Moominmama's Adventures

Of baby turtles and petroglyphs... The first morning after Moominmama arrived in Kejimkujik National Park in southwestern Nova Scotia, calm waters on Jeremy's Bay off Lake Kejimkujik invited her to break out her folding kayak. Clear, calm mornings have proved ideal for exploring by boat, which is how the Mi'kmaq traveled here for thousands of years. In addition to being a national park, this is a historic site because it has been a crossroads for First Nation's people traveling between the Bay of Fundy, the Atlantic and this large interior lake.  The smaller lakes and rivers, combined with a couple portage points make it possible to travel across the land from the bay to the open Atlantic. It's also interesting for being different when it comes to foliage. On the coast are wind-battered spruce. Here inland it's white pine, beech and lots of birch. Petroglyphs can be found on certain rocks that jut into the water. One has four compass points and an arrow pointing tow...

In which Moominmama explores Newfoundland's biggest city, St. John's, and goes hiking on the Avalon and Bonavista peninsulas... Gray skies aren't uncommon on the eastern shore of Newfoundland, but the people who live here compensate by painting their homes in bright colors. While it's clearly a Newfoundland aesthetic now, there are a couple stories about why this tradition started  The first suggests fishermen used the same paint on their houses as on their boats so as not to waste any -- and since the boats were different colors, the houses were too. The other is that the row houses were painted varied colors so the fishermen didn't wander into the wrong house after a night at the pub! Newfoundland's fishing industry took a hard blow in 1992 when Canada implemented a moratorium on cod fishing because of severe overfishing, mostly by large international trawlers with technology that allowed them to harvest fish at an unprecedented rate for months at a time.  Fis...