We had an amazing time at Gros Morne National Park. The weather was good, there weren’t too many people, and the berries were ripe. In fact, there were so many berries that one day Little Kid and I got out pails and went picking. I got pretty tired of eating berries after I ate about forty of them, so Little Kid and I made jam together. It was delicious!

On one day, we went to the Tablelands, a huge mountain made of the earth’s mantle. We walked around the base, the barren yellow mountains towering over us. At the end of the trail, there was a beautiful brook that led up to a snowfield at the top of the mountain. It was a snowmelt stream, but that didn’t keep Little Kid and I from swimming in it. After hopping around from rock to rock for a while, Little Kid and I persuaded Ma and Pa to have lunch on a rock in the middle of the stream.

Another day, we did a short hike that brought us to a dock that a boat ride left from. We had an awesome time on the boat, even though it was a bit crowded. The lake was very narrow, we were less than one hundred feet from the giant cliffs that loomed over us. We heard stories of huge landslides when chunks of rock came flying down, and I had no trouble imagining the cliff breaking apart and crumbling into the clear water. There were lines of striped rock where rocks had fallen off, and other sections of rock that looked like they were about to fall down the 2000 foot cliff. It was so amazing!

We spent almost six hours driving up to L’Anse aux Meadows, at the northern tip of Newfoundland, but the drive was worth it. On our first day we went hiking on a little point of land. There were no plants, except for in the weird craters that were filled with shrubs. Even though there was not much life on land, there was plenty in the water. When we hiked to a huge beautiful sea cave, we saw a ton of whales out on the ocean slapping their tails and fins. It was so cool! It sounded like a huge drum beating. Then we saw what the whales were after: a huge school of capelin, a small fish that whales eat, was near shore. Man, I wish I had brought my net! Another day, we saw a whale jumping completely out of the water.

We would have been happy to watch the whales every day, but we decided that we had to go to L’Anse aux Meadows park, which is what we had driven to the Northern Peninsula for. L’Anse aux Meadows was a Viking settlement in the 1000s. Yes, you heard me right. Vikings were the first Europeans on North America. There was a reconstructed Viking house, and Little Kid and I had fun dressing up in Viking clothes and trying to hold a sword and shield.

One day, we were hiking along a road in a town named Goose Cove when some people named Gordon and Mary invited us into their house for tea. After chatting for awhile, they gave us a tour of the small house where Gordon had grown up with ten other kids. The ceilings were very low: they used to entertain themselves by trying to kick the beams. The bedrooms on the second floor had even lower ceilings. They were so short that Pa couldn’t stand up in them. Gordon was 63, and he told us that when he was a kid they had no roads, no electricity, and used a dog sled to get around in the winter. They also had an accordion that Little Kid and I got to play.