Eastern Canada, Here we Come – Stephenville, Newfoundland -2025- Part 2

I love driving through Provincial campgrounds or National Campgrounds, I like to see what the parks are like in case we go back. On the day we headed to Burgeo which was about a three hour drive, we stopped in to drive around Barrachois Pond Provincial Park. It was a really nice park, nice sites and the beach look great. We did notice that every campsite had a garbage can and blue recycle box by their campsite post. I thought this was strange, you would not see this in Ontario because of wildlife. We spotted a Park Warden and I asked him why they were able to do that. He told me there hadn’t been a bear in the area for over 35 years and Newfoundland doesn’t have skunks, raccoons or porcupines either. As a side note, and nothing to do with the recycle boxes, Moose, which are my favourite animal, are not indigenous to Newfoundland. They were brought over from the province of New Brunswick in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They wanted another species for hunting and the moose did thrive becoming a major part of the island’s ecosystem.  

Another spot we drove to was Sandbanks Provincial Park which we liked because we also have a Sandbanks Provincial Park in Ontario. The Ontario park has the World’s largest baymouth barrier dune formation, which is pretty cool. A baymouth barrier dune is massive freshwater dunes along Lake Ontario that were formed by glacial activity and lake currents over thousands of years. The Park in Newfoundland was very nice too, they just do not have the dunes.

We made it to Burgeo after the other stops but it was such a foggy day, it was hard to see anything by the water. They had a small museum which we went into and wandered for a while. I didn’t know that the author Farley Mowat had lived here for three years and wrote a few books while living here. He wrote a lot of books and I think I have only read a couple of his books but perhaps I will try a few more.

Well one more stop and then we take the ferry off the island. Next stop is Port Aux Basques and there we will wait for our ferry departure date. The only two things we booked prior to leaving on this trip was the the ferry from Labrador to Newfoundland and the ferry from Newfoundland to the mainland. We did try to switch our ferry dates to leave Newfoundland and we were told they had over 7,000 more reservations this July/August than any other year so it wasn’t possible to leave earlier.

See you soon…