August 26
End: St. Anthony
Miles: 0.0
Total: 5469.4
In the morning I had the opportunity to sleep in. I was going to head over to L’Anse aux Meadows, the UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the only known Viking settlement in North America (not counting Greenland). The visitor center did not open until after nine in the morning, so around eight I got up, packed up my things in the continuing wind, took another photo or two, and headed back down the Cape Raven Trail. I took the opportunity to use the historic Cape Raven Trail privy, hidden behind a bunch of trees and brush, which felt like it hadn’t been used for a couple of years. The walk down the road took less than an hour. I arrived at the road into the historic site, but walked past it, into the nearby village, also called L’Anse aux Meadows.
It was just a collection of houses, and so I walked down to a dead end, then started walking back to the site. It had been raining for about twenty minutes, and though at first I didn’t care, now I was ready to be offered a ride or just get inside.
Thankfully it only took a few more minutes before I made it to the visitor center, and I dragged my sorry, soggy thru-hiker self into the building. I admired all of the exhibits at this incredible site, first discovered in the 1960’s.
Soon I was approached by a worker, and directed to a video screening room, where I met other visitors to the site, and watched a well-made video on the Viking settlement which emphasized the Vikings’ arrival in North America and their first contact with the local people as the human completion of a circle of the globe.
We then were taken on a tour of the sites of the buildings which stood a thousand years ago by a man who used to live in the village a hundred meters away, and played around the sites when the archeologists were excavating the site. The locals called the odd dirt formations the “Indian Camps” before they were exposed as Viking buildings. It was incredible to be hearing from someone who participated in the actual excavation. Our guide of course covered all of the building sites, and then left us to enjoy the recreated buildings.
The buildings were incredible. With roofs made of earth taken from a nearby bog and simple wooden structures, the settlement could have been a fairly luxurious place for folks living at the turn of the last millennium. With fires going inside and fur clothing, the Vikings probably figured Newfoundland was a cozy place compared to Scandinavia, Iceland, and Greenland.
Sadly the Vikings seemed to have burned down their buildings and left the continent just as swiftly as they had arrived. While touring the site I made friends with the other tourists and got an offer for lunch. I met a couple of friends, one of which used to be the Queen’s gardener.
They took me to lunch at a restaurant clear on the other side of St. Anthony. I was thankful for lunch and thankful for the ride. They dropped me off at Hotel North, I got a room, and did my best impression of a vegetable in front of the television for the rest of the day.
