Pics Newfieland!

gee

Finally a new goddamn title
Sep 29, 2012
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Halifax
Marklar
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A couple friends of mine in St. John's are getting married, and I've got friends/family I haven't seen in a couple years (I'm a stereotypical newfoundlander with the 'home' itch) so we're driving across NL. Brought the good camera with us to grab some snaps. I'm here for a couple weeks and I'll post pics to this thread as time goes on.

This is the west coast of the island, known as the wreckhouse region. Everything's rock and there isn't much topsoil for forests to get established on, so the few trees that grow are malformed and bent by the wind. This is a random shot out the car window on the highway:

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Random rock out in the bay:

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ICEBERG! DEAD AHEAD! The arctic ice shelf is breaking apart at a higher rate than ever recorded, which means there's icebergs to be seen everywhere off the NL coast:

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"I love you jessica!" "I love you too, ricky!" "lets vandalize this small town, nobody will know who we are!"

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Another iceberg. This one's breaking apart, it let out a huge CRACK when I was taking a picture of it:

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And everyone's favorite community name:

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We were on a time crunch so we didn't go into the actual town and get a shot in front of the "Welcome to Dildo" sign, which is now a welded metal sign sunk into concrete because people kept stealing the previous signs.

A dildo is a wooden needle used for repairing fishing nets, and Dildo Bay viewed from above resembles the tool with an island where the eye in the needle would be. A dildo is also a similar size/shape to the "modern dildo", and the theory is that a lonely fisherman's wife created the alternative use.
 
Newfoundland, Saskatchewan and BC are the only provinces I haven't been to yet. Love to get out there sometime.
 
Shag Rock, which is between Dildo Bay and Broad Cove. Community names here are great:

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Fishermen's gear storage sheds, where they keep their nets, floats and such. Newfoundland fisherman paint their boats with bright colors so they're easy to spot, and paint their sheds, sometimes even their houses, with leftover boat paint:

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You won't find much sand on a beach in NL, instead you'll find things like shale beach rocks:

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Co-pilot/traveling companion Cheddar Smokie:

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Traveling companion #2, Lucy. She's wound up because a seagull perched on the guardrail about 10 feet from her.

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Inspiring landscapes that are epic either because they are serenely barren or populated by a few things that are distorted because they seem to fill so much space than they actually occupy....I could easily live and be contented in that land devoid of the 'riches' of modern civilisation/consumerism. I'm very jealous. :(:)
 
Unfortunately it's been raining the last couple days, and I've been busy with family/friends, so I haven't taken the camera out. I'll try and get out tomorrow and take some pictures.

The capelin are spawning on the beaches right now - fish show up, have a great big orgy on the beach, and die. People go out and fill buckets with them - they're good breaded and fried or baked in the oven, or dumped across the vegetable garden for fertilizer. Not my video:

 
Unfortunately it's been raining the last couple days, and I've been busy with family/friends, so I haven't taken the camera out. I'll try and get out tomorrow and take some pictures.

The capelin are spawning on the beaches right now - fish show up, have a great big orgy on the beach, and die. People go out and fill buckets with them - they're good breaded and fried or baked in the oven, or dumped across the vegetable garden for fertilizer. Not my video:



:lol: those fish are getting the shit beat out of them.
 
Nah, those fish are having the orgasm of their life. They beach themselves and die, their decomposing bodies helping to feed the larvae that hatches from their eggs. Anyway, back home with the laptop, it's update time.

Best thing about coming home to newfoundland is the food. Everyone wants to have you over for dinner, and people go all out to impress their guests. Here's some random food porn, some steaks that the in-laws got from a farmer they know:

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Stray cat that lives in my parents' neighborhood. A few of the neighbors feed her, and chipped in to get the cat spayed, unfortunately she's an old cat that's not house trained, so she's unadoptable. Good to have an outdoor cat around though, to keep mice away.

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Middle Cove Beach. There's a pile of people out there fishing for capelin - they're mostly dead now, but there's still a few left to catch. The whole area stinks of dead fish for a couple weeks after the capelin roll, but nobody really cares.

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Shot looking out middle cove, taken from the same lookout:

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Around the bay, there's a local castle. Built by an american engineer that worked on the Apollo program:

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Random cliff shot.

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And onwards. Here's Cabot Tower, on Signal Hill. I had a summer job here many years ago, working at the radio site there and telling people about Marconi, who received the first transatlantic wireless signal here in 1901. Probably the favorite job I had, talking to random tourists.

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Looking across St. John's Harbor from Cabot Tower, you see Fort Amherst... and a big pile of icebergs.

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And here's St. John's Harbor itself.

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So with the wedding done and everything else taken care of, time to start heading west.

Here's some newfoundland fishing village, I'm not sure which community this is. Excuse the tilted pictures, having this blind spot in my eye makes it hard to see if shit's level through the viewfinder.

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A couple of our friends and us decided to go camping, about 1.5 hours west of St. John's in an area called Backside Pond. This is located north of the aforementioned Dildo, and looks out onto Shag Rock.

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We had awesome weather. Here's Charlie chillin' on the local beach - unlike the previous beaches with rocks on them, this particular beach has grass in it. We don't exactly have sandy beaches in newfoundland.

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Trees in the park. All spruce/fir, with a very occasional birch or pine. Newfoundland's forests are pretty much entirely softwood.

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Cheddar on the picnic table

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Beer time! We get tons of icebergs, but we also get crazy folk who get in boats, lasso them and make expensive bottled water to sell overseas, vodka, and now beer. This beer doesn't taste like much of anything, but hey, it's hot out and it's refreshing. I'll take it.

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Here's a spider eating a horsefly. These are little black/white jumping spiders that catch flies mid-air, they're cool as fuck and I appreciate what they do.

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Fuck it, time to light a fire.

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Girls at the campsite... "EWW THERE'S A BIG SLUG BY THE COOLER!"... "Why are you taking pictures of it? get rid of it!"

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Cheddar the following morning, who slept better than the rest of us.

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Lucy... "I want to run through the woods, but I'm tied on. I has a sad."

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After camping, we popped by my grandparents' cabin. The remnants of Hurricane Arthur were blowing through, white caps on the lake outside, but Lucy didn't care.

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After a night at the in-law's, another day and another beach. This is in Petley, located on Random Island.

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EWW A DEAD JELLYFISH ON THE BEACH

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Fishing boat.

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OK, enough sightseeing. Time to get in the car and head west. Charlie says "this way!"

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Power lines going from Deer Lake Hydro to the Corner Brook paper mill. This was a big project built in the 1920's that's still making newsprint. This power system runs at 35Hz or something weird, though it was built before 50/60Hz became standardized.

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Cool clouds.

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Then the rain rolled in...

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... followed by an awesome sunset.

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This picture was taken in Blow Me Down (yes, actual community name). It's so barren/windy out here that trees are far and few between, and the few that do grow end up looking like this. If it wasn't for the wind, this would probably be a perfect looking christmas tree.

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Glamour shot of the Audi. Now that the water pump's fixed and we can giv'er on the highway, we've concluded that the car is the ultimate road trip machine. It's comfortable, it hauls shit, and it hauls ass.

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Last picture taken before we rolled into Port Aux Basques.

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The ferry.

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We arrived in Cape Breton in rainy weather.

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But that quickly diminished, and before long we had some sweet-ass company on the highway.

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And the last photo of the trip, taken half an hour from home. Charlie at this point was completely sick of the car.

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