Day 11 - 12 Sep - Deer Lake to Port aux Basques, Nfld

Our last day in Newfoundland was a beauty...sunny skies and warm temperatures. We've enjoyed having the roads virtually to ourselves although there were still a few RVs heading north...but not many. Most of the parks close 15 Sep or before here so these slow pokes may find places to stay few and far between. I'm not sure if the early closure is because the locals are fed up with tourists or just afraid it's going to snow any day. The weather changes quickly here and the guide at L'Anse aux Meadows said they were still clearing snow off the boardwalks in early July.
There's no doubt that the people who live in Nfld, especially along the coastlines, are hardy. The same guide told me that the few older people who live on the fringe of the park...at the northern most part of the island, came and/or stayed here because of the fish. After the cod moratorium most of them couldn't afford to move anywhere else. He said he'd grown up here but it was a god-forsaken place to be in any weather and the park has already make their intentions known that as people die, the parks will be buying their houses/properties--this is rather than expropriating same as most of the remaining residents are 75+ years old. There's nothing here to bring anyone that would want to buy the houses anyway. It was in one of those houses on my first trip to Nfld that I met an old man with a goat named 'Job' that was his guard dog. He told us a wonderful tale of how the goat had fended off polar bears more than once that had come across the ice from Labrador (which you can see from this coastline). I expect he's dead now and I've often wondered what became of Job. I suspect that the declining ice probably keeps the bears away now anyway.
We took a detour off the main Trans Canada Highway and went in to St Teresa. It had a unique coastline in that a 20-ft sandbar separated the ocean from a small lake--which I'm sure is saltwater as a good storm would send the water over the sandbar. I took some photos from high on the cliffs above the shoreline. I never get tired of looking at the ocean, the waves, and listening to the rocks as the waves go back out.
It was an early night. The last RV park before the ferry is 28 kms away. Called Little Paradise Park, it's quite a gem and a pleasant surprise given the crappy sign and dirt road leading in to it. We've been very lucky with the majority of the RV parks we've stayed in and have no complaints. They might not be quite as flamboyant as some of the big RV 'resorts' in the States but the owners have been delightfully pleasant and helpful and without exception, will talk your ear off...even I have a hard time getting a word in edgewise. I met a lovely woman who had an RV in the last night's park. They live an hour from the park but because it's on a river, they use the RV as a cottage. She was just walking by, asked where we were from, and we ended up talking for an hour and solving all the problems of the world. "Well girl," she says, "time is short and death is long so go while you can, eh?"
We will take the 9 am ferry tomorrow and stay at the same KOA as we did coming over...they have our Thule 'caboose' anyway. Saturday we plan on going around the Cabot Trail and Louisburg and then we'll head for Hubbards on Sunday I guess. TTFN.