We
both have seen puffins before on boat trips – Barbara in Maine with her folks
and Bill in Iceland with Carrie – but neither time got very good pictures. So off we went on a cold, windy, foggy morning
to the Puffin Viewing Site in Elliston on the Bonavista Peninsula
armed with a better camera and binoculars. A short walk out a peninsula brings
you to a place where you can see a close island covered with puffins.
Don’t these
guys look cute? We also saw Black Guillemots and other seabirds.
It’s
a pretty scenic spot even if there were no puffins – reminding us a bit of
White Point in Nova Scotia
with its grassy headlands and rocky cliffs.
On
the way there we stopped at the Monument to Sealing Disasters and spotted
several icebergs.
Oddly
enough, Elliston prides itself on being the root cellar capital of the world.
The town preserves many of the 135 cellars.
We
still had some fog at Dungeon
Provincial Park
with its natural arches, but it started to clear while at the Cape Bonavista
Lighthouse.
Barbara
found lots of piles of stones to photograph, but we’ll spare you the pictures. We
capped off our time at Cape
Bonavista with the Cabot
statue. Cabot landed somewhere in Canada but didn’t record exactly
where. Nova Scotia local lore says he landed
there and Newfoundland
local lore says he landed here, so there is a park in both places. We also had
an interesting chat with a local – a Boston Bruins fan! He taught us the proper
way to say “new-found-LAND.”
