Monday - August 6, 2007

Wow, we woke up to sunshine this morning and it was a gorgeous day all day – bonus.

This morning we headed to L’anse aux Meadows where the Vikings landed over 1000 years ago, there are remains of a Norse village and replicas of three Norse buildings showing us how they lived 1000 years ago. The Visitor’s Centre was very interesting - there was a 30 minute video on the discovery of L’anse aux Meadows and then a very good display depicting life there.

I must say I am glad that I didn’t live there back then, what a hard way of life. The main house had four rooms – the main room had a central fire and that is where the day-to-day activities took place and about 30 people slept in this room on benches around the walls. One small room at the end is where the head honcho would have slept, then, there was a room they used as a workshop and then a room where the women did spinning etc. All in all a very close community and you would certainly get to know one another very well! There was also a replica of the blacksmith shop and a cold storage room.

From there we drove around the peninsula and visited all the little coves – very pretty! Most of the houses don’t cut grass, in fact at one place we saw a man out with his scythe cutting the front yard, but we did see some places that do cut their lawns and even have a bit of a flower garden. Another thing that has surprised us is that all the roads are paved even to the smallest community and basically they are in pretty good shape.

We saw one moose in a pond when we were driving but after we got home there was a moose roaming around the park – he didn’t seemed at all fazed by the people, he was just enjoying eating whatever it is they eat!! Moose are not native to Newfoundland, but in 1904 someone brought over 4 moose (who or why we haven’t heard) and now there are literally 1000’s of moose on the island, there are far more moose than caribou, and the caribou are native to Newfoundland.

Another observation – the RV parks here are really nice, the only one we haven’t cared for was the one at Stephenville and mainly because we were in the middle of the family camping and the kids seemed to congregate right behind our trailer to play, plus the sites were poorly laid out and we hardly had room to park the truck.