Happy Tuesday Folks!

Actually it's my Monday/Tuesday :) Back to work after an extra long weekend! 

As much as I like to complain about the weather here in Newfoundland (like today... rainnnnn, or the last two days of pea soup thick fogggggg), the beauty of this rugged land offers up some of the best scenery in the world. I know... cocky of me isn't it? ;) 

Despite having a miserable last few days weather wise, one day of stellar weather is enough to make you forget all about it! Saturday was this kind of day. 

Winds = negligible. This is huge deal considering they call this the "wind swept land". I won't deny it, trees along our coast not only grow in the most precarious of places (ie: on the side of cliffs) but they're also stumpily short and often grow sideways in the direction of the prevailing winds.

Temperature = ideal. Well ideal for a long walk/hike without dying from the heat. 20 degrees C is nearly unheard of this time of year, but it HAPPENED!

Climate = dry as a bone. No mucky puddles to be had!

So I took advantage of the wicked weather. Filled a bag with a couple bottles of water and a blanket, donned my old sneakers, hitched my dog up to her leash and off we went on a trip to Ferryland. 

As a child I can remember passing through this quaint community almost every weekend on the way to my Nan's cabin. Back then I knew it as "Fairy-land" and boy did that ever set my imagination to work. 

Newfoundland (NL) has many superstitions and the mythical fairies are just one of them.

I'm not talking about your run of the mill, whimsical, beautiful fairy here. More like your menacing, conniving, poltergeist type of fairy.  

When my mother was a child my Nan would give her breadcrumbs before she would go out over the barrens (the mossy-marshy-rocky mix you see above). The breadcrumbs were for the fairies so that if they ever wanted to "take her" (who knows were) she'd be able to give them to the fairies in exchange for her freedom. 

Now imagine telling that to a kid! I'd be scared out of my wits with fear! Perhaps this is why I'm such a homebody now ;) Who in their right mind would want to go outside with freaky fairies about????

Luckily, this perception of fairies in NL never coloured my liking for the community. It remains, as it ever was, a real life example of what NL is all about. The fishing heritage, the cultural heritage, and the iconic landscape NL has to offer. 

For whatever reason, I feel oddly connected to Ferryland. I can honestly say it's my favourite community in NL, and I have been to MANY. It's not special to me for any particular reason. It's not THE most beautiful place in the world or even the province, although it certainly has it's merits! I don't partake in the community. I don't attend church there. All I've ever done in Ferryland is take in a walk from time to time. I've probably made the trek back and forth to the lighthouse dozens of times. Each time is just as satisfying as the last no matter if it's in the thick of a fog, in the freezing ocean wind, or when the sun is splitting the rocks. 

It's just special. I can't give any other reason than that.

After getting my annual dose of Ferryland, I headed back to my family's cabin in a neighbouring community. 

Again, despite the weather for the remainder of the weekend, I had a blast. Relaxing, stitching, and making bread!!!! (Another favourite thing to do of mine).

This time it was rolls :) What's Sunday Turkey without dinner rolls!?!?

I love tying them up into neat little bundles of pure heaven! All you have to do is tear them open, toss in a little butter and there you have it... PERFECTION!

I'm always a little sad when it's time to leave. And who wouldn't be when this is right outside your door? 

You wouldn't know from this picture if it was spring or fall, but I can guarantee you, give it a couple of weeks and the juniper trees will have filled out, the birch will have sprouted a few leaves, and together with the pine, this will become a luscious landscape of green and blue.

Before I leave, I have to show you my stitchy progress! It was a productive weekend in more ways then one!

Before

After

Until next time,

Happy Stitching!

Melissa

Happy Thursday everyone!!!

I hope you're all ready for some "trick r' treating" tonight. Now that my youngest brother is not so young anymore, I get to stay home during this spooky night and await the kids who might ring our door bell. Problem being is that we live on a street with not so many houses on it... so that means not too many kids show up at the front door! And I don't blame them!!! If I were I kid I'd want to go where I can get the biggest bang for all those miles I put on my feet in the cold :) Ahhhh to be a kid again with a pillow case (or two) in hand pilfering all those houses for candy and chips hehe. 

Luckly, our door bell fortunes have increased lately due to some large new housing developments in the area and that equals MORE TRICK OR TREATERS :) What can I say? I just love seeing all the costumes that are donned this special night and handing out candy bars! 

I have it all planned out. The music, the decorations, and the PUMPKIN! Wait... the pumpkin... Well boy do I ever have a story to tell you about pumpkins. 

Usually it's tradition that my brothers and I go out and get our Halloween pumpkins at a nearby local farm. So Sunday arrives, it's nice, not too threatening on the rain side of things... although I can see some scary looking clouds in the distance... So I ring up my brothers to go get our pumpkins. We arrive... no pumpkins... disappointing. We always try to support local businesses first but I guess we'll just have to go to the grocery store... WRONG. No pumpkins at the grocery store... none in the whole metro area!!!! WHAT????? 

So there we are, all crammed into a car with our significant others, brainstorming where on earth we can find a pumpkin... on a Sunday... before everything closes. There's but one last place to try, Lester's Farm. A bit of a trek but we HAVE to have a pumpkin for Halloween! It would be like not having a tree on Christmas!

So off we go to Lester's, we arrive... A MILLION cars! Now if you're like me and think positive, the fact that there are tons of cars spilling out of the parking lot and into the street you'd think "Boy... they must be the only place left to have pumpkins. Thank God we are going to get one"... if you're a pessimist you'd probably think "CRAP! It's probably a free-for-all in there"... think Lord of the Flies...

If you're the pessimist, you were right. I walked in with hope only to see that the crates and pallets that used to hold pumpkins were practically empty, with only the saddest looking pumpkins left... the ones who've been beaten and bruised. Much like how I was feeling in that particular moment. I was totally deflated. My picturesque Sunday with my family had flown the coop. 

I all but gave up when I spot two GINORMOUS pumpkins left at the very end between what used to be pumpkins but now had their guts spilling out onto the ground. 

I make a beeline for what is now our "greenish", warped, yet perfectly funky and weird pumpkin.  

Now it's all over the news. "NO PUMPKINS!" "PUMPKIN SHORTAGE HITS THE AVALON". Literally, radio hosts are asking people to call in on how they plan to cope with this shortage and be creative and carve other things... watermelons, turnip, cantaloupe... you name it. While these substitutions are great solutions if you don't want to miss out on the tradition of craving at Halloween, they're still just not the same as getting up to your elbows in pumpkin slime. 

I know one thing for sure... From now on I'll be getting my pumpkin much earlier and will appreciated it soooooo much more :)

Lastly, I'll leave you with a couple pictures of two very curious pups... They were looking at me as if to say "Mommy, why are you taking pictures of pumpkins???". So I took the opportunity to grab a few snaps of them in the morning light on the front deck :) Now hopefully they'll sit just as well when the doorbell starts ringing!

Happy Halloween Everyone!

PS: Be sure to sign up for my giveaway! Make sure you comment on my giveaway post if you'd like to participate!!!

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

Happy Friday Everyone!

I'm so excited to continue with the story of my weekend adventure to the Bonavista Peninsula lovingly known as the Discovery Trail.

After having poked around Bonavista, myself, the boyfriend and the parents (who stayed in the hotel the evening while Phil and I battled the moths and flies out camping... lucky ducks) decided it was time to broaden our horizons a bit. LOTS TO SEE!

One of our first stops on Sunday was 'Cape Random'. A number of years back a TV mini series called Random Passage was filmed just on the outskirts of New Bonaventure (and by outskirts I mean a 10 minute walk through the woods). The series was based off a fairly famous Newfoundland book which took on the task of describing the day to day life and hardships of a particularly courageous set of people living in Newfoundland back in the 1800s.

While the location is not actually called 'Cape Random', it was the site of an old fishing outpost. The buildings you see below represent perfectly the types of buildings people lived in 200 years back on this fair island of mine. Which is really what makes this site gem for me. It's not that a national TV series was filmed here... its that this preserves a history not many get to see anymore.

As a child every Newfoundlander learns about the fisherman's life past and present, we learn about the seal hunt and how many Newfoundland women were left widows when their men simply did not come back from fishing/hunting on the Atlantic ocean. But the people who actually did the hard labour, well their buildings, their lives were never quite preserved. Sure their are traditions that still exist because of their way of life, but I've never been able to really get a feel for how these people lived and survived here. Newfoundland was not the most hospitable climate 200 years ago... and in some cases still isn't hospitable now when the snow starts falling. So when you're looking at the pictures below... think living there in the dead of winter, with snow piled up as far up the walls of the houses just to keep the wind coming through the cracks in the 'walls'. Imagine that... piling snow up the side of your house to keep the warm in... WHO KNEW?!?

View of the Village

The house in the background is the 'rich' house.

Apparently these houses wouldn't have actually had glass
windows... just shutters. 

A poorer house. The floor would have been covered
with straw to keep the dirt down.

Up to 17 people could have stayed in this 6 bed shack. Lets
just say lots of bunk buddies for body warmth on those
chilly nights.

The crevices between the logs that make up these houses would
often be stuffed with moss... which continuously needed
 replacement.

A small school house built on the side of a home. The numbers and
 letters you see are actually written on birch bark. They also would use
 individual slate pieces to practice their writing and math. My lovely
boyfriend - a teacher - loved this clearly :)

A view of the fishing wharf and traditional fish flake. Salt cod was the bread
and butter and was essentially currency 200 years ago. Everyone in
the community would have been part of the fishing/fish processing, right
from the oldest adult to the youngest child. Another interesting factoid is
that they would use evergreen bows as a layer between the filleted cod and
the wooden boards of the fish flake to allow air circulation and promote the
curing process.

The fishing wharf... also the wharf of death... soooo rickety!!! 

Our lovable true blue Newfoundlander tour guide showing us how
  the cod was processed.

See what I mean by rickety!?! These logs were more like sticks and
only 3 to 4 inchs on the round. That's the ocean and rock you see in the cracks!!!

This was a calm day in the bay... just imagine what it must have been like
 working  in that building when the seas were rough...
which they typically are.

Not much to say here... just LOVE this picture. 

 Well folks look like this is leading in a Part 3. Wayyyyy too much to share :)

I hope you've enjoyed your little virtual travel experience to Cape Random, Newfoundland!

Have a great weekend,

Melissa

Happy Thursday everyone!!!

This past weekend the boyfriend and I did some at home tourism. By at home I mean 3 hours drive one way and camping for the (long) weekend at one of Newfoundland's beautiful provincial parks. The beauty of it all was that it was so spontaneous. I was simply driving to work thinking 'what on earth am I going to do this weekend'... things have been kinda stalled on the home construction front and the weather man was calling for our best weekend of weather yet! Long weekend + beautiful weather + nothing to do = CAMPING of course. So that's where it all started.

Now I should tell you I have probably only been camping in my adult life just a handful of times. I'm not a fan of anything that buzzes, creeps or crawls in the woods so I usually just try and stay away from it all. BUT as my camping epiphany hit me all that went out the door. I was going to go camping and that was it! But where. There are about dozen or so official camp grounds about the province and I kinda wanted to branch out of the 'go-to' places that I visited most as a child (Terra Nova and Butterpot parks- don't you just love those names!!!!). After a quick conversation with a coworker and the desire not to drive too much Lockston Path Provincial Park on the Discovery Trial (aka highway) became the destination for the weekend.

Cape Bonavista Coast Line

Now, I won't bore you with too much history BUT the Discovery Trial lies on a particularly historically important peninsula in Newfoundland. The Bonavista Peninsula and the town of Bonavista marks the very discovery of the isle of Newfoundland by the British sponsored and Italian explorer Giovanni Caboto (or John Cabot as he is known here). It is said that upon arrival the ocean was simply teeming with cod, which eventually became a huge trade industry for the Brits as they colonized - somewhat unwillingly - the Island of Newfoundland. The Bonavista Peninsula was also a huge epicenter of fishery as well, evidence of which remains to this day. I hadn't been to this area since I was 10-12 years old so it was great to re-discover all the sights.

First up was Bonavista with it's picturesque fishing town vibe, the Ryan Premises and their iconic lighthouse. The wonderful thing about Bonavista is that they have really committed themselves to preserving history through their historical sites. The Ryan Premises is a perfect example of this. Mr. Ryan was (some 200 years ago) a very powerful and wealthy fishing merchant. So now the federal government has turned all the buildings he owned including his house into a story of the rise and fall of the cod fishery in Newfoundland. 

Bonavista

View from the Ryan Premises

Out-building of the Ryan Premises

The Boyfriend and I at the Bonavista Lighthouse

Bonavista Lighthouse

I should also mention that before heading back to the campsite for the night we made sure to stuff ourselves FULL with the freshest and most delicious fish and chips that this planet has to offer :) and I don't even really like fish and chips hahaha

Well folks I think that's about it for Part 1!

Lots more to tell so I think that will have to wait for my next blog post!

Until next time :)

Melissa