Back in colourful St Johns (after all our afternoon of wildlife in Newfoundland and Labrador), we dropped off the car at the hotel and proceed to traipse through St John’s on foot.
That’s the beauty of cities like St John’s, it’s a proper city but it’s so walkable that it feels a lot more intimate than one.
I’m a sucker for colours and boy does St John’s know how to deliver on the colour front.
It’s street after street filled with rows of colourful houses that, we decided to (figuratively) throw the map out of the window and just get lost in its colourful streets.
It was brilliant.
Newfoundlanders are a very warm bunch and before long, we found ourselves chatting away to some city locals, eager to give us tips for us to make the most of our time in the city.
Dinner that evening had us return to Chinched and I’m not even ashamed. Lol! I know I should be trying other places but the food was so good there and it was within walking distance that it was something of a no-brainer.
The following morning, on what was our final morning of the trip, we headed out to meet Lori of Cod Sounds, for a bit of food foraging, followed by lunch, before heading for the airport.
Now here’s a bit of a confession, I’m not the biggest fan of foraging, I tend to get distracted part way through and subsequently bored so I tend not to look to do it. Lloyd, on the other hand, is quite the opposite and finds everything about it so fascinating.
Despite my lack of enthusiasm for foraging, somehow (and I have to give huge credit to Lori for this), I had such an amazing time foraging for food!
I think it’s just how well she did it. She didn’t waste time explaining stuff I had no interest in and everything she did was with a purpose and a point. It felt very much like we were “shopping” in nature for stuff for our lunch which I loved. When she needed to, she explained why some of the stuff was necessary and how to select the right ones but it was just the perfect balance of information and activity.
She also grounded everything in how her family had done this for years and how the settlers from Europe (read: Ireland) had done this across several generations and something that could have been a dull afternoon became this fascinating insight into local customs, traditions and survival techniques.
Once we were done foraging we popped by Lori’s house by the lake she was renovating herself, where two ladies in the community (I think one might have been her in-law) were waiting for us all to have lunch together.
Oh, and lunch was sooooo good!
We dined on smoked fish, mushrooms, wild cabbage, stewed fish (cod) and even grilled moose – most of which was prepped right in front of us (asides from the stuff like smoked fish which was done in advance. Clearly it takes hours – maybe days? – to smoke fish properly. 😁).
We even had a dessert of wild berries and jams made from said berries.
One of my favourite things about the whole afternoon was also the conversation.
Getting to meet the locals, felt like such a privilege to find out even more about Newfoundland and Labrador (I realised relatively recently that – and maybe this is in part because I like to talk a lot – nattering away with locals is one of my absolute favourite things to do when we travel).
I love learning about stuff that they do that’s perhaps similar or even very different from what we might do in the same situation and for me (as pretentious as this sounds), feels like an opportunity to learn even more about the world.
I feel like these perspectives actually make you a much more tolerant, much wiser person and this is something I definitely don’t take for granted. (Okay, I am aware of how soppy this all sounds, I apologise – Hehehe! I just genuinely enjoyed spending time chatting away with these ladies).
To see us off on our merry way, Lori made us batches of wild spices, ground up with sea salt for us to make our own meals back at home!
Well, she put them together and we got to grind them (which means I’m taking full credit for making these 😄 even though I’d have had no idea what to put in them).
And just like that, it was time to head home.
Our time in Atlantic Canada, despite it being a week-long had felt fairly brief, I guess in part because we’d gotten to see so many parts of it over that week but it’s just left me wanting to come back for even longer to do it all again and then some more.
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