OK, Folks...The most exciting adventure of this trip was a whale watch in a small boat and just enjoy the pictures that we were able to get!!! This last stop has been the most beautiful and I'll include a few pictures of our view. Really special,. We leave here on Saturday morning, the 12th, and will be back in Richmond on the 27th. Go to my picasa link that I sent in the last blog and see more of these pictures. It will be the album called "Whales." [View Full Entry]

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June 27 continued, Icebergs and Dr. Grenfell Visiting L'Anse aux Meadows fulfilled a long time dream for me, but the day wasn't over. Just minutes down the road, we saw icebergs! Mark, our guide, noted that it may take them three years to travel here from Greenland. Now if the puffins would just show up, my check list would be complete. Actually, we were about a week too early as the puffins aren't coming in to nest yet. Once we reached St. Anthony we visited the Grenfell Museum and learned about the work of medical missionary Dr. Wilfred Grenfell. Born [View Full Entry]

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June 28 St. Anthony to Corner Brook How can it be the last day? We're all sad that this great trip is ending. The day starts with seeing 15 moose in the first hour out of St. Anthony - did our guide somehow stage this finale? We even watched a cow with her calf and saw a fairly big bull plus lots of yearlings. We stopped at Port aux Choix, a national historic site whose web site explains its importance. "For over 5500 years, this small peninsula on Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula has been the crossroads of various native North American [View Full Entry]

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Whales June 25, Point Amour and June 26, Red Bay and Point Amour Harold's new Canon Rebel got quite a work out on the trip. The result is many wonderful closeups impossible without a good zoom lens. Point Amour is known as a great whale watching spot and we saw several in the rain on June 25. To our utter delight and great good luck, by the next day, the capelin had arrived and the whales were in a feeding frenzy thanks to these little morsels that they eat by the millions. You could actually see a dark circle in water [View Full Entry]

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June 27, 2008 L'Anse aux Meadows - Only Viking Site in North America We've got an exciting day ahead of us, and I don't even mind the 6:40 AM departure time to catch the morning ferry back to St. Barbe, because I know it's followed by our drive north to L'Anse aux Meadows (LAM), my prime reason for making this trip. Most of highway 430 is designated the Viking Trail, good for marketing, but also because the Vikings probably explored a great deal of the area along the Gulf of St. Lawrence as well as much of Newfoundland. My Dad, [View Full Entry]

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June 25, 2008 Ferry to Labrador, Visiting Point Amour We drove north 120 miles to St. Barbe, had a quick lunch and proceeded to the ferry for our 90 minute crossing of the Strait of Belle Isle. It was a cold windy day so while the hardier souls, Harold, the Peters 2 and guide Mark headed to the outside decks, Marilyn and I chose the warm lounge with it's big pictures windows across the entire front of the ferry. I ventured outside when Mark rushed in to announce a whale sighting, and I made it out just in time to experience [View Full Entry]

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June 26, 2008 Whaling in Red Bay - Hunting and Watching Our first stop as we explored southern Labrador was the Pinware River, an exception place for trout fishing, plus salmon is abundant here. We learned about whale hunting when we arrived at the village of Red Bay. Today it’s population is 211, but in the early 1500s, when Boston and New York were still wilderness, this part of the Labrador coast had a population of 1500. The lucrative whale hunting industry brought Basque fishermen here by the ship load. Their targets were the right whale and the bowhead whale [View Full Entry]

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We came to the St. John's area on Sunday and have really enjoyed it. It is built on the sides of mountains and the houses are kind of "stacked" up. The historic downtown area is pretty cool but Bob and I both felt it wasn't a very clean city...lots of graffiti and crazy looking kids (like Picadilly Square in London) around. You can go up to Signal Hill and that is where the first trans-Atlantic signal was heard in 1904, I think. Anyway, we stayed there for 3 days and the last day was the BEST!! We had so much rain [View Full Entry]

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Afternoon, June 23, 2008 The skies continued to darken and the drizzle began as we reached Western Brook Pond, our afternoon destination. Ahead of us was a 2 ½-hour boat ride on the pond; just one catch, there is a 2-mile walk before you reach the boat. Drizzle turned to rain, fog moved in and around the mountains, but we bravely marched off anyway. The trail was good, either wood chips or a board walk over the bogs; a few hills, fairly gentle; however, by the time we reached the boat launch, we were extremely wet and some of us, including [View Full Entry]

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June 24, 2008 Today our destination is Tablelands. First we visited the new interpretive center in Gros Morne and then drove through south and west along highway 431. What a contrast! The north side of the road was lush and green with gently rolling hills, plenty of trees. The south side was rocky, barren and flat. Scientists think that this area originated in the earth's mantle and was forced up from the depths of an ocean during a plate collision several hundred million years ago. The rock, peridotite lacks the usual nutrients required to sustain most plant life. It’s very low [View Full Entry]

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