(Pouch Cove, Newfoundland & Labrador, Canada)

The city of St. John’s dominates life on the Avalon Peninsula.  We’ve visited a couple of times already and we will pass through the city a few more times before returning home.  It is known for its colourful houses, some of which appear in the photo at the top of this post.  It’s not just one street:  you see these all over the downtown core.  Some of the newer buildings in the suburbs are also being built in the same style.

Driving in St. John’s can be a challenge.  It’s an old city and sometimes the sightlines and merging streets can take you by surprise.  However, the scariest part is the steepness of the streets that descend to the harbour. You need very good brakes here…and you need to check them often.  I can’t imagine what it is like to drive here in the winter when there is snow and/or ice on the roads.

We squeezed in a visit to the Botanical Gardens at the Memorial University of Newfoundland.   This turned out to be a huge facility:  not just a “traditional” botanical garden but also a well-annotated series of trails through boreal forest and pond environments.  You could spend a few hours here if you wanted to see everything.

We also visited the Johnson Geo Centre located “inside” Signal Hill.  The structure itself is probably worth the cost of admission alone; it’s difficult to imagine how they blasted so deeply into 500 million year-old rock to build it.

While the focus at the Geo Centre is clearly on geology, we focused on two aquatic themes:  the ill-fated journey of the Titanic and the journey to the Mariana Trench (the deepest place on earth).  In hindsight, it is surprising how many warnings the Titanic received (and ignored) about treacherous iceberg conditions in the North Atlantic.  The various warnings are all on display at the Geo Centre.  While most people are familiar with the story (from the movie, if nothing else), it is of course more intense when you have just seen icebergs off the very same coast where the Titanic sank.

We also saw a 3-D movie chronicling the journey of James Cameron (the same guy who directed the Titanic movie) in a special sphere to the bottom of the Mariana Trench…almost 36,000 feet below sea level.  While th 3-D effect seemed a little corny at first, it ultimately proved to be well-suited to a documentary picture.

A big event around here is when the “capelin are rolling”.  These small fish periodically wash ashore in huge numbers; it is a highly anticipated (and free!) opportunity to harvest a lot of fish.  It is particularly impressive in the darkness, as the fish are iridescent.  I took a few pictures at Middle Cove, where locals and visitors alike were laden with nets and buckets, jostling for the best position.  Although we didn’t stay long enough for the capelin to roll, we did get a strong sense of the excitement.

We generally end each day with a walk around our home base of Pouch Cove.  It is very refreshing, as the last few nights have been well below 10’C even before considering the effect of the coastal wind.   While I brought shorts along, I don’t think I will need them at all on this trip.  We are both enjoying change from the summer heat and humidity in Kingston.