We returned to the campground for a morning drivers meeting including coffee and sweet rolls provided by our Wagonmasters and Tailgunners. We have a short drive today of 55 miles so the Wagonmasters arranged for us to stay at the campground until about 3PM so we could have more time in the area. Four of the RVs (including us) has to vacant our sites and park out of the way until time to leave to make room for some RVs that had reservations for tonight.
We didn't think there was much to see/do in this little village of 900 residents but we were wrong. It has a long 5000 year history and lots of beautiful locations for photographs. We drove out past the Visitors Center to Port Riche Lighthouse. We saw three caribou just beside the parking lot. We did a little beach combing and saw lots of wildflowers growing in the rocky area before returning to the Visitors Center.
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| Wild Iris |
This area has a long history of being a great fishing location and it continues today. Port au Choix is referred to as The Fishing Capital of Newfoundland. They have a modern shrimp processing plant and a large fishing fleet.
We drove up to Phillip's Archaeological Site and hiked part of the trail to the area where an ancient village was discovered. The views were great and there were lots and lots of wild flowers, especially Wild Iris. There is also a 4500 year old cemetery in the middle of town. As we were walking back to the Jeep we saw a small herd of caribou swimming in a lake but they were to far away to photograph and to get to the lake we would have had to walk through a lot of the wildflowers including the Hog Weed (bad stuff).
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| Wild Iris |
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| Hog Weed |
We went back to the motorhome for a quick snack before going back into the town to see a demonstration of baking bread in an outside stove oven. When the French fisherman came to this area many years ago they would build this style of oven to bake bread for the crew of the fishing boats. The town build a smaller version and puts on demonstration at 2PM of how it was done many years ago. Once they get the oven hot they can bake a large pan of bread in about 5 minutes and the oven will stay hot for over an hour after they remove the coals. It works like a brick oven for cooking pizza you may have seen in Italian Restaurants.
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| Salted dried Cod |
We didn't realize they were going to serve the bread to us along with choices of butter, partridgeberry jam, blueberry jam and molasses. We were each given two large buns hot right out of the stone oven and coffee or tea. Talk about tasty, yummy!! This was not part of our planned schedule but the Wagonmasters arranged for it and the tour company paid for it so it didn't cost us anything extra.
We all returned to the campground, hooked up and drove the 55 miles to St. Barbe RV park in you guessed in St. Barbe. Our Wagonmasters do an amazing job of getting 25 RVs into a campground without causing a big traffic jam on the road. We try to space ourselves out coming in but when we leave late like this and only have 55 miles to drive we tend to come in about the same time. This campground is kind of like a fenced in storage lot with power hook ups. Probably within 30 minutes we all arrived, unhooked our toads and were backed into our sites without any trouble or confusion. We are in site 5.
Mark, our Tailgunner gives a weather report at each driver's meeting. He does a great impersonation of a radio weather forecaster. Our group gets a big kick out of it. He said rain was in the forecast and about 7PM it started raining as predicted.
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