Sunny Day

Thursday, August 18
After a fine breakfast at Jeannie's we started south on Hwy 430.  It was a sunny, windy day.  There were lots of whitecaps on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, along which we were travelling.







To our left, the mountains that we couldn't see at all for fog on the way north were now visible.  At first, they were totally covered with clouds, but slowly the clouds lifted and I was able to  get this picture.








Our first stop was at The Arches Provincial Park, which is immediately beside the highway.  This is an example of the action of rocks and waves over the ages in breaking down some of the limestone cliffs along the shoreline.

The vegetation along the shore is severely battered by the wind, and often the windward side is bare of leaves and looks quite dead, while the lee side seems fine.  There was this grove of dead trees at the Arches, and I wondered what had killed them all.  Was it a fire that destroyed them?  They were just bare, white skeletons of trees, and in the morning sunshine they seemed quite striking and even beautiful.







The roadsides in Newfoundland abound in wildflowers.  Here is a closeup of just a few fireweeds, but in many areas they turn the entire roadside a beautiful mauve.  There are many other flowers also: more buttercups than we've seen anywhere else--probably because a lot of this land is boggy.

Although the land along 430 northward is fairly flat once you leave the coastline to head toward Deer Lake, you enter the hilly areas.  Newfoundland is definitely rock, hills, water and flowers.

Although we were warned of many moose, we've seen only one, and that was at L'Anse Aux Meadows where there are five moose in residence. Most likely they realize they are protected from hunters there in the National Site.

We stayed the night in Grand Falls-Windsor.  The three B and B's we tried were full up, and we're at Hotel Robin Hood, with a great corner room, breezy and bright with windows on two sides.  Today we head up the "Discovery Trail" toward Twillingate.  There's a good Interpretive Centre on the Beothuk Indians at Boyd's Cove that we hope to visit.