It has a very nice Provincial Seamen’s Museum which is a regional branch of The Rooms, the large Provincial Museum we visited in St. John’s. The very nice people staffing the museum described ot as “open storage” of their collection. Virtually all of the pieces the museum has are on display. Sometimes they go elsewhere to be exhibited, but most are displayed on the two floors of the museum in Grand Bank.
It is a very interesting collection on fishing and martime gear, mostly from the age of the great cod fishery that existed in Newfoundland until 1992. They had everything from dorys to fish hooks to navigation equipment to boatbuilding tools to oil-lit ship’s lanterns to a collection of early marine engines. It it had anything to do with maritime activity on the Newfoundland coast, they had it. The only problem was that there weren’t many explanations about the collected items. Every piece was tagged with its accession number and sometimes there was a note on the other side of the tag, but not much detail was available. The staff acknowledged that this was a problem they were working on, but it was slow going. They were more than happy to answer any questions about objects and were quite knowledgeable.
The second floor of the museum was a new collection of household and farm items, mostly from 19th and early 20th centuries. There were many examples of horse-drawn plows and hay mowers, as well a collection of various types of sleighs. There were also old household appliances from hand-cranked washing machines to mid-60s TVs.
In all it was an interesting museum in an interesting building. It was a large mid-century modern building, unlike anything we’ve seen in Newfoundland. It started out as the Yugoslav pavilion at the 1967 Montreal Expo. After the expo ended, the building was disassembled and shipped to Newfoundland. It sat for awhile awaiting reassembly and while it was waiting many of the carefully placed labels indicating where each piece went weathered away. It took a bit of effort to figure it all out, but the building was re-erected with no leftover parts.
After we finished at the museum it was nearly lunch time, so we drove to a quiet location along the harbor and lunched in Speedy. We had a nice shorebird show as we ate lunch, seeing, among others, a small group of Ruddy Turnstones pecking among the rocks on the shore, our girst in Newfoundland.
After lunch, it was only a few more miles to the Horse Brook RV Park in Fortune. It isn’t a big or fsncy park, but it does have electricity and showers. The sites are in an open field and just a doulble line of graveled serviced sites and two grassy fields for tents.
It is about a mile from the waterfront and ferry dock and we plan to leave Speedy at the RV park and walk to the ferry. We noticed that there were two routes one that just walked into town via the road and another that was a trail along the river to the waterfront. It was time to test them out.
We walked into town on the road, an okay walk, but not too interesting, taking almost 30 minutes. When we got to town, we stopped into the ferry office to find out about checking in. It turned out we could do it right then and get our boarding passes for the morning. This meant there was one lessthing to do in the morning. We then went looking for the best coffe shop in town, as recommended by the official 2018 provincial visitor guide. We eventually found that it had been in the same building as the ferry office, but was out of business. This is the second time we’ve gone looking for a highly recommended or reviewed coffe shop only to find it gone.
We took the trail back to the campground. Not only was it more scenic, it was significantly quicker.
The rest of the afternoon, we stayed around the campsite watching the park fill up. I was talling with the park mamager later in the day and found out that this was a weekly occurrence as people came for two nights to take the only scheduled day trip to St. Pierre.
Tomorrow we are off to France.
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