Monday, August 19, 2019
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| The Arches |
We awoke to clear blue skies. For breakfast, we each had a small blueberry pie and then continued up the western coast of the Northern Peninsula on highway 430. We stopped at The Arches (along with lots of other tourists including two buses). These limestone formations were created over millions of years as a results of glacial action, wind, and water erosion. Jane, who is now limping from her calf injury and only using the tippy toes on her right foot, viewed them from an observation deck while I walked down and peered through each arch as the surf came pounding through them.
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| Nurse Myra Bennet House in Daniel’s Harbour |
Further up the coastal highway, we exited into the town of Daniel’s Harbour. There we visited the house of Nurse Myra Bennett. She arrived from England in Daniel’s Harbour as Myra Grimsley in 1921 as one of a few nurses recruited by the Outport Nursing Association to attend the small villages along the west coast of Newfoundland. She quickly developed a reputation as a steadfast worker and healthcare provider throughout this geographically isolated region at a time when none was available. She extracted teeth, attended to the sick and injured, delivered babies and attended to any other health issues that arose in addition to raising her three children and providing piano lessons to local students. Additionally, she sewed, made quilts, knitted, spun her own yarn, and leapt tall buildings in a single bound. Even after the placement of nurses in neighboring villages and the opening of cottage hospitals, she continued her life-long calling of helping with the heath care of the region. She lived to 100.
From there we continued to our destination for the day, Port au Choix, only stopping once for lunch in the RV at a scenic pull out. On the way into town, we pulled off at the Oceanside RV Park to check in but no one was in the office. The campground is aptly named because it is simply a row of 26 RV sites facing the ocean. So, we drove through town to the visitors center for the Port au Choix National Historic Site. Our new Discovery Pass got us in fee free. There, through displays and a lecture from a guide, we learned about the four groups of people that had inhabited the region prior to European settlers: the Maritime Archaic, Dorset and Groswater Paleoeskimo, and “Recent Indians” or the ancestors of the Beothuk. Archaeologists have, and are, excavating sites in the area belonging to these cultures and uncovering remains and artifacts that reflect their domestic, hunting and cultural rituals. The visitor center featured artifacts exemplifying each of these cultures. Also, the center provided information about, and trails to observe, the unique flora of this region which is quite different from most of Newfoundland due to the basic limestone bedrock rather than the more acidic bedrock in other regions.
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| The Point Riche Lighthouse |
From the visitor center, we drove another 2.2 km to the Point Riche Lighthouse. The building was closed but I walked down to the limestone beach and enjoyed exploring the many shelves, pools and other features eroded by the waves. Meanwhile, Jane had nice views and was entertained by a group of caribou grazing nearby.
As we were returning through town to the campground, we stopped at the French Rooms Cultural Center. This included a small museum that described among other things: 1) the French Shore Treaty that relinquished France’s exclusive fishing rights to this coastal area in exchange for allowing permanent settlement, 2) the resettlement programs enacted after Newfoundland joined the Confederation in 1949 to relocate small communities to more centralized larger communities so as to centralize the province’s population, and 3) the Basque people and how they fished and eventually settled the area. Before leaving, we purchased a pound of local pre-peeled and cooked small shrimp, a jar of blueberry jam, and a jar of bakeapples (cloudberries).
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| The Limestone Beaches at Point Riche |
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| Grazing Caribou at Point Riche |
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| The Port au Choix Harbor |
Back at the campground, the manager checked us in and showed me photos on his phone of two caribou that had wondered through the campground earlier in the afternoon. One of them was a huge stag. We set up the RV in site 9 backing in with a close-up view of the ocean through the windshield. Jane prepared a great one-pot stir fry meal of vegetables, rice and shrimp. After dinner as the sun was going down, I spent about an hour wondering around the fascinating limestone beach that is so different from the sandy ones of NC. Clouds had been developing since late afternoon so that it was dark and becoming foggy as I made it back to the RV.