Bonavista Peninsula!

Sept 15, 2019

Today our goal is to travel to the Bonavista Peninsula. One of the things that I am looking forward to is seeing the puffins.  One of the areas that is a popular puffin watching place is Elliston point.  We decided to pull our little trailer up there and then find a place to camp tonight on the way back. That way we would have a short drive into St. John’s tomorrow. After breakfast and a shower we were off.

We toured the shoreline and suffered through the bumpy roads. We got to Elliston by 12:00 and parked in a small parking lot near the end of the point.  Elliston was at one time a thriving fishing village until the closing of the cod fishery. It is making a comeback with tourism. Many of the tourist attractions are developed by the municipality. A large granite memorial is erected commemorating the deaths of 364 seal hunters during the 1914 sealing disaster. A bronze statue is also built showing a father holding his teenage son who is freezing to death. The father and son were locals from Elliston who had died on the ice floes. Debbie and I then hiked the 2 km trail into the puffin viewing site. 

This point of land is the headlands of the peninsula and is rugged and wild.  The Atlantic is crashing against the craggy shores and there are several small rock islands along the shores.  The puffins have built their nests into the grasslands on top of these small islands. Unfortunately there were no puffins. It is late in the season, however the local guide did assure us that there are puffins still here, but they are not in their nests today.  That was a disappointment, however there are some other places south of here that we will visit that also have the puffin nesting areas.  Puffins build their nest in the soil and lay one egg per year. They return every year in the spring after wintering in the northern Atlantic states.  They often return to the same nests.

We talked to Mark, the local guide, who explained and showed us some of the berries that grow on the hills and rocks in the area.  Debbie was interested in picking some partridge berries that thrived in the grasslands along the road. Mark told her that she has to wait until after the first frost. He showed us a berry with a small worm inside. After the first frost, the worm leaves the berry and then the berry can be picked. That changed Debbie’s mind for any more berry picking. We also looked at several of the root cellars that had been built into the hillsides all along the rocky coastline. There are about 130 of these root cellars dug into the hilsides.  Some of these root cellars, which are still being used to store vegetables etc., are over 100 years old.

We then drove to the tip of the Bonavista Peninsula.  The Cape Bonavista lighthouse that is built on this point is now a historic site, and was built on the rocks in 1843. Again, this lighthouse museum featured the lifestyle of the lighthouse keeper who looked after the light until he was 88 yrs old.  The next three generations of his family continued to maintain this lighthouse. This point is also a historic site because it reportedly is the landing site for John Cabot in 1497. A statute of John Cabot is erected there.  

We stopped in at a small restaurant near the lighthouse and had an early supper.  Then we drove back down the peninsula until it started to get dark and stopped into Clarenville.  We chose a small park on the edge of the shore, in town and boondocked for the night.  We hope that no one will chase us out tonight.