2016/08 Newf'land trip - Terra Nova |
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We’d planned on camping at Notre Dame park but we had enough time to go on to the more interesting Terra Nova national park and 
hope that we could get in on a Saturday night. We did. The park has two large campgrounds and we found room at Malady Head.
We set out walking to find the trailheads and ended up by also walking the main trail up to Malady Head itself. The trail 
had some steps for steep sections but it was mainly rocks and roots, good exercise after driving all day. The terrain was very different from that in the west, dense forest with a carpet of bunchberries wherever the sun found a gap.
The trail ended at a platform, perched on a cliff overlooking the fingers of rock that surround the inlets of Bonavista Bay, with the Atlantic Ocean on the far horizon.
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Sunday August 14th
After the hike the rat was back chewing on my leg that night. We had a beautiful sunny morning and planned to spend 
the day in the park and its surrounds. One of the rangers had told us of a brand new trail, as yet unnamed, and we set off to find it.
It turned out to be very different, all bare rock and lichen, with few trees in the landscape. One new discovery was this Indian pipe, a 
parasitic plant, first we’ve seen on the east coast. A staircase helped us up the steep ascent. The view from the top was outstanding in all directions. We tried to find out the name of the hill but only found one young guy who thought he knew; 
Larry’s Hill.
We drove out of the park, along some of those fingers of rock and across a tiny bridge connecting them. We ran out of road at the pretty village of Salvage. We had the idea of walking the local trails, but there was nowhere to park, understandable in 
a place sometimes overwhelmed by visitors. We returned to a rocky bay we’d passed earlier and had lunch there on the beach.
We’d seen signs referring to the “relocations”. In the late 1950s, after Newfoundland had joined Canada, the government had a “Resettlement” program which pressured communities on remote islands to relocate to more accessible locations, where government services were cheaper to maintain. However, many people refused to leave their houses behind. We saw photos of these people floating their houses across these 
waters to the mainland on boats and barges.
We went back to the park to hike up Louil Hill, not a very interesting trail, but it ended with a long staircase up to the hilltop, where we 
could look down on the site of our morning hike and also got a view of Malady Head where we’d been the previous evening.
Monday August 15th
It was another beautiful morning. We were moving on to the park’s other campground as it had a laundry, but first we were making a quick stop at the visitor centre to pick some maps. The VC turned out to have a brand new laundry and a reasonably fast Wi-Fi so while Sandie washed clothes I made tea and booked our ferry trip back to the mainland. We’d be getting the ferry at Port aux Basques on the island’s southwest corner.
We caught up on e-mail and heard that Bob had been called out by our security company as the garage door had opened at about midnight. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. This was very odd as the remote had been disabled before we left. Maybe next time we’ll have to pull the fuse.