Port aux Basque to L'anse aux Meadows

 Our adventure in Newfoundland started in the lower left hand corner at Port Aux Basque.  You can kind of see that there is a major road that crosses from Port aux Basque to St. John's on the western side.  That is 12 hours by car.  We started out by going straight up and stopping in the green area which is one of their main tourist attractions...Gros Morne National Park.

 Our first night of camping in Gros Morne National Park, right on the beach.  We found the signs about not walking on the dunes to be very interesting since we grew up running up and down dunes.  They were very serious about retaining the grass to hold the sand and minimize the movement of the dunes.  They did a really good job of educating the public as well as providing good access to the beach.  This was a big park on the beach with great play areas as well as private showers and a nice hot water dish-doing area.  I really liked the Canadian parks.

If you got caught in really bad weather it is nice to have some options for a roof overhead and a stove that could provide some heat....nice alternative for the blue tarp camper.

This could challenge all you basketball players...kind of basketball in the round as who knows which side the ball will come down.

We loved the cloud formations, the tundra type land with the mountains in back.  As you can see, the weather was overcast, the wind was blowing and it wasn't possible to hike in a mile and do the spectacular boat ride up the fjord which was a major disappointment.  We opted to drive up the coast to the Viking Village with the hope that the weather would clear and we could enjoy more of Gros Morne.

Moving up the coast we stopped at the Arches Provincial Park.

Leo started up the arch to stand on the top, but decided maybe a guy with a fused ankle really shouldn't try to be a mountain goat.

We are now moving up to the top of the island to where the vikings came ashore at L'Anse aux Meadows a UNESCO  site. L'Anse aux Meadows ("Jellyfish Cove") is an archaeological site on the northernmost tip of the island of Newfoundland . The fateful discovery of L'Anse aux Meadows, by Ingstad and his archaeologist wife Anne Stine (Norwegians) , rewrote the world's history books. The couple had been intensely interested in the Vikings and their lore. By 1960, they turned to Newfoundland believing it held answers to questions about the discovery of North America raised in the Sagas. An authority on ancient Viking manuscripts and folklore, Helge Ingstad correlated geographical locations by boat and airplane with information from the Sagas on "Vinland".
Those calculations led Ingstad to Newfoundland and L'Anse aux Meadows and local resident George Decker. In 1960, near his home, Decker, a fisherman, showed Ingstad and his daughter Benedicte some overgrown ridges, the lower courses of the walls of eight Norse buildings from the 11th century. For eight years, Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad led an international team of archaeologists from Norway, Iceland, Sweden and the United States in excavating the site. Carbon-14 testing of the site proved it dated to approximately 1,000 A.D. In 1968, the archaeological site was declared to be of national historic significance by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. The United Nations (UN) designated it an UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978.
The site remains the only widely-accepted instance of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact, and is notable for possible connections with the attempted colony of Vinland established by Leif Ericson around 1003, or more broadly with Norse exploration of the Americas.

There is a boardwalk out across this almost tundra type land to where they have re-constructed a lodge from sod and sticks next to the land where you can see the outline of the former buildings.

  

Here's Leo trying to get in touch with his inner Norseman. The metal bump in the middle of the shield protected the hand and the leather covering helped keep the shield from splitting especially when hit on the edge.

There were only a couple of women in the village who did all the cooking and making of clothes etc.  She had a tough attitude about how she kept the men in line...as I remember she carried a knife in her boot.

This fire is actually propane fed.  Originally they had real wood fires in this reconstructed building but the room filled with so much smoke and I believe caught the building on fire once, so they abandoned that plan and went with the propane.  I'll have to say that the room felt warm and cozy compared to the cold and wind outside on this day.

Imajne dealing with a clump of wool and having to build a loom with rocks and wood and start to weave cloth.  I wonder how many of us would have survived by our wits if we lived in the day.

Blacksmith building

This shows the construction of these wood and sod buildings.

 We had lunch before we went to the village at a small local restaurant near by.  There was only one other couple in the restuarant with us and these two guys walked in to have lunch.  Because there were so few people in the resaurant, it was fun to beable to chat with the guys about their job.  Unemployment is high in the area and they were happy to have this seasonal job.  This guy is a musician and spends his winters writing music and recording.

This is what the remains look like.  One of the guys at the visitor center said he remembers as a child playing on these mounds...riding his bike up and down them having no idea the historical significance of them.

A sculpture created to represent the completion of human migration on earth.  Luben Boykov and Richard Brixel created this sculpture. Boykov, a Newfoundland sculptor born in Bulgaria, and Brixel, a sculptor from Sweden, collaborated on this work, which symbolizes the end of a centuries-long journey for mankind from its point of origin east through Asia and North America and west through Asia and Europe to a new meeting place at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland.