Three Days in "the weather" - Trinity Bay Newfoundland

Our crumpled rain gear is hung to dry on a high hook in cozy yellow room.  On the high wooden bed, surrounded by worn rag-rugs, the colourful quilt provides a warm refuge after a day in the driving mist.  Through mullioned wooden windows, the stiff North Atlantic winds whip the dark waters of the bay into lively whitecaps.  Black clouds hang heavy over the village of brightly-coloured wooden blocks scattered like children’s toys over the folded landscape of the Bonavista Penninsula. 

It’s a soothing, cozy haven after a long day spent out in “the weather” – a true taste of the marvellous, terrible Newfoundland experience. 

We’ve come to Newfoundland for a quick visit – pairing an early June conference with a 3-day get-away.  Our base of operations, an easy 3-hour drive north of St. John’s is the colourful, random tumble of Trinity Bay.   The town was settled in the early 1700s, and while dozens of generations have drawn their livelihoods from the waters of the North Atlantic, little about the town appears to have changed.  

We’ve taken a room in one of the local homes that are collectively the Artisan Inn.  Barbour House is a wooden clapboard painted a jaunty blue-green that mocks the dark weather.  Tucked in behind, a burgundy outbuilding balances on pilings over the dark waters of the  bay; the Twine Loft is a lounge and restaurant that lovingly serves hearty breakfasts and finely worked, fixed-menu dinners to those wise enough to reserve weeks in advance. 

There was more than enough to keep us busy over our three days on the Penninsula. 

·         Trinity Bay boasts 7 historic sites – a museum of daily life, a grand brick mansion, a cooper’s shop, a fish-plant theatre all accessible on a $10 pass.  

·         A short drive away, at New Bonaventure, the set for the year 2000 miniseries Random Passage is preserved as a perfectly re-constructed outport from the early last-century.

·         In Port Union, the only union-built community in Canada, the historic factory district provides glimpses into life in a fish factory town, with picturesque workers’ housing, long-abandoned, melting back into the unforgiving landscape .

·         At Maberly, a short walk, along a cliff’s edge out onto a windswept promontory, brings you to a Puffin colony, where the comical potato-shaped birds with the rainbow beaks tumble out of their burrows into frantic flight, or crash land into the sea. 

·         At the tip of the Penninsula, a candy-striped lighthouse marks sturdy Cape Bonavista, site of explorer John Cabot’s landing.  Behind it, the jumbled town faces the full bluster of North Atlantic storms with weathered clapboard and billowing grasses.

·         At every headland, hiking paths lead hikers to cliff-top vistas – and an opportunity to spot majestic blue-white icebergs drifting down from the Greenland ice cap and humpback and minke whales following the capelin.

·         Around the Penninsula, top-notch eateries serve local delicacies to hungry travellers – the road-side Two Whales coffee shop specializes in Panini and soups, the Bonavista Social Club offers fresh-baked bread and scrumptious pizza with views of surf-pummelled headlands, Fisher’s Loft Inn serves exquisite fixed-menu dinners from a hilltop mansion.

Between each of these destinations, a well-kept ribbon of road – highway 230 – drifts through vast, crumpled forests of fir, larch and birch and by pristine fresh-water ponds edged in granite and shale.  Despite hundreds of years of waterfront settlement, development has yet to penetrate the interior.

Throughout our three day stay, the constant drizzle and strong easterly winds paint a hazy, gray picture of an outpost culture – gazing sadly out to sea, mourning the fish the government claims are no longer there, missing friends and children who have moved away to earn a living. 

The history of loss is starkly revealed on Bruce Miller’s intelligent Rugged Beauty Boat Tour out of New Bonaventure.  His open dory skims across the lively ocean swells and slips into Keyley’s Bay, Eye of Ireland and British Harbour  - all outports cleared in the 1950s and 1960’s by a government decree focused on increasing efficiency.  

Fifty years later,  only scattered jumbles of rotting wood mark homes where generations of Newfoundlanders lived.  But his stories bring the communities and their characters vividly to life: here’s where Uncle Joe set his nets, that’s where grandpa dried his cod on harbourside flakes, that’s where Auntie challenged the fish inspector’s grading of her husband’s catch, there’s the time the Great Uncle threatened to shoot a campaigning Joey Smallwood in the foot.  The humour, the love, the anger are constant threads that run through his colourful patter.

In only three days, we have immersed ourselves in the magnificent landscape of this small corner of the Rock, absorbed glimpses of a long history of humour and disappointment, and nestled into the warm embrace of rural Newfoundland hospitality.

On our last night, the Twine Loft serves us a hazelnut encrusted salmon and local root vegetables paired with a lovely Oregon Pinot Noir and sends us to our room with a contented glow.  (The Screech Chaser may have helped!)

Nestled under the quilt, the light off, we listen to the muted whistle of the wind and, imagining the stories that surround us, drift off to sleep.   

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