Monday - August 27, 2007

Today was overcast most of the day but the sun did come out about 3:30 and it was really nice, the high on the truck was about 21 so the temperature is improving.

As we were getting ready to head out this morning the two fellows who seem to run the park stopped by to chat and asked if they could see inside the trailer. We then stopped at the office to pay (they weren’t there last night for us to pay) so chatted with them a bit more. It turns out this is a municipal park, which explains why it is so nice, and the one fellow is the mayor, who volunteers his time to help out here. He was telling us the average tax in Winterton is about $650 and the average house assessment is $35,000-40,000 – can you believe it!! He was telling us that the Hauser’s (Hauser Industries in Waterloo) bought a piece of land here off the town and have built a beautiful home for the father as well as homes for the children. The mayor said they have wi-fi here, I could park beside the office and get it for a small fee - $10 for a couple of days. I thanked him but said I would wait till we got to St. John’s (highway robbery if you ask me!). We stopped at three libraries and I did manage to download my e-mail but they all have a block on blogger so I couldn’t get my blog posted and somehow I bet I would find that if I paid the $10 here there would also be a block on blogger as it is probably all set up by the same person.

Today we drove up the Trinity Bay side of the peninsula then back down the Conception Bay side to Carbonear and what a lovely drive it was. When we got to the top of the peninsula at Bay de Verde it was really foggy which was very disappointing as it looked like it would be a beautiful view out into the Atlantic from there. We went to Grates Cove which is at the very end of the peninsula and stopped at a lookout where a woman and her son were looking out with binoculars. It turned out that she was a local and had been looking out her living room window and saw a very large seal in the harbour so jumped in her car to come to the lookout to see it, then lost sight of it. We would have loved to have seen that! We chatted with her for a bit, she said that next week the men would head back out fishing for mackerel, capelin, and squid and the women would be back to work at the fishing plant. I asked the young lad about school in winter and he said they got out early a lot and had quite a few snow days last winter. She said the winters there can be brutal with the winds, don’t think we would want to experience a winter here.

The drive was interesting as along the Trinity Bay side we were driving pretty well along the shore line but on the Conception Bay side most of the towns are on the cliffs overlooking the ocean – some really beautiful views and although the water wasn’t really rough there were very large swells and it was fascinating watching them crash in on shore. I said to John that I wonder if it isn’t a lot like the coast in Scotland or Ireland.

Carbonear seems to be quite a large place and has a Wal Mart, a Tim’s and a Dominion grocery store so we hopefully will be able to stop there on the way home tomorrow and stock up on some groceries. I didn’t have my list with me today or we could have stopped and done some shopping on the way back. If not then we can do it when we get to St. John’s on Wednesday.