St. Pierre (but not Miquelon) – Phyllis – June 18

Before I get to our little trip to France, there are a couple of places we omitted from our last post.

More On St. John’s

Memorial University is a prominent feature in St. John’s and one of Michael’s brothers-in-law left Grande Prairie and came to NFLD for his degree. Knowing this, we had to relay pictures to him of an iconic brewery everyone recommends.

Quidi Vidi is an old area located at the bottom of Signal Hill. The tiny houses are haphazardly placed on narrow lanes around a small harbour/inlet. Squeezed into this are is the Quidi Vidi Brewery. It looks like it was an old fisheries or shipping industry building.

There is no parking close by and the entrance is up a very long, narrow stairway that also accommodates customers running up with their food orders. The brewery does not serve food so they have an arrangement with a food truck / restaurant down below. The brewery staff takes the order, hands you a pager and you fetch.

Iceberg Beer is ‘the’ beer on offer all over the island. Its what I call a girl beer: mild, not hoppy, not malty. We had a few along the way. I ended up having a Blackberry Milkshake Beer in this instance. Though I don’t like sour beers, this one was pretty good. The cod from the restaurant down below was arguably the best we had anywhere.

Benjamin said he knew the place well.

So, here’s to Benjamin and Channelle:

Johnson Geo Centre

The other spot I forgot to mention was another of St. Jon’s excellent museums. The Johnson Geo Centre is built right into a wall of rock. There’s no need to create fake rock to illustrate their lessons because its all right there for all to see. It covers the geological history of NFLD and oil and gas. It is a newer museum and had the best explanations and illustrations of both geology and off shore O&G industry that I have seen. Neither subject has held my attention before. I actually learned a lot. I also figured out that I would not survive the safety training to get onto an ocean platform.

St. Pierre

It has taken a long time to get to this part of the world and there was no point in leaving without seeing as much as we could. A one and a half hour ferry ride to France had to be done. One must have a proper fresh baguette.

Interestingly the topography heading down the Burin Peninsula is a bit different than the areas we visited. The rocks seemed rougher, there was sparser vegetation, but just as much inland water.

There’s always an exception! One valley was a bit deeper, protected by higher rocks and mostly populated with a dense cover of deciduous trees, mostly white birch. Every other area was predominantly black spruce, with a smattering of birch.

We had a lovely trip over and visited two museums. Though the French peoples were involved in the same fishing industries as the NFLD islanders, the architecture and lifestyle are very definitely small village French with a few structural modifications to fend off the winter weather. My impression is that these folks made a later transition to the tourism industry than their Canadian counterparts. It has only been in the last 30 years that the archeological history of the islands has been explored and seems to have been initiated by academics from Memorial.

There is a tremendous amount of work being done now, however. One museum is full of artifacts from daily life while the other covers the archeology and has a fantastic section on the role of St. Pierre and Miquelon during Prohibition.

We stayed in a port side hotel which was exactly what I experienced staying in various small auberges in France many years ago. The hotel staff were very helpful. The local folks were warm and friendly. One fellow even stopped to explain how a Tiffin restaurant operated when we were staring at its menu on locked doors.  We visited one of the newer restaurants in a hotel across the harbour and I enjoyed a delightfully tasty lobster pasta. The second night we were in a small place closer to the hotel and had scallop risotto and snow crab ravioli. The lamb was dreadful!

I particularly enjoyed getting out to the two boulangeries in the morning to buy a baguette, croissants and pain au chocolat.

Our experiences with fog and rain carried over to St. Pierre. The trip back to Fortune was rough. The ferry was small and bounced around in the wind and rough seas. Things quietened when we got inside the cover of the long spit of land on the Burin Peninsula that stretches past the docks but the sky had blackened considerably during the voyage. We were greeted by a very loud clap of thunder as we got off the boat, Lightning flashed and it started pissing buckets at the same time. I was soaked to the skin in the short walk to our parked vehicle. The drive back to St. John’s is 4 hours. During that period, we drove in and out of the clouds, in and out of fog banks and into a damp city. We still had one day to visit and it was a mostly lovely day.

Going Home

Tonight, we fly home and at 10:30 in the morning, this is all we can see outside our window.