Day 6
From the Hotel to the AirBnB
Woke up early in the morning and wrote my prior post before packing up my stuff and leaving. The prior day I was trying to find a laundromat and thankfully the AirBnB had one. My cousin contacted them ahead of time and they even left out some detergent and a bottle of wine! They’re awesome people and we’re super thankful they let us rent their place. It was near this hiking trail that goes to La Manche Village which I’ll talk about shortly. The trip to the AirBnB was cool, as it was about an hour south of St. John’s. The landscape on the way was beautiful but sadly hidden behind a veil of fog that didn’t lift until later in the day. I only got to see it on the way to the airport on Saturday.
The AirBnB itself
It was amazing, it was a small red cabin on a dirt road that had a hot tub, a wood stove, Netflix and an oven range. You could probably live there pretty easily. It had 3 bedrooms and slept 4 people (the couch Colin slept on was pretty big, but he said it wasn’t super comfortable lol. I felt bad but if I didn’t have to wake up and travel at like 5AM I would have. For the first night, John and Colin both couldn’t make it so Ethan and I had a fire in the wood stove, drank the wine in the hot tub and hung out watching Netflix. It was honestly, a lot of fun. We watched Bo Burnham’s “Inside” again and it was really good. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it and it holds up so well. After a long night of hanging out, we both retired to our rooms and slept.
Day 7
Ferryland, not Fairy Land!
Ferryland is a cool settlement that starts way out on a peninsula in a protected cove with a lot of small islands. Started in, I believe, the 1600’s, the village was a small area where people had gardens and lived a very easy fishing life. It was your classic town that you would picture from those days with the whole fence of large spiked trees. They all wore the usual settler garments, but the legacy they left behind has been pretty well preserved. We ended up visiting it and walking around, checking stuff out. It was really cool actually.
Lamanche Village
John and Colin arrived around 1pm. Before they did, Ethan and I woke up at like 9 or 10, headed to the local grocer and bought some eggs, bacon and some jalapenos wrapped in bacon. After we got back, we cooked breakfast and waited for John and Colin.
John arrived first. He got situated and we showed him his room (Hey, first come first serve!) then proceeded to get our hiking boots on and head toward La Manche Village. The Village itself existed and was occupied into the 1960’s. Situated near and above a massive gorge, it was in the 1960’s that it met its fated end. A rogue wave, which apparently is a phenomenon I’ve never heard of, rose to a massive height of at least 100 feet and just tore the entire village to the ground. The foundations are still there but in massive disrepair and most have been left decimated. The area that was destroyed is about 1km into the woods down a somewhat narrow and sometimes dangerous path. It’s pretty well maintained but in the winter the rocks are slick.
After a short jaunt down the road to the trail-head, we waited for Colin to arrive. He eventually did after like 15-20 minutes and we all gathered our muster and proceeded down the trail. I thought it was going to be WAY worse than it actually was, but it did help me realize that I need to lose weight haha ( ;; – _ -). There was this incredibly cool suspension bridge that the park services made that is just amazing. See pics of the gorge and the bridge below!
Just beyond the bridge, about a 15 minute hike away, is Doctor’s Cove. It can really only be reached by foot or boat since there’s a ton of I almost slipped a few times! Thankfully my brand-spankin-new hiking boots did pretty well. I’m glad I bought them. The whole cove is really cool, it’s all this slate rock that has these incredibly geometric fracture points creating a futuristic, almost alien looking domain. The rocks gently slope toward the water, so the friction causes a beautiful color that constantly mixes blue and white in a never-ending accompaniment to Nature’s majesty. Honestly, the crazy geometry might have made it my favorite cove that we visited, but that’s not including the boil up because that was one of my favorite memories of the entire trip.
I wish I had some more pics of the cove, but we were all just hanging out. After the cove, we hiked out and back to the house about an hour before it got dark out. The night was filled with revelry and hot tub! It was honestly just so awesome.
When the 5AM alarm goes off…
We ended up waking up super early, driving out to Ethan’s old house and picking up his cat around 6:30AM. After that we drove to the airport dropped off the car and enjoyed about 5 hours of sleeping on 2 separate planes. Back in the United States, the customs was easy to get through. Not sure if that’ll be the case next time when I’m coming back from Germany, if I end up going at all!
Thanks for reading everyone! If you enjoyed it, text me and let me know 🙂
