2016/08 Newf'land trip - Pistolet Bay |
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By the time the Apollo left we had low cloud, wind and rain so we didn’t to see much of the Strait of Belle Isle. 90 minutes later we docked at St Barbe and we were soon driving up the west coast of the Northern Peninsula.
There seemed to be a tiny village in every cove with scrubby forest and limestone barrens in between.
Every village has a cute little church and a cluster of white cottages around the shore line, obviously built long before a road came through. On our last trip I’d seen a photo of villagers lined up to take their first ride in a car for 10c each. That photo dated from 1968.
We picked up a few groceries from a little store, somebody’s front room by the look of it. At Flowers Bay we stopped to take a walk to 
see the thrombolites. Thrombolites? Yes, they are like stromatolites, but don’t have the same layered structure. Both are “living rocks”, bacteria that form colonies in salty seas, emitting most of the oxygen we now breathe, and gradually cementing sand grains into rocks. Live examples are extremely rare but by chance we’ve seen both kinds, still fizzing oxygen at Hamelin Bay and Lake Clifton in Western Australia. Fossils are much more common; these at Flowers Bay are hundreds of millions of years old. Sorry for the lengthy geology lesson but we keep stumbling over these things that we didn’t know even existed until about ten years ago.
It was cool and breezy but we were also looking for flowers, and found these rather nice gentians along the trail. The other flowers are similar to lupines but the leaves are wrong.
Between the villages, we were seeing woodpiles like in Labrador, but also small veggie plots with boards around them. There were cars parked in odd places; presumably their owners were somewhere in the bush, either fishing or hunting.
A steady drizzle set in so we gave up on exploring; we’d have to come back this way anyway. We were heading for the excavated Viking site at the tip of the peninsula and had found a nearby provincial park we could use as a base. So did a lot of others. The campground at Pistolet Bay was full but we could camp in the day-use parking area. Fine by us.
Wednesday August 10th
We had a perfect sunny morning. One of the tenters said there had been a couple of bull moose wandering around their tent just before we’d arrived the previous evening. Newfoundland had no moose until a few were introduced just over a hundred years ago and now there are over a hundred thousand, a significant hazard to night drivers.