This time we went another hundred miles to Bishop’s waterfalls, waiting for fun at the Salmon Festival in nearby Grand Falls. He stopped at the visitor center in Grand Falls and received information about the salmon festival, which is considered one of the top 100 festivals in North America. The festival lasts one week and is expected to be around 30,000 people. The main attraction this year is the group Great Blue Sea, as well as other popular rock bands Newfoundland. The festival has a salmon dinner for 500 people, followed by a dance, a family day and night "Newfie", dedicated to the features of Newfoundland. The cost of reception is quite high: $ 32.00 per concert, $ 25.00 for salmon lunch.
We continued to the bishop's waterfall and camped at the municipal campsite at the base of the waterfalls and hydroelectric power station. The Exploits River is known for its salmon fishing. The fisherman is allowed only four from the river. For a non-resident, a fishing license is $ 50 plus guide services. This is an expensive fishing. Rather, catch my own fish in the market.
Today we had the choice of traveling north or south. The journey south to the coast of the bays was a one-way trip of more than 150 miles. Most of the territory was mountainous and forested to the bay. On the southern coast of Newfoundland there are many different fishing villages. Natives say the area is good, but you should not travel. Instead, we took another road leading to the Leading Tickle. The name itself has changed our imagination (you notice that I did not say tickling). Tickling, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a narrow treacherous stretch of seawater, usually between rocks or cliffs entering the harbor. The real origin of the word is unknown. But either the ship was tickled from both sides by a narrow passage with rocks, or the sailors were thrown to go through this last treacherous passage to the harbor when they arrived after they were abandoned in the North Atlantic. So it turned out the name. At Leading Tickle it was fishing, and we took fresh cod fish. The fish was gutted and opened. Only bones and skin remained. Then they were collected salted and preserved. We got our fish before they were salted, nine pounds worth $ 2.50 a pound.
Because of the fresh fish, we didn’t want to linger too long on tickling. There was one short excursion that we had to do: “Glover”. In 1879, the city entered the Guinness Book of Records for the largest giant squid ever caught. This child was over fifty-five feet long and weighed over two and a half tons. His tentacle was thirty-five feet. Squid appeared to die. They are commonly found in the deep Atlantic. Their only deadly enemy is sperm. In the village there is an interpretation center that tries to depict the life of a giant squid (a species without it). Outside - a specific copy of squid in the place where it was brought to the shore more than a century ago.
The next day we went to Twyling, Iceberg Alley. We found camping at Peyton RV Resort, which serves 30 amps. The converter has switched, and we are back to business. Twillingate is located at the end of a series of islands connected by dykes. This area is known as the Iceberg Lane, but very few icebergs set off from the north this year. At the northernmost top of the island is the Long Point Lighthouse, manned by Jack May and his family. They work in an intelligent center, restaurant and gift shop. Guides show the interior of the lighthouse, which still works.
The light is fully mechanized, but the original manual rotating spinning mechanism is still working. The lighthouse keeper should have reset it by the hour. Also on site are observation stations in the North Atlantic. Today there was visibility about thirty miles. We met a lady and her son, who were waiting for their husband's return from a crab 150 miles from the sea. He called and said that he was about ten miles from the coast and along the way. Nothing has changed since ancient times, when sea-captains of the wife were waiting for their husbands to return to the tops of widows in their homes.
The water is crystal clear. You can see different streams in the ocean with different colored lines in the water. Cucumbers, gulls and other aquatic birds abound.
At Walter B. Elliott Causeway, connecting New World and Twillingate Islands, is Prime Berth, a functioning authentic fishing stage. David Boyd, the owner, has been fishing for over fifty years. It shows how the cod was made, and prepared for salting in the old traditional ways, before cooling. Everything you want to know about the fishing industry in Newfoundland can be found here. In the 1960s, he tried to persuade the government to declare an extraordinary fishing industry as a multinational trawler. They did not listen, and the cod fishing in the North Atlantic is now like a highway. The ocean floor was cleared of life, and breeding grounds were destroyed, perhaps not to be fertile again for many generations. On tour, he shows how cod liver oil soothes the waves and how fish and seagulls follow pieces of fish that he throws into the bay. When traveling to Newfoundland, this is a necessary stop.
Left Twillingate and stopped at Boyd in the bay of the archaeological center of Beotuck. The Beotuck were an aboriginal tribe of hunters and gathered that became extinct in 1829, when the last woman died in captivity. Because of her little knowledge of our tribe has been preserved. Archaeologist Dr. Ralph Pastor of St. Louis John searched Notre Dame Bay for the remnants of this society. One day he found a clearing. Not knowing what it was, he went ashore and found the possibilities of an archaeological site. After sampling, he found eleven houses, including one ceremonial. Thousands of artifacts, including stone arrows, various animal bones and iron tools.
While European fishermen were seasonal, they left home every winter and left things they didn’t need, such as iron nails, fish hooks, broken metal objects, etc. Beotuck processed these products, especially heavy iron spikes, and converted them into tools that they could use, such as spears and arrows, scrapers, etc. For more than a hundred years they lived in peace, while the French in the North and the British in the south prepared with each other. When the British began to settle around the Gulf of Notre Dame, a small tribe of Beautoka, numbering no more than a thousand members, declined and eventually became extinct, mainly due to illness.
The archaeological site is reached by a 1.6 km trail. We took Morgan. She did an excellent job and tried her best to go the whole distance. But the heat and length made it impossible, especially with the spread of annoying pirani-mosquitoes and black flies that wanted to feast in the cupboard of our bodies, even though we sprayed.
From there we started to take a loop, route 330, around Hamilton Sound. We passed through many small villages in which many inhabitants have the same last name. We decided to stay in the harbor of Musgrave. To the east were the Wadham Islands and the North, the island of Fogo.
Bunting Interpretative Center is located in Musgrave Harbor. Sir Frederick Banting, one of the co-founders of insulin, died in a plane crash here. Debris and replicas of his aircraft were found.
Climb the coast to Newton, to Venice from Newfoundland, because the city is built around nine tickles (remember them?) Connected by bridges. Here lived the Balfurov family, a thriving sailing family. Since the 1960s, they have allowed tourists to visit their estates to see how life was in those days. The family still comes and lives there for part of the year. The center consists of two houses built in the 1870s, which housed thirty people; another, the design of Queen Anne, built in 1904. Both houses have original furnishings and family memorabilia. The work of the ship Balfour was examined in a hurricane one year and ended in Scotland. He turned lemon into lemonade, bringing Calvin’s engine and marble vanities home. All hands were saved. The center plays a CBC interview with Captain Balfour, which in itself is exciting. The Center features costumed assistant professors who depict different characters in the school house, a cod stage and a replica of a ship for seals hunting. One of the buildings is also used for theater, where plays are held regularly. Newton itself is pretty scenic.
We drove a few more miles to Greenspond, another fishing village that was once the capital of this part of Newfoundland. The 1904 courthouse was restored, and costumed assistant professors give tours of the building. There is minimal parking, especially on Saturday, when each of them seems to be engaged in buying fish at a local fishing factory. This greatly influenced Baby, the trailer and our personal relationships.
Our next stop was Gander, one of the busiest airports in the world. All transatlantic flights once stopped here for refueling. Just a week ago, Concord made an emergency landing here because he didn’t have enough fuel to arrive in New York from London. London experienced a heatwave with a temperature of around 100 ° F. After refueling, the plane took off. Fuel is thickened at high altitude, not having enough to get to New York. The only plane at the airport today was the US Air Force transport.
Near the airport are the ruins of the city during the Second World War. Nothing remains except the streets and a few signs.
Not far from the city is the Memorial of the silent witness to the victims of the plane crash on December 12, 1985, from the 101st airborne army, departing from the peacekeeping mission in the Sinai Peninsula, landed in Gander. There was a crew change and fueling, but after takeoff, the ship failed and crashed, leaving no survivors. The reason is still unknown.
Another fact about Gander is their people. After September 9, when airports were closed in the United States, many aircraft that were connected to the United States landed at Gander. The people of Gander and the surrounding area arrived at the airport and invited passengers to their homes. This is really the spirit of Newfoundland hospitality.
Our next stop is Botwood, where we spent the night at the old air force airbase. Even before World War II, Botwood was an important airport. The first transatlantic flight of a commercial Clipper seaplane landed here in 1937. It was the appearance of luxury air traffic across the Atlantic. It remained until World War II, when sea planes followed the path of a horse and buggy. One PBY Catalina aircraft sits today in the harbor as a reminder of the city’s heritage. In the harbor there is an island with a dam leading to it, in which during the war there were defensive weapons.
We went to Glen Falls-Windsor and visited the Marya Marsh Museum, dedicated to one of the last members of the People of Beotuk. It was interesting, and he stressed that the search for Beothucks in the valley of the Exploits by Cartwright, Buchan, and then Peyton. By this time, the nation was dying because of the disease that Europeans had given birth to, and the many differences between the two cultures.
Behind the museum is the reconstructed village, which presents the different types of buildings used by Bottak.
Not far from here there is a logging museum, included in the cost of admission to the Mary-Marsh Museum. This is one of the highlights of our trip to Newfoundland. The museum is a reconstruction of a logging camp in the 1920s, where between forty and one hundred people cut trees for pulp wood for mills. The camps were usually used for two years before moving to another zone. Along the building where the workshops were located, the galley and the cooks, as well as on the bed, were a blacksmith and a shop. The task of the feeder was to sharpen axles and saws every day. He worked at night while the boats slept. There were several interesting names for their various equipment: washcloths, bitch-pot, ass dilator, etc. Each of them was an important element in the logging camp.
The reduction usually lasted from the last weeks in August until the fall of the snow. Logs pulled to the river bank or to the river itself, if it was frozen. When spring came, they were lowered down the river to the mill. Finally, there was a small cleaning team to find logs scattered along the river. The wage for the cutters was piece work, depending on the number of cords cut. Wages were paid to other jobs.
Today we went to the Be Wert peninsula (Green Bay) to see the mines and especially the Indian Dorset soapstone excavations at Fleur de Lys at the tip of the peninsula. Along the way we passed open asbestos mines, which were closed for several years. Mother Nature begins to accept this, creating a lake at its center.
In Fleur-de-Lys there is a heritage site of the Dorset Indians from about 6000 years ago. They pre-formed bowls, lamps, and other objects in soft rock, and then removed them from the site. The tools they used were other stones for chisels of hammers and scrapers. A soapstone that feels like soap has properties that retain heat and were used for cooking pots and for oil lamps. Talc is part of the rock. Today, very few sites of soapstone. Several hunters use them for decorative purposes.
We made a side trip to Tilt Cove. It was once a thriving city of more than two thousand people. Today it is a ghost town of five families. The area is beautiful and isolated, the bay leading to the bay of Notre Dame is surrounded by steep hills.
Today I went hiking, a beautiful sunny day. The first trail we went on was the Rattling Brook Falls trail, where water falls eight hundred feet from the mountains. It was a short trail only one kilometer long, but all up the stairs. Morgana came, but was tired because of the way.
After that, we walked a short distance to the Alexander Murray footpath, about eight kilometers long, most of which climbed to the top of a 1000 foot peak. More than 1200 stairs take you to the top. There is also a side trip to Corner Brook Falls, just 205 steps one way. Falls seem to come out of the mountain, rather than fall over the mountain. The views from the top of Green Bay are beautiful. On the way there are two more waterfalls, one of them is called Gull-Brook Falls. The hike, which was said to take only three hours, took almost five hours instead. We returned home, completely exhausted.
