2016/08 Newf'land trip - L'Anse aux Meadows |
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We drove to L’Anse aux Meadows at the northern end of the peninsula, paid our fees, bypassed the museum, and joined a tour already in 
progress outside. Our guide, a hairy archeologist, insisted that the people who came to this land back around 1000 AD should be called Norsemen rather than Vikings, a subset who specialized in pillaging the rest of Europe. However, we were driving on the “Viking Trail” and everyone else refers to them as Vikings.
These Norsemen are believed to be Lief Erickson’s people who came here from Greenland. A Newfoundlander, studying the Norse 
sagas and the local geography had predicted to within 10K where the camp was likely to be but a Norwegian couple actually located it in 1960. Since then archeologists have found evidence of iron smelting, buildings, forges, and a boat repair workshop.
Based on what they’ve found, the belief is that it was not a settlement but a base camp used for foraging expeditions 
into what they called “Vinland”, possibly the St Lawrence estuary and New Brunswick. Supplies like wood and iron were taken back to their home in Greenland. There were probably women among the group but this wasn’t a place where families lived. Eventually Greenland became too cold and the settlement there was abandoned.
We walked through meadows where we could see the outlines of buildings, reburied to preserve them. Further on at the edge of the bay were reconstructions of the buildings they’d found. They had thick sod walls, timber rafters, and an actively growing sod roof. Costumed interpreters told the stories.
We spotted a trail going around the bay and that kept us busy for a while. We had a good view of the site from the water. Across the bay we could see the wreck of an iron ship, balanced on the rocks of Sacred Island. The Strait of Belle Isle is only ten miles wide at this point and littered with reefs and islands, and complicated by gales, fogs, and fast currents as well as the occasional iceberg, so the coast is littered with wrecks.
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Northern Peninsula Flowers |
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Further around we came to a boggy area and all the strange plants that thrive there. Soils are low on nutrients so insectivorous plants do best. 
Most obvious were the pitcher plants, Newfoundland’s provincial flower, but we knew there’d be sundews as well, and we found some tiny examples. Pitcher plants just drown the bugs in their pitchers (not visible under the greenery) but sundews are sticky and their leaves wrap around the bugs and then digest them.
The trail took us back to the parking lot so after lunch we went back to the museum to watch the movies and look at what the archeologists had dug up: mostly tools and weapons.
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L'Anse aux Meadows |
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Back in town was the commercial Norstead Viking Village, but we were about Viking’d out by this time. Instead we drove over to the east coast to the town of St Anthony to see if the local Timmy’s (Tim Horton’s) had the lobster rolls that were so popular on our ’97 trip to Nova Scotia. They didn’t but St Anthony is a largish town with a supermarket so we stocked up on food instead.
On the edge of town we walked the trail out to a whale watching platform, a scenic spot but no whales. It was very breezy but still warm, tee shirt weather.
In the far distance we spotted something large and white. We drove over in that direction to St Anthony Bight and walked down to the shore and there was an iceberg, stranded by the low tide. There were berg fragments along the tide line, frozen fresh water, possibly thousands of years old.
A “bight” is a wide-entranced bay, the opposite of a cove. The only other bight I can remember is the Great Australian one which is certainly bightier than St Anthony’s.
We went back to Pistolet Bay, even fuller now so there were more of us in the parking lot this time.