Sonya's Blog - Day 91 - Driving to Trinity and Boavista

Sonya’s Blog - Day 91 - September 21st - Driving to Trinity and Bonavista Bay

Well it was pouring rain this morning in St. John’s when we woke up and I guess it had been raining hard all night. We were packing up to leave today, but not so excited about doing it in the rain. Blake had to go down to the Husky office in downtown St. John’s first and leave his phone and ipad there as he is officially on leave now. They wanted him to ship the items back, but the easiest way to do this is to go through Husky and they have an office in St. John’s so it worked out well. Peter gave Blake a lift on his way to work and then when he was all done Maureen went down and picked him up so that he wouldn’t have to fight for parking in the truck and walk in the rain. I stayed behind and started packing up our stuff and got the kids to do a bit of school work as well. When Blake got back he was able to back his truck into the garage so that all of our stuff would stay dry when we were putting it in the truck. We have a topper, so once it is closed everything will stay dry.

We left Maureen and Peter’s at about 10:30 and got on the road. We were on the highway in no time and on our way. We were going to drive and explore the Trinity/Bonavista area, which was about a 3 hour drive or so. This area is on an arm that extends out, with Trinity Bay on one side and Bonavista bay on the other. We figured we could explore that arm in one day and then stay the night in Point Blanford, which is also on Bonavista bay, but at the base of the arm. It probably would have been better to have had an earlier start, but this is how we roll. We stopped and had lunch at a diner when we filled up the truck. The diner didn’t look like much, but they had good food. For the whole drive and during lunch I worked with Isaac on math problems, grammar and vocabulary words. Natasha worked through her math and science lessons that she downloaded. There wasn’t a lot to see until we got to Trinity, so it was a good time to do a lot of school work.

We arrived in Trinity around 1 PM. It is a tiny little town, so we parked the truck and started to walk around. We headed to the pier first and stopped in at a little chocolate shop. They had lots of homemade chocolates and as soon as we stepped through the door she offered us a taste of a chocolate. Super yummy. We bought some chocolates. The funniest were the “After 8:30 Chocolates”, because everything is a 1/2 hour later in Newfoundland. We bought a few chocolates and Natasha got a liquid chocolate, hot drink. The lady that owns the store is from the Toronto area (this is where the main shop is), but she now spends 7 months of the year operating the store in Trinity. She then returns to Toronto when she closes the store down for the season. However, for about 6 weeks of that time at home she travels to Ottawa and operates a small shop off of the Rideau Canal when it freezes over and is open for ice skating. So she operates her business in 3 different places each year. We thought that was interesting and it was an interesting career lesson for the kids, you don’t necessarily have to stay in one place all year around to work. Sometimes you go where the business is. After we left the shop, we wandered around Trinity.

We headed into the Protestant graveyard and Church. It was a large wooden church and it had a rather large graveyard, with very old gravestones in it. You couldn’t read most of them due to the fact that they were very weather worn. They have headstones in the graveyard that date back to the 1700’s, now we don’t know if we saw those headstones, since we couldn’t read most of them. We then headed into the church and had a look around. It was very large and impressive, it was the 3rd church to stand on that site. The inside looked a little like a row boat (the way the rafters were built, I have put our picture in this post. We then walked down some more and saw the Catholic church. It was much smaller and had now graveyard. It was all locked up so we couldn’t go inside.

The protestants had the money in that town judging from the difference in the church sizes. They were only about a block apart and the town itself is only about 10 blocks square. We had a good walk around, we were about the only people walking around in the town. During the summer they have the Trinity Pageant, on Saturdays I believe, and they will get 100’s of people in the town to come and see that. It starts on the streets of Trinity and then ends in the Theatre and the actors tell the story of Trinity. It is supposed to be very good, but we were too late in the season to see it.

After we were done walking around we hopped back in the car and headed to Cape Bonavista. It was a very spectacular shoreline out there and we had fun walking around and checking it out. There is a large statue of John Cabot (his name was actually Giovanni Caboto as he was Italian, but we have anglicized it) at the Cape as Bonavista is celebrated as the place of John Cabot's landfall in 1497.

After getting our pictures we walked over to the lighthouse and checked out that area.

Next we headed into the town of Bonavista, which has a rich history and the largest collections of heritage buildings in the province. We drove around and had a look and then ended up at Skippers which is in The Harbour Quarters Inn and is a heritage building that was owned by J.T. Swyers. J.T. Swyers had an interesting story, going from having no money to owning many businesses in the town of Bonavista. His father died when he was 16 years old and that left him to take care of his mother and his sisters as he was the eldest boy. He only had $20 in savings, but he approached a local businessman, James Ryan, and asked for him for $20 in goods and $20 in credit so he could start his business. Mr. Ryan agreed, but decided to give him $100 in credit as he thought the young Swyers had something special. His faith in the young man paid off and Mr. Swyers went from operating a small bartering store to owning a General Store, fishery, factories, wholesale and other ventures. To this day there is still a Swyers grocery store, the Harbour Quarters Inn and a Hardware/Building supplies store. Skippers serves traditional Newfoundland meals and had a great view of the Harbour. While we were waiting for our meals they were playing the movie, The Grand Seduction ,which was filmed in the Bonavista area recently. There was no sound, but it looked really funny and we want to make sure we check it out one of these days. Our food came and we all had a scrumptious dinner. The only problems was that it was now quite late in the day and it was already getting dark out. We had over an hours drive to get to our cabin that we had booked and it is not ideal to drive in Newfoundland when it is dark due all the moose. There is one moose for every 3 people in Newfoundland, so that is quite a few.

We made it to our cabin without any moose incidents, so that was nice. We are staying at By d’ Bay Cabins and they are very homey. Unfortunately we are only staying one night so we won’t get to enjoy them too much. We head to Gros Morne National Park tomorrow.

Sonya