After visiting western Newfoundland I crossed the island east to St. John’s, which I’ll cover on the next page.  I split my visit there in two so I could have an overnight trip to Trinity, northwest of St. John’s on the Bonavista Peninsula, which I’ll cover here.  This is St. Patrick’s, a Catholic church in Brigus.

Many little villages line Conception Bay west of St. John’s, and I wanted to stop by one of them on the way to Trinity.  Brigus happened to be the one closest to my route, and it turned out to be a good stop.  Narrow lanes and small streams lined with stone walls wind between the wooden homes in this quiet place.

Brigus was established over three centuries ago as a British fishing settlement.  Like so much of Atlantic Canada, it got caught up in the conflict between the British and the French, who burned it down twice around 1700.  Each time the settlement was rebuilt, and by the mid-1800s it had become an important seal fishery, with dozens of vessels and thousands of their crew passing through each year.  Today the village is modest, with a population under 800.

Like so much of Atlantic Canada, the population here is falling; a historic marker in the village note the population in 1996 as over 900 - that’s a 14 percent drop in just eleven years - and throughout my trip the locals talked of the number of their people heading west to work the very prosperous oil sands of Alberta.

The village’s most famous resident was Captain Robert Bartlett, an arctic explorer a century ago.  His 1830 home, Hawthorne Cottage, is today a national historic site and museum celebrated for its now rare cottage orné style.  The veranda ornamentation may look like metal, but it’s actually wood.

Inside the Bartlett family home, Hawthorne Cottage.  Bartlett made over twenty arctic voyages, was called the greatest ice navigator of the century, and was instrumental in helping Robert Peary reach the North Pole in 1909.

A hall cupboard upstairs at Hawthorne Cottage.  Beside the coffee and tea is Prince Albert in a can, the inspiration behind many a prank long ago.  The house is decorated as it might have been a century ago when Bartlett made his voyages.

Out back of The Country Corner, a modest restaurant and shop in Brigus.  After a big lunchtime bowl of chowder, blueberry pie was a must for dessert this day, as the Brigus Blueberry Festival has just ended.  The white octagonal contraption, seen all over Newfoundland, helps keep animals out of the trash before the garbage collectors arrive.

The Brigus waterfront, which leads into Conception Bay in the distance.  The coastline is so rocky that back in 1860, a Brigus captain had a miner blast a tunnel through some of the rock on shore not far from here so that he could easily reach his ship in the harbor.

Even with the unexpectedly long stay in Brigus, I managed to make it to Trinity by late afternoon, in time to take a handful of shots before sunset despite the heavy clouds rolling through.  This is a section of the St. Paul’s Anglican Church, built during the 1890s, in the middle of the village.

A crafts store in Trinity.  This village has a long history: the area was first explored in 1500 and a settlement established in 1558 by the British, making it one of the oldest places in North America - older than the oldest city in the United States, St. Augustine, in Florida.  It’s hard to believe now, but this village of a few hundred people once competed with St. John’s, population 100,000, for prominence in Newfoundland.

A home in Trinity converted into a bed-and-breakfast establishment.  Trinity is picture perfect; historic homes and businesses all seem extremely well maintained, and the entire village is as close to manicured as one is likely to get in Newfoundland - a surprising difference from the working fishing villages I visited earlier throughout Atlantic Canada.

Trinity seems far more focused on art than on fishing these days.  The Rising Tide Theatre here hosts a well-regarded performing arts festival throughout the summer, which includes productions of Shakespeare, and the products available in arts and crafts shops tend to be more upscale.

The Artisan Inn where I stayed also serves as a retreat, a studio, and a performing space for artists.  The loft above the dining room displayed the work of a recent in-residence artist, and I unfortunately missed by a few days a performance by one of Newfoundland’s most well-known singer-songwriters, Pamela Morgan.  The inn’s amiable owner, originally from The Netherlands, rightfully scolded me for spending so little time in Trinity - “One night?!” - and indeed, along with the Mahone Bay area of Nova Scotia, this is a place where I should have spent more time.  Certainly when I do return, I’ll stay here again; the Artisan Inn is an excellent place, right on the water, with the entire picturesque village and all its niceties right outside the front door.

Boats along the eastern shore of Trinity at sunset...

...with the village’s lighthouse in the distance.

A trip to Atlantic Canada would not be complete without puffins, and I found them the following morning a little further north, in Bonavista.  I had read somewhere that puffins might be found near the Cape Bonavista Lighthouse, and sure enough, hundreds were on a small island just across from it.  Though they’re graceless fliers, with wings slapping together as they work hard to remain airborne, they're great swimmers, and fun to watch as they look around quizzically while perched near their burrows.

The Cape Bonavista Lighthouse.  Newfoundland got its name from the explorer John Cabot (actually, Giovanni Caboto - he was Italian), who arrived in the “New Founde Lande” in 1497 and claimed it on behalf of Britain.  While it’s unknown exactly where he made landfall, many believe it was in this area.  Just seconds after taking this shot, the fog rolled in and the foghorn beside the lighthouse began blaring, signalling the end of photography for this part of the trip.