Playtime

A little girl playing on the rocky beach in Woody Point. Look at how clear the water is!

Boats

I'm surprised by how many pictures I took in Woody Point. We were only there a couple of hours, in crappy weather, but it was ridiculously photogenic.

Sunday bird blogging

        Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy,
        and all the tricks my body knows—
        the opposable thumbs, the kneecaps,
        and the mind clicking and clicking—    

       don't seem enough to carry me through this world
       and I think: how I would like 

       to have wings

-- Mary Oliver

If this gannet had just dipped a little to the left this would be a much better picture. On the other hand, you can actually tell that it is a gannet -- golden head, clear eye -- which is not always the case with my attempts to catch birds in flight.

Bonus reflections

A little artsy, but I can't resist that yellow pole sticking out of the water -- still in Woody Point.

View from the lighthouse

Looking out over Bonne Bay.

The lighthouse at Woody Point

Woody Point is the location of the Discovery Centre for Gros Morne National Park, and incidentally contained one of my favorite lighthouses on the trip.

Norris Point

This little town is outside the national park; we took a water taxi from here across Bonne Bay (which I kept hearing as “Bombay”) to Woody Point.

I love the pop of that yellow building against the gray skies.

Saturday reflections

Nautical reflections in Woody Point.

Pissing Mare Falls

This waterfall is more than 1100 feet above the freshwater fjord Western Brook Pond in Gros Morne National Park.

I hadn't actually processed most of the Gros Morne pictures yet, so posting will take a couple of days. I have been cursing The Good Place all day because I have the 1-877-Karz-4-Kids jingle running through my brain on an infinite loop. On the other hand, making that truly hellish bit of music the anthem for the demons in the Bad Place was such a stroke of genius I really can't complain.

Whales in King's Point

Two last pictures from King's Point, before moving on to the west coast of Newfoundland: a sculpture by the water, and a distant glimpse of a minke whale in the harbor.

View from the beach

Cookout on the beach

I passed on the grilled capelin, small fish similar to herring; I was still full from one of the big lunches we ate almost every day. Somehow I managed to find room for one of the tarts made from partridgeberry jam cooked over the fire when the fish was done.

A perfect afternoon

Another look at the beautiful cemetery in Twillingate, and the rocky beach below, where we had a cookout.

Tools of the trade

The art of boat building

This is Tony, master boatbuilder at the Wooden Boat Builder Museum in Twillingate. He uses traditional methods to build one boat each season, and gives demonstrations to visitors.

That those wooden planks can be made into something seaworthy when I can't squeeze my fingers together tightly enough to keep a handful of water from leaking away fascinated me. Boatbuilding is an art as well as a craft -- the woods for those ribs are selected so the grain arcs into the right shape; the long planks are planed into perfect curves. And hemp soaked in tar is jammed into every crevice and somehow that makes it watertight.

The masterpieces Tony creates are raffled off to benefit the museum. I was so impressed and inspired that I almost bought a ticket, but realized there was no way I could get that boat up the stairs to my apartment.

Views from Long Point Lighthouse

Today's lighthouse

This is the Long Point Lighthouse near Twillingate. We drove out there after dinner one night to see the sunset. As you might predict from seeing those trees, the winds on the point were quite enthusiastic and it was freezing.

We also saw a bald eagle swooping low overhead, and a silver fox running across the road in front of the bus (I did see the fox, unlike that alleged moose.)

Astronomy Tuesday

Nothing makes me happier than finding a new Cassini image of Saturn.

This picture shows a view we can never get from Earth: the planet backlit by the Sun. It was taken two days before Cassini's final death plunge into the planet's atmosphere in 2017.

Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Space Science Institute, Mindaugas Macijauskas

More of the spirit garden

Spirit garden

Boyd's Cove is the site of a museum dedicated to the Beothuk,  one of the indigenous peoples of Newfoundland. The remains of a Beothuk encampment nearby was excavated in the 1980's.

Shanawdithit, the last known Beothuk, died in 1829. Because they avoided contact with Europeans, very little is known about their culture. They lived on caribou, fish and seal; they used red ochre to paint their bodies, houses, boats and weapons, and the Europeans called them red Indians, the origin of the pejorative redskin; they pilfered metal from the Europeans and turned nails into scrapers and arrowheads. As European settlement in Newfoundland grew, they were driven inland away from their food sources; those who didn't die of smallpox or tuberculosis starved.

Outside the museum, there's a wonderful spirit garden on the tree-covered slopes running down to the cove. You can make your own blessing from shells, pinecones, feathers and other natural materials and hang it on one of the trees.

Happy first day of fall

Before summer disappears in the rear view mirror, here's a picture from a perfect sunny afternoon in Boyd's Cove.

Another beautiful cemetery

This one is in Elliston.

Sunday bird blogging

A few more puffins -- two of them peering out of their burrows, while a third attempts to demonstrate that he can too fly.

More houses in Elliston

These houses were near the cliff trail out to the puffins.

Saturday reflections

Surprisingly, some of my favorite pictures from Newfoundland are from gloomy days like this one. I always think oh, this would be so much more beautiful if the sun were out, but this view in King's Point? I don't think so.

It's perfect.

Bonus bird blogging

One of the Elliston puffins.

We probably got closer to them in Witless Bay, but this time the sun was out. And I wasn't holding on for dear life on slippery decks in rough waters.

Cliff walk in Elliston

More pictures from the walk. Out at the far end of the cliffs, there was an island with -- puffins!

And yet more beautiful coastline

Also in Elliston.

Yesterday when I was out doing errands it was sunny and warm, but just breezy enough to be on that cusp between enjoying the air on my bare arms and thinking that a sweater might be nice. Fall is coming.

And a year ago, I was in the cardiac unit at Mount Sinai with my African mystery illness. I am still not 100%, maybe never will be, but considering how long it took me to work up to being able to walk around the block, I'm very grateful to be able to travel again.

I wouldn't have wanted to miss hiking along these cliffs.

The Root Cellar Capital of the World

Yes, there is such a thing and I have been there! Elliston has 135 documented root cellars, some of which are almost 200 years old. In a region where growing anything was hard, root cellars allowed the precious crops to be stored through the long winters.

The two root cellars above are in Elliston, but my favorite is the one on the left, in Twillingate. It looks like a hobbit hole.

Random building break

This is completely out of sequence, but I found it in the latest batch of photos from Gros Morne National Park that I was processing today. I do love lonely buildings on the water, and Newfoundland has so many.

Two more looks at Terra Nova National Park