15: A Lyme Birthday (9/27)

Private roadsides enterprises here in northern Newfoundland fascinate me.  Without warning, there’s a beat-up fence, just a few rails, really, in which is a patch of potatoes, with maybe some carrots or turnips alongside.  There’s no “public” or “private” land; it’s all available.  Same is true for wood lots.  People cut their wood and leave it stacked, sometimes quite beautifully, right along the road, along with the boxes-on-sleds that they use to haul the wood from the forest with snowmobiles.  No one takes anyone else’s stuff.  Neat!

Spent part of the day in the ER in St. Anthony, Newfoundland, after spotting a bullseye rash last night.  This is after having spent part of last Tuesday in the ER in another small town because I thought I had a urinary tract infection.  The latter has been bothering me for more than a month, since before we began our trip, and I'd already completed three rounds of antibiotics, to no improvement.

So it turns out I most likely have Lyme disease, and today I hopefully got the right antibiotic.  We're going to continue our trip as planned.  The rash actually helped sort things out a great deal.

And it turns out they've never seen Lyme disease here before; I was quite the phenom.  Anyway, I think things are finally on the right track, all in all, a very good birthday present.

Then…the sun came out!!  The ER visit kind of cut the day, so we hung out in St. Anthony, seeing the sights and enjoying a fine lunch on a high point with stunning views.  

Allen and this husky just loved each other, and we really enjoyed seeing the shrimp boats.  Our plans to return to the point for hiking were thwarted when the entire downtown was evacuated due to a couple of chlorine barrels that had fallen from a truck and began leaking.  Instead, we headed back to Raleigh for an evening walk in the light of a stunning sunset…and no wind.  But temps couldn’t have been out of the 30’s. All in all, a memorable birthday for me.

Again, the tenacity of these plants growing in nothing but stones at water's edge is impressive.  I also loved the scarlet red runners this plant shoots out.

14: Alpine Flora and Leif Ericsson (9/26)

So we finally got some real North Atlantic weather - and the rollers in the little bay near our cabin to show for it.

Our first stop was Burnt Cape Ecological Reserve, 1,000 acres of oceanfront rock, karst topography, alpine and tundra flora, gulls and plovers, and only known spot in the world where the Burnt Cape Cinquefoil grows.  We don't know one plant from another, but they were all tiny, colorful, beautiful.

The is the park's "entrance."  Of course we were the only ones here.

And yup, Allen drove us all the way to the end of the so-called road. I was terrified we'd fall or roll off the path and not be found for months.

End of the road.  You could hardly stand up for the wind, yet crows were bobbing up and down, playing, at ocean's edge near us.

This "tree" was 2-3 feet tall, the tallest thing around by far.  Alpine flora is so....elfin-perfect.

Back to civilization...whew!  These would be snow crab pots, and the boats below that use them.  They're HUGE!

Still no real moose sighting, just a new sign to taunt Allen.

At Newfoundland's northernmost point, L'anse aux Meadows is the confirmed site where Leif Ericsson and party first set foot in North America around 1,000 A.D.  Today it is another of the stellar UNESCO World Heritage Sites. I'm sheltered from the wind by the statue of the Norwegian archeologists who showed up here in the 1960's, asked locals about mounds or hills, and were shown to the "old Indian camp." With little effort, the Ingstads quickly realized they'd found a Norse settlement - neat story.

An intrepid park ranger leads our hearty band of crazies from the visitors center to the recreated camp site.  Wind, rain, wind, rain, cold, cold, cold.

But hey, we got to stand in Leif Ericsson's bedroom!

The camp has been stunningly recreated, and re-enactors who know the answer to any question you can imagine are waiting for us.  Indoor "fire pits" were gas-fired and the most welcome sight of our entire day.  Unlike U.S. museums, you can touch, try on, heft, and/or work anything you see.

Allen and Ragnar got in some really good conversations, and Allen came away with a new reading list of Norse epics.

Our hosts, Marina and Ted, provided a home-made local fish dinner for us and some of their friends, one of whom was a North Carolina girl whose daughter is attending UNC.  The evening turned into a really fun party, we only had to blow across the street to go home, and we made some great new friends.

13: To Burnt Cape (9/25)

The road north from Gros Morne is named the Viking Highway, and it's easy to imagine the Norse boats coming ashore at many places.  The road is just at the coastline much of the way, and to the east, scenery and fall colors abound.

Our geology stop on the trip was at Arches Provincial Park, aptly named.

That would be Allen in silhouette.

Our day's destination was Raleigh, a small fishing village on Burnt Cape, at the northernmost portion of Newfoundland.  Our "good" weather was gone, replaced by the 40's, both temps and winds, plus fog. 

We arrived at Burnt Cape Cabins to find our luxurious (real beds! a bathroom! washer and dryer! heat!) cabin wasn't ready due to some miscommunication.  We were immediately put in an adjacent cabin, comfy, warm, to wait for ours to be ready, then our hosts offered to cook dinner for us, our choice of Newfoundland cuisine.  Allen chose moose tenderloin, culled from a moose the owner's dad killed the week before (one moose per year per license is the limit), prepared like a Philly cheesesteak. I got freshly made salmon/cod chowder, and both were simply wonderful.  Marina and Ted sat down with us to chat and entertain, and it all made for a wonderful evening.  And at the end of it....clean clothes!!

Marina's mom knits socks for sale - $15 a pair; I bought five pairs, one for me, below, in Finnish flag colors, and four for friends.  Thanks to my mom, I know how much skill and time goes into making a single pair, and these are waaaay underpriced.

12: Green Point, Gros Morne: Cambrian/Ordovician exposé (9/24)

We were in awe. Green Point, in Gros Morne National Park, is one of the few places on earth where the Cambrian and Ordovician rock boundary is easily seen, and confirmed via carbon dating and fossils present.

"In 2000, the cliffs at Green Point were approved as the Global Stratotype Section and Point for the base of the Ordovician system by the International Union of Geological Sciences. The boundary is a section 60m thick composed of layers of shale and limestone with overturned beds dipping 60-70 degrees to the South East. It is marked by the first appearance of Iapetognathus fluctivagus, a conodont fossil, 4.8m below the earliest known planktic graptolite fossil, Rhabdinopora praeparabola.

The shales represent a 30 million year record of deep-ocean sediments laid in a base-of-slope environment in the Iapetus Ocean. The limestone layers indicate periodic avalanches from the shallower waters. Portions of the same limestone avalanches that came rest to further up the coastal slopes are featured at Cow Head. There, the individual rocks in the limestone conglomerate are much larger."

Look straight across the cove and you can see where the two period sidle up to each other.

I don't know what makes these rocks do this wavy thing, but am going to find out.