Chop Chop Billy Goat

We went to King’s Point
And Twillingate too
And wherever we went
There was plenty to do

There were cliffs so high
They scraped the clouds
And when fog came in
The horns were loud

There were ancient sea creatures
Embedded in rock
It was like a time machine
Turning back the clock

We explored the sod houses
Where the Vikings once slept
And memories of these places
Will always be kept

We played by the seashore
And explored the bays
Oh there were so many
Fantastic days

We saw clouds of capelin
Rolling in like the tide
And we met friendly people
Who took the fish to be dried

We saw adorable puffins
That were orange, black and white
And we did the puffin dance
Late into the night

There was a whale breaching
And flapping its fin
Maybe it was hunting
Juicy fish with its kin

There were towers of ice
Reaching for the sky
And little bergy bits
Drifted nearby

We will miss Newfoundland’s magic
Its wonders by the sea
But the seasons keep moving
And so must we

We spent our last night in Newfoundland at an oceanside campground named Oceanside Campground. I know, lamest name ever. But we really were right by the ocean. The beach was rock, with little cliffs and sea caves everywhere. When I was lying underneath one of the small overhangs, I noticed a fossil almost a foot long, and I showed Pa. Suddenly we started noticing fossils everywhere. There were thousands of them!

We celebrated our last night in Newfoundland by having a fire. I wanted to try starting the fire with no lighter or matches, only my flint that I that I had gotten in Vermont. After a lot of sparking I finally did it! I actually kind of panicked when the toilet paper lit, because I was so used to sparking endlessly. It was a very fun fire, even though I spent a lot of time gathering driftwood to keep the fire going. Our fire ended when it started raining and we all had to go inside. Oh, I hate rain!

The next day, we boarded the ferry going to Labrador…

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.

Our time at St. John’s was a bit gray, wet, windy, and cold so we mostly did errands. We shopped at the only Costco in the province, where they sold a local food: big tubs of salt beef! St. John’s also had one Old Navy, but no Trader Joes… does this city sound like the mega Newfoundland big city where half the population lives? Well, it is. And the population of St. John’s is about 250,000.

Despite the bad weather, we went to Cape Spear, the eastern most point in North America, and a fort called Signal Hill. We also saw the rows of brightly colored “jellybean houses” as we explored the port and downtown of St. John’s.