Excursions
We are planning a range of different excursions, from full-day (i.e., morning & afternoon) trips that involve a few hours of bus travel to one or more sites of interest, to a multi-hour boat trip to an island ecological reserve, to full-day and half-day combination walking and bus tours of St. John's and the surrounding area.
The information below is representative of the excursions. Exactly what form each excursion will take will depend somewhat on levels of interest and hence numbers of attendees to be accommodated on each tour.
Some of the excursions, well, really just the “fossil” ones, will be restricted in terms of numbers of people who can go on them.
Excursion 1: Super old fossils!
One possible excursion is to Mistaken Point UNESCO World Heritage Site.
“Touch the Prehistoric Past … Visit the exact location where ‘life got big’ … Walk amongst the world’s richest collection of Ediacaran fossils and explore the rugged coastal beauty of Mistaken Point and it’s surrounding neighbours."
For Mistaken Point's web-site please go here.
This will involve a two-hour bus trip to the extreme south-east corner of the Avalon peninsula (see map below), plus a 30-minute walk to the actual surface with the fossils (overlooking the ocean).
There is a very restrictive cap on the total number of people visiting the site in any one day. Because of this, we might not actually offer this as one of the Wednesday excursions.
(If you're like me and not really sure what “Ediacaran” implies, well … really, really old, specifically, 565 million years old!)
There is a second location with Ediacaran fossils, in Upper Island Cove on Conception Bay, recently found by researchers at Memorial University (more information here & here). A second “fossil” excursion would be a custom guided bus & walking tour to this site (about a one-hour bus ride from St. John's). There is more flexibility in terms of numbers for this site, and so this might be the one “fossil” excursion that we offer.
Excursion 2: Boat tour
A boat tour of roughly four hours duration around the islands making up Witless Bay Ecological Reserve (Gull, Green, Great, and Pee Pee Islands) that “teem with bird life.” (More information here). The boat tour departs from Bay Bulls, which is a half-hour bus ride to the south of St. John's. (See map below.)
Again, interest and hence numbers will determine the exact format of the tour. If we have a hundred or so people interested in this tour, then we can charter a boat to ourselves.
Excursion 3: 'Round the Bay
There are two possibilities for tours “round the bay” with one or other, or both, going ahead depending on numbers.
One will visit Brigus (see map below, and pictures to the right) and other "picturesque outport communities that sprinkle the shores of Conception Bay; a region teeming with amazing stories about ancient pirates, WW2 submarine attacks, the dawn of transatlantic aviation, arctic exploration, and an Irish migration like no other in the world". This is a full-day (i.e., morning & afternoon) bus tour involving frequent stops at sites of interest.
The other is a “Taste of Newfoundland” tour that showcases St.John's and Newfoundland's culinary and brewing specialties as much as the local coastal scenery.
Excursion 4: Geo-history tour of St. John's and surroundings
We shall arrange for a selection of half-day local tours that involve a combination of walking and bussing.
In St. John's we'll visit Cabot Tower and Signal Hill (from where Marconi did the first trans-Atlantic radio transmission), explore a cliff-side World War II gun battery, visit the Geo Centre, along with Quidi Vidi Village, “Jellybean Row”, Government House, and the Roman Catholic Basilica.
This day, i.e., the Wednesday of our Workshop, is also the day of St. John's Regatta, a rowing competition on Quidi Vidi lake. This is a public holiday in St. John's, with all sorts of attractions, not just the rowing, down at Quidi Vidi Lake. One option, as part of a “make your own adventure," is to combine the experience of the Regatta with the walking or bus tour.
Outside of St. John's, there'll be a visit to Cape Spear, the eastern-most point that one can get to on the North American continent (see map below; more information about Cape Spear Lighthouse National Historic Site here).
