Monday - September 3, 2007

We woke up to sunshine this morning although it was quite cool – only 8 degrees but it did warm up during the day to about 16-17.

We did the Irish Loop today which is a drive around the Avalon Peninsula; there were a lot of pretty little villages along the way. We had heard that at Ferryland you could have a picnic at the lighthouse, you order lunch and they give you a blanket to sit on and you go sit on the rocks and they bring you lunch so we thought that might be kind of neat. Well, we got to Ferryland and started up the road to the lighthouse – wow, it is a VERY NARROW road, uphill all the way and about two thirds of the way to the lighthouse there are a couple of parking areas and it is about a 1 to 1-1/2 km walk from there to the lighthouse. It was a really busy area and we figured by the time we walked up, had lunch and then walked back down again that we wouldn’t have time to finish driving the loop so instead went back down and went to a local restaurant and had really good fish and chips for lunch. The drive back down from the lighthouse was interesting, we met a couple of cars coming up so John had to back up for quite a bit before he could pull over and let the cars going up go by. Thankfully, we got the rest of the way down without meeting another vehicle and we had got up without meeting another vehicle.

We would have liked to have driven out to Cape Race but it was a 20 km dirt road and we just didn’t feel like tackling a drive like that, the paved roads can be pretty brutal in spots so we could just imagine what a gravel road would be like.

At Trepassy we were going to drive into the main part of town but all of a sudden there were a lot of sirens and we could see a couple of ambulances and a fire truck heading into the main part of town so decided to pass, then as we came around a curve to head out of town there was this huge line of vehicles heading into town with yellow ribbons on their aerials and honking their horns, then we saw “Welcome Home Trent” signs so think that one of the local boys has just returned from Afghanistan and they were having a huge welcome home party. For about 2 km going out of town all the brush had yellow ribbons tied to them and most of the driveways had yellow balloons – very festive.

When we got close to the bottom end of the peninsula the landscape totally changed, the elevation was quite high and there were no trees just a bit of ground cover and lots of little ponds. There were a lot of little cabins along the highway that are probably used for hunting and fishing, they had no hydro and looked quite rugged. It was quite interesting that there was no obvious means of earning a living in all the little villages along the bottom and up the west side of the peninsula – there were no harbours and no signs of fishing or any other industry. The villages also had a different look to them, not as prosperous as most of the other places we have been. The east side of the peninsula was far prettier than the west but all in all it was a nice drive.

When we got back we stopped at the library and I got my blog updated and checked my e-mail. That’s it for another day; tomorrow is our last day in St. John’s.