Off to Bay Bulls.

Spent the night in the quaint little town and after breakfast took a walk down to the wharf, what a great protected little spot. It's like taking a walk back in time looking at the old boats and antiquated equipment.

While there we glanced over the edge of the dock to see an incredible amount of fish (might be a bit difficult to see in this shot but almost everything in the picture is a fish).

Just a shot of the Inn we stayed at from across the harbour (Inn by the Bay)
The house up on the hill is called the George House and is part of the same property, seems to be a pretty famous place around there.

Off we go, down the road... the GPS decided that the rental SUV we got hadn't gotten enough off-road time so it put us on Route 81. Looked like a main road on the map but about ten miles of rough road was all we got.

Along the west coast of the Avalon Peninsula, down what's called the "The Irish Loop" proved to be somewhat of a dud. Just not a whole lot to see since the terrain turns flat and quite boring. One interesting thing I noticed is that this area must be the burnout capital of the world. I don't think there was more than a 300' stretch for about 10 miles that didn't have black rubber snakes burned into the pavement. Most of the area's where 10 or 15 layers deep of nice posi-rear burnouts (I have no idea what that is all about, maybe they own stock in tire companies?)

Once we turned inland things changed for the better, still incredibly flat for "The Rock" but it turned into what looks like a arctic tundra grassland with evergreen shrubs and thick blankets of moss that covers, I would imagine, about 100 square miles or more (have to look that up). The southernmost herd of Caribou are located here and from what we were told, "they are everywhere, just be careful not to run into them". There is only one road that goes through this area and it only covers a small amount of the lower part, I guess the caribou moved north to feed for the summer but we did manage to find one just to prove they do exist.

So Sue says, "turn down here, there's a road that takes us to a light house, it's the site of Marconi's first radio transmission site, and Amelia Earhart's first Trans-Atlantic flight took off from this location". So off we go down this gravel road, this long gravel road, with steep hills and potholes galore. It's times like these that I'm glad it's a rental car!
We get all the way down close to the end of the road - we can see the lighthouse in the distance - and we start to notice a large amount of strange waves in the water. The waves where actually being caused by Humpback whales, LOTS OF WHALES!!! There must have been well over a hundred of them out there. They come in to feed on the Caplin (there are other spellings for these fish), they herd them up and race up through the middle and breech as they grab a mouthful of fish. It's almost impossible to get a good shot of these buggers with 60 MPH winds blowing you around and not being able to decide where they are going to jump next.

Then it was off to Bay Bulls for the night - I'm tired of typing so you'll have to imagine the rest until tomorrow.

See Ya,

Dr.