New found land for real!!

Ok, so here are the people I'm staying with in Newfoundland that are responsible for me staying longer by finding me a job and are also partially responsible for my recent weight gain. It is a house of hedonists, I tell you. The food is too good to be missed, so I don't.

Here is Misty:
and Rob:

And here are a few pictures from a recent excursion out to Bell Island off the coast of St. John's. There are 20 acres of land for sale, which Misty, Rob and a few others would like to turn into some kind of farm. We are going as a group sometime soon (after the snow clears up a bit, maybe) to see what we think we can do with it, particularly the professional farmer amongst us, Mark.

There are two very rickety attached buildings that will probably need to be torn down. The foundation they are rottenly balancing atop is cracked and eroding, so no renos are worth doing. The building shown here next to the ass-end of our rental car was a little grocery store at one point in the vanishing past.
The tree is nice, but who knows what its roots have gotten into. The septic works probably need to be figured out or reconfigured out again, as it's obviously been a while since anything resembling plumbing was needed here. There are apparently two wells on the land, but we were unable to locate them. They are no longer clearly marked, if they ever were.


The back side of the house.
The field behind the house. It is fairly large, and windy, but would be easy to plant once cleared of the random rusted car parts strewn through it.


More of the field:
Journeying down into the land:

Further down, the trees are definitely thicker, creating more of a break against the wind. There is a track running down the entire length of the property, and frequently to either side are small clearings like this one:
The land further down is definitely wetter, due partially to the shade and water retention that the trees provide and the steady downward slope. A number of mosses and mushrooms grow on the lower part of the property here, as well as a bright orange fungus of some kind.

The property abruptly ends in a cliff that empties into the gap between St. John's and Bell Island. It could be a good site for some extreme rock climbing tourist business, or an experimental commuter system that involved a giant slingshot. The wheels are turning...

New found land too

Here is the Atlantic Ocean, everybody! This is the easternmost point of North America, if you exclude Greenland from the figuring. It even looks cold.


My aquaphilia is definitely less than it was up North, seeing as the water here is harder to get to and far more perilous to boot. But, it's still absolutely gorgeous to watch. Still pictures are really no good reflection of the reality, but uploading tons of footage of crashing waves might just be annoying.

...just one more for the record!

And here I am in an unusually calm moment on the easternmost point of Canada et al.

Cape Spear:
Lighthouses, of course:



An old army barracks, back from before Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949 (!), a sore point still for some:

New found land

Here is what I normally look like in Newfoundland if I don't restrain my hair. That's signal hill we're climbing the back of, and the water is the Atlantic once again.

Here's Misty, at home in the city that was her fate as soon as her parents named her...Misty!


The view from Signal Hill. That's the cliffs of Dover off in the distance, and you can see Big Ben on clear days. This is a panoramic series that moves from the ocean into the harbour.
P.S. that's not really Angleterre over there...




And above is the city of St. John's NL. More later about the city itself.