Friday 19 July - L'Anse au Clair to St. Anthony

This ferry-crossing business is rather stressful. Once again, we were booked for an 8 am crossing, so had to check in by 7am. This time, though, our motel was just 10 minutes down the road and the weather was clear. However, we found a scene of chaos at the terminal. Most of the  milling crowd seemed to be locals or regular truck drivers. They knew a bit about how it worked, but generally were as confused as we were. The ferry apparently was still in St. Barbe and our departure delayed by 1 - 2 hours. After parking more or less randomly, and lining up at the office for about 30 minutes we got our pass and were sent to park properly in a designated lane. Good thing we had books and puzzles handy. Eventually the ferry arrived, the long unloading and loading process was completed and we were on our way around 9:30. Today, where we saw the iceberg yesterday, we saw two. Yesterday's seemed like it had shrunk; the other one was lower and less-interesting.
Once off the ferry, we headed directly to L'Anse aux Meadows, the Viking site. It's at the northern tip of the western peninsula, so quite a drive. Much of it is along the coast, and we got another look at "our" two icebergs from a closer and different perspective. Once at our destination, we enjoyed a tailgate picnic and joined a guided walk around the site.

The history of this site and its discovery is fascinating. Parks Canada has done itself proud here. Our guide grew up in the neighbourhood and had lots of good yarns about the excavation process. We were reminded of some of the sites we visited 2 years ago on our Iceland cruise. There's a theme here of "closing the circle": As humans migrated north out of Africa, some groups moved westward and populated Europe, while others moved eastward and populated first, Asia, then crossed the land bridge to the Americas. When the Vikings and the aboriginal North Americans came in contact, humans had encircled the globe, in a record-breaking 90-100,000 years.

We checked into the Haven Inn in St. Anthony, had cocktails in our room and a very nice dinner in the dining room. It was a long, chilly, cloudy day with lots of walking at L'Anse aux Meadows, so we're ready for an early night.
[ Sorry pictures have taken so long.  One thing in NL is that hotel/motel wifi is abysmal. Worse that a cruise ship.  To get these up I have resorted to using my cell as an internet access point. LH ]

Photos of the Day
allow 5 sec to load