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Published: September 7th 2015
Today we said goodbye to Eastport and made our way to Gander to drop Tim's daughter Shayna off at home before we continued on the rest of our trip.
We took a little side trip to an old outport town called Greenspond which is linked to mainland Newfoundland by a causeway. The landscape there is rugged and barren, strewn with rocks. This area was settled by people from England and is one of the oldest continuously inhabited outports in Newfoundland, having been settled in the 1690s. Its livelihood was cod fishing and an annual seal hunt in which they used guns and nets to kill the seals. The population at one time was over 2,000 but now there are less than 400 people there.
Our next stop was Lumsden which has miles of white sand beach. Judging by the tire tracks on the sand dunes, this area is used by ATV enthusiasts. The day was blustery so we cinched up our hoods against the wind as we walked what seemed like forever down to the end of the beach and back. It felt good to stretch our legs.
We stopped in Musgrave Harbour for lunch in a little
family run restaurant that had been recommended to us. The owner is from Labrador and was very friendly. She had quite an accent, just a little hard to understand. They had some baking displayed and the owner noticed us looking at the Nanaimo bars. "Those are really good", she advised us. "They're called Naomi bars". "Oh no", I corrected her. "They're called Nanaimo bars. I know because that's where we're from". She shrugged, "Well, that's what we call them". You can't argue with that, can you?
We carried on and arrived in Twillingate about an hour before sunset. We had made it to the Twillingate of our "Tofino to Twillingate Tour". We parked at the harbour and to my surprise, Tim pulled out a bottle of champagne and two glasses and we toasted our success. After six months of planning, almost 10,000 kilometres of driving, 10 provinces and not one fight, we felt thrilled to have finally arrived.
Twillingate is one of the oldest outports in Newfoundland and is located alongside Iceberg Alley, a vast corridor of ocean that runs from Greenland. It is known as the “Iceberg Capital of the World” because of the many icebergs that
flow past its shores in early spring and summer. Alas, there were no icebergs to be seen, but we'd expected this as the season for seeing them was not right. All the same, we saw its beauty in the small fishing sheds reflected in the still water, its bright wooden houses and its scenic, rugged coastline.
We only had a short time there as we still had a long drive to Gander and it was getting late, so off we went. Once there, we dropped Shayna off at her house and checked into our hotel, the first of our trip. It had been a long day but we went to bed pleased with ourselves. Not to say we were done yet. We still have many miles to go and more things to see. As Scarlett O'Hara said, "Tomorrow is another day".
(Scroll to bottom of page for more photos.)
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Chantelle
non-member comment
They ARE Naomi bars!!
That's hilarious - we were just laughing at this when we were home to NL last month, how we grew up calling them "Nie-O-mee" bars and it wasn't until I moved to the mainland that I learned other people called them (maybe correctly?!) Nanaimo Bars. Regardless, a damn good square!