On the Discovery Trail (Part 3)

Happy Monday!

Welcome to my last post on my trip to the Bonavista Peninsula! HURRAY. It was never my intent to have 3 whole posts dedicated to this trip but what could I do?!?! There was so much to share that I felt all the little places I visited deserved their own post :) The scary part is that hopefully we'll be going back their before the end of the summer to see Trinity and the Trinity Pageant... one thing that was on our wishlist that we just did not get around to seeing.

On our final day, the boyfriend and I spent a good bit of the morning taking down the tent. By the time we were finished I was toast... luckily I was thinking that morning and had planned to take a shower AFTER all the hard work was done.

Our campsite was so beautiful, I was actually so sad to leave. But I'm committed to going back there at some point VERY soon. 

By mid morning we were all packed up and on our way to our last stop - Elliston. The road to Elliston, while beautiful... was barely that... a road. I felt like our car was in a slalom race as we swerved about the road to miss potholes and gaps in the road that I am sure could have swallowed our car whole. This is one of the pitfalls of having such a dispersed population, there are little tiny communities of just a couple hundred people scattered all along the coastline. Some communities have disappeared overtime, but plenty (some say more than 1000) little nooks and crannies still exist today and naturally all the roads are inland. This means tons of access roads stretching kilometres all to reach just a 100 people or so in most cases... needless to say the economics of patch and repair are severely challenged. So the road to Elliston remains as rough and rugged as the land of our province.

But in the end it was all worth it - as I truly feel I had probably the best experience of the whole trip. 

Elliston is known as the root cellar capital of the world. Settled in the early 1800's, it likely resembled the small fishing community that you saw in my last post about Cape Random. Today the town is littered with what is know as the Salt Box house, which was the typical house you can still see throughout Newfoundland today. 

Not quite a Salt Box house but still pretty typical of NL.

As I previously mentioned, Elliston is known as the root cellar capital of world! Now I realize you might not know what a root cellar is, although I'm sure some British readers or history buffs might know :) Root cellars are basically semi submerged ground cellars where food was stored. In the winter it would keep your roots (aka: veggies!) from freezing and spoiling and would keep the food cool in the summer time. While root cellars were used throughout Newfoundland for food preservation (I can still remember my Nan talking about her cellar), many of them have disappeared over time, replaced by the new-fangled contraption the Refrigerator  It just so happens that Elliston is like the root cellar graveyard. Well actually some are still in use today like the ones below! 



Le Boyfriend :)



Moi!

Looks can be deceiving can't they. Some are very small and others a little bigger. But they all look like they would be dirty holes in the ground. NOT SO! Inside the walls and ceiling are all rocked in and the ground has been walked on so many times that is now hard packed. Looking at these pictures does however make me wonder how and where they got all those huge rocks!!!

The other thing Elliston is famous for is their Puffin Colony. Now if you know anything about Newfoundland you know we love our provincial symbols. We have the Newfoundland Dog as our Provincial Dog, we have the Pitcher Plant as our Provincial Plant and we have the Puffin as our Provincial Bird. Puffins are sea birds and for the longest time I thought they were what you'd call a bigger bird... partly because our hockey team's mascot was Buddy the Puffin and in my eyes he was HUGE... ahhh thank you childhood for the misconception. In fact Puffins are the sweetest, cutest, tiniest little bird ever. The white of their breast looks like it's made of marshmallows and their beaks look as if they must be a relative if Toucan Sam except on an idity-biddy scale. 

The boyfriend and I sat and watched these birds for probably an hour... and a few of them were even brave enough to get within 10ft of us!!! Life long dream REALIZED!

Mom or Dad Puffin watching his nest (hole under the tree root to the left
 of the picture).



Puffins!



Cute attack!



A Puffin Par-tay!



Mr. Puffin with the head of dandelion seed!!!

Well I think I'll leave it at that folks!

I hope you've all enjoyed my last few posts!!!!

Melissa