Saturday started cloudy, rainy, and breezy, although we still enjoyed being on the cliff overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence while we ate breakfast.
We carefully maneuvered along the edge of the cliff, back down the potholed and rutted drive to the gravel road and back out to route 1 toward Port au Port.
The weather cleared and became sunny as we drove. Stopped at the Wal-Mart in Stephenville for a little shopping. Looked for a laundromat and found one but it was upstairs, dingy, and had only 1 front loader. Went back to the van and as we were talking a man tapped on the driver’s window. The guy was conversational and made suggestions as to what we might want to see in Stephenville but out turned out he was a panhandler who said he was down on his luck and asked for spare change. We gave him a toony (a 2 dollar Canadian coin).
We did drive around a bit and found Blanche Brook Park where we had lunch of the last of our cinnamon raisin bread and peanut butter and Clementines. Then we took a walk by the pretty brook that was the reason for the park: the brook had flooded in 2005 causing massive damage and destroying around 50 homes nearby so they relocated everybody affected and turned the area into a park. The lower part of the brook has large and medium rounded rocks under the clear water. As we went upstream we found a falls where the water was coming off sheets of sandstone rock that contained fossil tropical trees from 305 million years ago before Pangaea split up.
After a little more exploring Stephenville, we continued on toward the Port au Port Peninsula. To get there from the mainland one has to travel across The Gravels, an isthumus on which an earthquake in 1927 destroyed nearby buildings. Then a flood in 1951 severed the connection altogether.
Today it has been rebuilt as a narrow neck with a causeway.
We crossed it, parked and took a hike along a trail that followed the coastline of East Bay with its windblown pine trees and fossil rocks. Beautiful clear water.
We drove along the southern coast of the peninsula with its gorgeous views of St. George’s Bay in beautiful sunlight until we came to Cape St. George and drove into a fog bank. We continued to the unsupervised “Boutte Du Cap” Park which is perched on top of a limestone cliff. We found a place for the night right on top of the cliff.
We found lovely little flowering rock plants, seagulls, cormorants, and kittiwakes, and whales! Janice even got a photo of the dorsal fin of a whale.
We made a dinner of chicken and mushrooms and spinach and cream cheese over 7 grain rice and had enough for another night to. Mark and Jackson, a husky, drove up, walked over and introduced themselves and chatted for quite a while before the sun began to set. He was originally from Ottawa and is a photographer and moved here about 3 years ago. He complained about how hard it is to capture the vastness and majesty of the place. We could only agree with him.
For another night we were all alone on the top of a cliff when the sun set with beautiful colors in the clouds and the Crescent moon was lovely too.
Had brownie bites and raspberry liqueur and went to bed late but there was still a bit of color in the sky.
