When I dropped John off at the airport last Thursday, the paddling portion of our adventure was well and truly over. My skills are not advanced enough to solo the most interesting water in the immediate vicinity of L’Anse aux Meadows, and the more placid stretches would just frustrate me. It’s also hard to load and unload those big fiberglass beasts by oneself, without doing damage to the fragile shell (or my still more fragile back.) We therefore strapped and locked the boats on the racks in preparation for Sunday’s launch on the first leg of my 1800-mile, 35-hour drive (complete with overnight ferry.)
That’ll be the subject of a later post.
In any case, we spent Thursday morning and early afternoon pulling, cleaning, drying, organizing, and packing our gear. It was a task of some proportions in its own right. After we had finished and had something to eat, we left for the airport.
St. Anthony Airport is some 22 miles west northwest of St. Anthony, Newfoundland. It’s about twice that from L’Anse aux Meadows, and interestingly, from that site one doesn’t drive past the town of St. Anthony along the way: While the town is at the very end of Route 430, going to the airport from the Norse settlement requires one to backtrack back down the Viking Trail.
“Airport” may be a bit generous; “airfield” would probably be more accurate. I’ll let John describe his homeward-bound odyssey in his own post. Suffice it to say that, when we arrived, there were a handful of cars in the parking lot, and two more in a nearby and somewhat grassier lot marked “Long Term Parking.” We could see no planes at all, either on the ground or in the sky. We walked over to the door and put on our masks, as the sign bid us do, and then entered the facility itself, which is very nice and clean and modern, if quite a bit smaller than the larger ferry ports we’ve visited on this trip. There was one single soul that we could find in the public area, and he proved to be the lone grumpy and misanthropic person we’d met throughout our travels. I was under the impression that he was pretending we didn’t exist and/or attempting to will us to combust spontaneously, but I’ll let John describe that encounter. In any case, once a security guard wandered into the building, John and I said farewell, and I left to return to our camp, alone for the first time in our adventure.
To stave off any feelings of isolation as the last Viking left to represent the Team, upon my return to camp I was bound and determined to get right to work. I had decided to spend the couple of days I had left on site hiking around L’Anse aux Meadows and the nearby coastline, absorbing impressions of the place, and thinking and writing about those impressions. I also was in the process of soliciting some local advice concerning visits to potential spots of interest on the long road to Port aux Basques, where the ferry departs for Nova Scotia.
Right before I got back, however, about 800 yards from camp, I passed a young moose. From a distance, I had thought it was a runaway horse, as if that makes much sense. To be fair, I’ve had runaway horses in my front yard. I don’t have a lot of experience with moose.
In any case, it vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared.
I took this apparition as a good omen, and a totemic one, at that, because my brother and I often refer to each other as “Moose,” as that was what our dad used to call us.
I felt revitalized and ready to continue our epic quest to seek insight In the Wake of the Vikings.
More about my ongoing adventures later….
We have plotted many of our adventures on this map:
In the Wake of the Vikings 