Day 29: L'Anse aux Meadows to Norris Point, NL
Mon Jul 8 2024
Distance covered: 422km
A visit to the first European settlement in North America on a warm and sunny day. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/4
Warm and bright to start the day, and got to L'Anse Aux Meadows when the gates opened just before 9. Walked around the visitor center and watched the intro video which framed the site as the first meeting of people that had circled the Earth since humans left Africa--the First Nations folks that came from the west across the Bering straits, and the Norse that came from the east via Greenland. Not that the two peoples ever knew this, really; that knowledge was still 1000 years away from their meeting.
Some other points in the Visitor Center were interesting: the Norse liked the butternut trees and their nuts and burls and collected them, yet they grow far south on the New Brunswick coast. Grapes don't grow nearby (maybe it was called Vinland as a promotional ploy, just like Greenland was hyped as the next great place to move?). Most curiously, when the Norse left they deliberately burned their structures around the year 1030 or so. Are there other settlements further south? Why did they decide to leave? Later I found there was maybe just 500 settlers in Greenland, and the overwintering population here was about 80, so that's a substantial investment to maintain... and might just be too costly.
It was a decent video, but as the visitor center got crowded with three or four dozen visitors on this bright clear sunny day I said "uh I'm not going to linger around for the 10am English language tour" and walked down towards the cove and the longhouse reconstructed long houses.
A costumed man and three women were inside the sod building, and I got to chatting, mainly because the man had a decent reddish beard I must say. "How do these reconstructions survive the winter, and how many men overwintered back in the day?" I asked and the response was "very well, though we've enlarged the doors from the more authentic shorter door frames so visitors don't knock their heads" and "about three ships worth--or maybe 80 men, which was a big commitment from the Greenland colony which only had 500 people in total", and then after several more volleys of history quizzing there was a short pause and he asked "what kind of motorcycle do I ride?" I told him a R1200RT and he enthusiastically shared a story of his restoration of the finest twin bike that the UK never produced: a 1980s Yamaha XT600. It was good to connect as a fellow adventurer and tinkerer--later I found his name was Kevin, but I didn't get his Viking drag name.
There really isn't must else there to see--no icebergs were passing by, nor whales--so I turned around and headed back across the strange limestone tundra plains of the peninsula. The weather was being bipolar, either 23C and sunny and kinda warm, or 15C with fog and chilly, and I took off my wool shirt and put it back on three times.
I took a small detour to Port au Choix to see caribou, maybe, and yes I did find them--there were half a dozen cars parked on the roadside gawking--then scooted back to Norris Point. Once inside the Gros Morne park boundary, the weather improved quite a bit, and the walls of the Western Brook Pond fjord were impressively sunlit from the west, looking like a little Yosemite plopped down in eastern Canada.
Then back to Sheldon's for the night. Thank you again Sheldon and Gary for your hospitality.