77 F, no rain, and a nice breeze instead of the biting cold wind we had the day before. We headed out again about 0900…that would put us at Shannon’s Irish Pub in Bonavista right about lunch time…see, we wuz using our noggins on this one. Cape Bonavista turned out to have the best scenery we’ve seen since our day at Western Brook Pond on the boat into the former fjord.

This boat…well, it’s got a problem Ima thinkin’

Some shots of one of the many coves we passed.

And eventually we made our way past the town of Bonavista over to the Cape Bonavista Lighthouse…which as you can see actually has a visually distinctive paint job so you can tell which light it is in the daylight. It’s also got a different light pattern and even the type of light it uses than most other lights up here.

Typically…a lighthouse has a single light with a rotating reflector behind it…and it’s surrounded by a Fresnel lens to focus the beam. I won’t get into a bunch of detail about what a Fresnel lens is here…you can look here if you want to see more…but basically it’s a compact lens which allows a large aperture and focal length without the correspondingly large mass and size that a conventional lens design would have. Instead of a single light and lens like almost every other light you’ve ever seen or heard of…this light has a total of 6 lanterns with reflectors behind them that rotates every 90 seconds. Two of the lights are red so instead of your typical lighthouse characteristic of either a flash every x seconds or an occulting light (which means it’s mostly on with short periods of darkness instead of mostly dark with short flashes of light) of x seconds duration…it flashes white, white, red every 45 seconds. So it’s easy to identify both visually in the daytime due to it’s unique paint scheme as well as by night. Pretty good idea as if you look at the geography it’s pretty much the first thing you see when coming in from Europe to Newfoundland.

As you can see from the tilted layers…this entire area was laid down by volcanic lava flows sometime in the really distant past…then as it was uplifted when either the glaciers receded or the teutonic plates collided it wasn’t pushed up evenly but on a slant…these layers are about 10 feet thick and the entire coastline is like this.

Connie staring out to sea…next stop is the UK in that direction…Neil told her it was too far to see…not enough height of eye to overcome the distance to the horizon thing ya know.

Whale tour boat returning from a trip.

Ya think? The cliffs here are probably 150-160 feet tall and range from the sloping down to the sea slabs above to rocky hillsides you could probably climb down if you were forced into it to vertical slap cliffs down to the water.

The light was built in 1843 and served until 1962.

Kitchen area of the lighthouse…the door that is open shows you the counterweight that the keeper had to go and crank to the top every 2 hours or so…took about 15 minutes and then he had two hours of turning the light before he or one of his kids or spouse had to go up and do it again.

Top end of the rotating mechanism.

The unique light structure…the light itself no longer is in service…it’s been replaced by an automatic light out back but it’s been restored to the condition it was in back in the late 1870s

Nearby is a statue and memorial to John Cabot…who based on his name you would probably think was English…but then you would be wrong. He was a Venetian whose actual name was Giovanni Caboto who had a patent from Henry VII to find a western passage to Asia. On June 24, 1497 he landed somewhere on the eastern seaboard of what is now Canada. Sources do not allow unequivocal identification of his landing point…and no hard evidence exists either way…but local Newfoundland oral tradition has it that he landed at Cape Bonavista. That’s their story…and Ima gonna guess they’re stickin’ to it.

Our next stop was lunch…we headed about 5 klicks back into Bonavista for our previously selected by the DLETC destination…Shannon’s Pub. I gotta tell ya…we’ve been in probably hundreds of Irish pubs both in the old country and around North America…and this one is the closest we’ve found on this continent in character to an actual Irish Irish pub. We knew when we walked in and inventoried the taps that it would be good because …blimey, they’ve got Kilkenny Irish Cream Ale on tap…we’ve found 2 or maybe 3 total Irish Pubs in North America that have it…and I gotta tell ya it’s one of the finest beers we’ve ever quaffed. What makes it so interesting is that it’s got the flavor profile of an Irish Red Ale…but a mouth feel like a smooth creamy Guinness Stout. Smooth going down I tellya…

So we quickly ordered a couple of pints…and then eventually another single pint which we split as we were getting full by then. To go along with it we split a BLT with Cheese Panini type sandwich and a bowl of Irish Onion soup. It’s similar to French Onion Soup…but it’s made with chicken stock or milk instead of wine and beef broth and flavored with mustard…then instead of having the bread toasted and put on top the bread is mixed in with the soup so it gets all gooey and creamy then covered with Gruyère (a wonderful Swiss cheese made in France). My oh my…was it good. So very rich though…that even though it was a small bowl about 10 ounces or so between half of that and half of the BLT we were stuffed…so stuffed that we didn’t even eat dinner. 

Mighty good Ima tellin’ ya…mighty good.

After lunch…we headed another 4 or 5 klicks out of town to a Puffin viewing area…basically a small rock right off the coast separated by about 10 yards or so of water…just enough to keep predators away I guess. It was populated by thousands of Puffins, Murre, and Gannets which are the same birds we saw over on Skellig Michael off the southwest tip of Ireland…small wonder though, both Ireland and Newfoundland are islands at about the same latitude in the North Atlantic and both are warmed by the Gulf Stream. So not only does the landscape look eerily similar to Ireland’s…particularly over here on the eastern side…but the bird life is pretty similar as well. As you can see…there were literally thousands…probably 10s of thousands…of ‘em. The third shot is about 10 or 12 feet wide so you can see the density…and the entire rock was probably 40 yards by 40 yards.

On the way back home…we stopped and got some shots at the Northwest River…more of a rapids than a true waterfall…these shots are looking downstream from the bridge over it…there wasn’t any way to get shots looking upstream without crashing the golf course…and Ima sure they wouldna liked that.

Sunday we went to Mass then after a quick lunch headed out for a quick look at Terra Nova NP…unfortunately most of the park is one of those drive through and look type of parks…not many hikes to speak of and nothing really of our length. Connie’s hip was hurting some today…so we just stopped by for a quick peek at Pissamare Falls right off of one of the parking lots. Not really much to see though…only about 15 feet tall and not much water flowing over it…we’re a little late for the spring melt runoff.

One last stop as we headed for home…there was a nice overlook at the top of a hill right off of the TCH named Blue Hill and Neil got a nice pano overlooking what’s known as the Western Arm. The Adirondack chairs…or Muskova chairs as the Canucks call ‘em…are frequently placed at viewpoints by the Park Service up here. The water you see in the distance is the Western Arm…this view is looking east-southeast and it eventually connects up to the Atlantic.

Really…a beautiful day today…and yesterday for that matter. Warm…a nice breeze…and we even changed into shorts before we went out today instead of jeans.

OK…on to interesting things found on the net.

Somebody had a bad day today…

Ever seen a turbocharged grill? Tune is a race car term that means to adjust it for a maximum performance. A turbocharger is an exhaust driven compressor that pumps a lot more air into an engine than it would get normally…hence more power. Big Red has one on his Cummins diesel…which is what makes him so powerful.

No words needed here.

And finally…a slogan we can get behind.

Cyas.