The Viking Trail

The expanse of geography and the number of sights and stops along the way mean this is no Sunday Drive along Route 430.

The first stop is Gros Morne National Park where mother nature spent millions of years carefully sculpting the landscape into glorious fjords and magnificent ancient mountains, the likes of which are found nowhere else on earth.

The United Nations designated the park a World Heritage Site because this is the place where scientists found the hard and conclusive evidence to support the theory of drifting continents.

A trip across the Tablelands is like commuting on Mars. Eerie orange mountains rise from the flat, barren terrain to twist perceptions of distance and size.

It's strange and inviting and there's nothing like a wonderful big hike up the trails that finger out over the mountain.

Trout River is at the end of the road that slices through the tablelands. Pencil in some time for the town and the two hour boat tour up Trout River Pond. It's actually a land locked fjord surrounded by the Tableland Mountains, and about 450 million years ago it's where North American and European continents had an earth shattering fender bender. The mountains towering over the water were heaved up by the continental collision.

Along the shoreline bears and moose keep pace with the tour boat and disappear up the slopes.

This unique landscape more than just dazzles. It inspires. Woody Point is home to painters and potters who reflect their surroundings in the art you'll find for sale in the town. The village is at the end of Route 431 on the shores of Bonne Bay, where you can see Norris Point staring back across the water.

The town is back on Route 430 and, just past its neighbor, Neddy Harbour, is the highest picnic table in Newfoundland. From the top of South East Hill you can see the peaks of the Long Range Mountains and the East Lomond Valley.

In Rocky Harbour you'll find restaurants, boat tours, giftshops and motels, if sleeping outdoors in the park's slew of campgrounds is a little too adventurous for you.

But a sense of adventure is a requirement if you want to go up Gros Morne Mountain. It's a day's worth of hiking up James Callaghan Trail to get to the 806 metre summit where you may have to pull out a sweater depending on the mood of the mountain. Conditions can quickly change along the 16 kilometre trail and along the way you'll find plants and animals that are usually found much further north. Patience is essential if you want a glimpse of an Arctic Hare.

You can see it all from the top of the park's highest peak. It's not known how many relationships hit a rocky point when one partner was some stunned and forgot to put the camera in the backpack. Leaving the mountain without a photographic portrait from the peak is an awful shame that can't be shrugged off with a store- bought postcard.

So pat your pockets for the camera as you hike the trail into Western Brook Pond for another two-hour boat tour.

The Norwegians like to brag about their fjords so much they made their country famous for it. Newfoundland has its share of spectacular fjords, it's just that we don't talk about them so much.

Newfoundland also gets a bum rap for its beaches. "They're all rocky, there's no sand," some say. For one thing, this is Newfoundland, not Disneyland and there are spectacular sandy beaches if you know where to find them.

Just north of Cow Head are the rolling dunes of Shallow Bay where on a hot day the sand between your toes feels every bit as warm as the sand between the toes of a tourist in Florida. Of course, at Shallow Bay you don't have to pay for a cabana (there are none) and no one will shoot you for laying your towel too close to them in the stifling beach crowd (there is none).

When Jacques Cartier anchored around here in 1534 maybe he took a quiet stroll over these same dunes. Shallow Bay is the last stop in Gros Morne National Park before the Viking Trail continues north.

The park doesn't have a lock on natural beauty. Just north of Parsons's Pond look for the signs that lead to The Arches where the thousands of years of the the ocean's handiwork created large arches through solid rock.

Salmon and trout thrive in the rivers, lakes and ponds where caribou wander the shores. It's been this way since the Maritime Archaic People hunted here over 3,000 years ago.

The Port aux Choix National Historic Site is where ancient burial grounds were uncovered in the late 1960's. But it was more than bones that told archeologists about these long-forgotten people. Unearthed tools and other artifacts revealed the Maritime Archaic's artistic sophistication.

And after the Maritime Archaic People mysteriously disappeared, others inhabited the same area.

Dorset Eskimoes occupied this and other rich fishing and hunting grounds along the Newfoundland and Labrador coast.

There is only one road across the wild interior of the Great Northern Peninsula. Route 432 carries you away from the old French gravemarkers in Plum Point and over a landscape that still shows the scars of the last ice age and the horizon is pelted with giant boulders left behind by moving glaciers.

At the end of Canada Bay you'll find the town of Roddickton. Continue south to Englee or detour north along dirt roads to Conche, Croque and Grandois.

There may be a road but life here is isolated from the rest of the world. And that may be why many of the area's young people are leaving home and never coming back.

It's the sad reality of life in rural Newfoundland that is often unspoken. With the cod fish off limits since 1992, work is scarce in many small towns and people are looking outside their communities and outside of the province for work.

When cod was king and work was plentiful, the tiny towns on the peninsula would have been the next best thing to heaven. But now they struggle to survive in the face of a changing economy and government restraint.

You should double check and call ahead for any and all ferry schedules and attractions you want to see because no matter how the government likes to dress it up, cutbacks do take a toll on things.

Back on the western edge of the Great Northern Peninsula is the town that will be your port of call for a quick sailing trip across the Strait of Belle Isle to Labrador.

You can see the great land across the water without squinting too much on a clear day. Icebergs are a common sight on the Strait in late spring and early summer as the ferry sails to the Québec/Labrador border town of Blanc Sablon.

Of course in some corners of Quebec, people like to believe there is no border. Some government sanctioned maps get released showing the vast Labrador territory as a part of the province of Quebec. It's either wishful thinking or a clever inside prank that always makes headlines in Newfoundland.

The road weaves through L'Anse au Clair and on to Forteau for the annual Bakeapple Folk Festival in August. There's music, dancing and bakeapples. The orange berries have their own distinct flavour and aroma described as "sock-like" by those who have not come to love the province's exotic delicacy. You can have them in the traditional jam or pie or takle them uptown in a cheesecake or on ice cream drizzled with liquor.

"Oh me ducky, that's some good," your taste buds tell you and roughly translated that means "yum". The word "some" turns up in the oddest places in Newfoundland.

Back wherever you came from you might say, "I'd like to buy some subway tokens." Newfoundlanders say, "That's some big iceberg."

And if you can't understand it then you're some shockin' slow today.

Something to ponder along the ugly big Pinware River just north of L'Anse au Loup is the Labrador way to correctly say ugly. While you might think the salmon are pretty big around here, the Labradorian will tell you they're "ugly big".

Athough you may want to think twice before testing it out in singles bars back on the mainland because someone may not appreciate a complement about their "ugly pretty" hair. Unless he or she is from Labrador.

Red Bay is the last stop on Route 510. It's here that fishermen from the Basques region of Spain set up a whaling station in the 16th century.

Year after year the Basques braved the dangerous North Atlantic to work in this remote cranny on the edge of the New World. The ice-cold water of Red Bay are the final resting place for sunken ships that date back to the 1550's.

The history is laid out at the interpretation centre but a walk around Saddle Island is required to set your mind back many centuries to a time when this outpost played a vital role in European economics. It's only since the discovery of its past that the world is once again paying attention to Red Bay.

And while its the end of this road, Route 430 on the other side of the Strait of Belle Isle takes a detour further back in time.

North from the ferry terminal past Nameless Cove and Eddies Cove, the road swings up to L'Anse aux Meadows at the tip of the Great Northern Peninsula.

A thousand years ago the Vikings established a settlement here. Bjarni Herjolfson stumbled across Newfoundland when his ship was blown off course.

A few years later Lief Eiriksson set out for the New World. He and his crew of 35 men set up in Vinland but sailed back to Greenland after a year. Other Vikings followed marking some important firsts in the history of European settlement in North America.

The first meeting of Native people and Europeans happened here when Lief Eiriksson's brother was killed by natives. And it was here that the first child of European parents was born in the New World.

The Vikings lived in their sod huts in L'Anse aux Meadows 500 years before Christopher Columbus finally managed to "discover" the New World. That's why this is a United Nations World Heritage Site.

St. Anthony was home base for one of Newfoundland's early 20th century heroes. Dr. Wilfred Grenfell came to Newfoundland with more than just ideas about medicine. He was also a writer with plans to improve the health and economy of the outports of Northern Newfoundland and Labrador.

And through the Grenfell Mission, the good doctor left a lasting mark on the province's history and on the people of northern Newfoundland and Labrador.

Back at the base of the Great Northern Peninsula the Trans Canada curves northeast out of Deer Lake to the intersection of Route 420. That road swerves up through the wilderness past Sop's Arm to Jackson's Arm. A ferry ride up through White Bay ends in Harbour Deep.

This fishing town at the end of Orange Bay is a long way from anywhere, without a road leading out of town. It's places like this with the water as a welcome mat that give you an appreciation for the Newfoundland that used to be, and in a lot of ways, still is.