Gros Morne

Yesterday was a spectacular sunny day which was perfect for our prebooked tour of West Brook Pond. In Nfld they call all of their lakes ponds which is cute. I always think of a pond as being small like what the call on the prairies a slough however all fresh water is called a pond. West Brook Pond is not just any pond. 10000 years ago it was connected to the ocean and would have been called a fjord. It now is separated by 3 km of land from the ocean and is a freshwater lake. On a sunny day it was spectacular. Cliffs of granite rising vertically from the water up to 800 meters above the lake. That's higher than the CN tower. It was as impressive as any of the fjords we saw in Norway. The one crew member was also a singer so for the last 15 minutes of the trip he performed Nfdl folk songs. It was a lot of fun.

Now the real excitement on the trip began as we were landing. A caffufle started on the foredeck beyond our scope of vision as we were on the upper deck. I could tell something was wrong when someone ran up to the captain on the upper deck and told him something. A minute later the female crew person came up onto the deck holding her left hand wailing in pain announcing that she had lost her left thumb overboard at the time of landing. Normally in such situations I hold back. My first aid skills are poor and I don't function well in emergency situations. I have always felt guilty about this but this is the reality. They were in the process of landing the boat so the other crew person and captain were involved in these tasks. Cheryl however jumped up and helped the woman. I asked the crew member where the finger was but she said it had gone overboard. She was holding the thumb so I never saw it. We escorted the woman off the ship mainly Cheryl by holding the woman at the waist. One can't walk up and down steps without a hand to hold onto a railing. Physiotherapists know how to do this. The captain had radioed the office so when we got to the end of the dock a staff member told us they had called an ambulance but the staff didn't seem to know what to do. The boat tour left 3 km from the parking lot on a gravel road. They had golf carts to drive frailer people back and forth so I encouraged the staff to drive her to the trailhead to meet the ambulance. In hindsight, the wound wasn't really bleeding so they could have driven her to the nearest hospital. Wait times for ambulances in rural Canada can be very long. By the time we got to the car park 40 minutes later the staff member was gone and I suspect they had just driven her to the hospital. No one thanked us for mainly Cheryl's help. We were a little traumatized afterwards. I can't believe that Bon Tours who operate the tours are not better equipped to handle such medical emergencies as a large volume of tourists partake in this activity. I would like to think that they would have been more helpful to a guest and they were taken back as it was a staff member involved but I guess that I will never know

We headed north to Cow Head another community in the park where there was a Lobster festival. To have called it a lobster festival was an over statement. The Anglican Church was putting on a lobster lunch/dinner. After losing but finding Cheryl's purse yesterday we decided to revert to what we do in Europe and other places. We would travel with our phones which have a credit card loaded on them, our licenses and a little cash. That way one reduces the risk of losing everything at once from one's wallet. The church lunch however was cash only and between us we only had 40 dollars which wasn't enough to pay for the lunch. We had packed our lunches as the details on the lobster festival had been weak so we ate in the church garden looking out at the ocean or probably better described as the Gulf of St. Lawrence and fed a very pesky seagull.

We had enough energy for a short hike so headed out to the Cow Head lighthouse on an island off Cow Head for a short jaunt before calling it a day.

Today was a rain day. It was foggy and drizzled all day long. It has been the first rain day of the whole trip so we have been quite fortunate. Newfoundland is known for being a wet rainy place. We headed out and did a several km out and back Coastal trail hike. We won't be experiencing the coast after our return to Edmonton. It was pretty in a foggy drizzly day. We saw innumerable American toads along the trail. They were quite comical to watch hopping off the trails. We were quite wet after our hike so headed back to our Airbnb for a change of clothing and rest. There was an aquarium advertised at Norris Point. My experience with aquariums is that often smaller is better and it is very dependent on the staff to explain the exhibits. This small aquarium was associated with Memorial University and had 4 enthusiastic summer interns working. They had displays of many aquatic animals and fish and the interns were very happy explaining everything to us. Some of my favorites were the wolf fish, the sea crabs and of course lobster McDavid a 97 year old 12 pound lobster. He was huge. It was a great experience.

We had planned another walk in the evening but by then it was raining too hard and we played a game of Scrabble and Cheryl won.Read more