Today my church participated in an event for migrant workers and their children at the Good Samaritan Mission out in Wimauma. They had food and some variety of medical care (looked like vaccinations, I think) for the parents, and school supplies, popcorn, cotton candy, and all sorts of festivities for the children. There was face-painting, hair-cutting, magic shows, balloon animals, and all manner of fun. I think they even tried to have a soccer game, but the sun was brutal, and that didn’t last for very long.
Archive for the ‘Trip Report’ Category
Good Samaritans
Monday, August 3rd, 2009A Last Day Of Travel
Thursday, July 16th, 2009Today I finally made it home. Got up at 02:00 Newfoundland time, or half past midnight here. Had breakfast, packed, got on a plane. Got off in Toronto, got on another one and came to Tampa. Now I’m back in Bradenton, and got to see family and such again. Even got to eat at Taco Bell again (not a single one in Newfoundland). Now I just have to try and catch up on sleep: starting to feel the jet lag pretty bad…
Rainy Morning
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009Alas, the weather did in my plan to photograph the sunrise this morning. I woke up to rain, followed by heavy fog. So, no sunrise photo, but I still walk away from Newfoundland with a pretty good bunch of photographs, so I’m happy. Now I just have to get on the plane tomorrow, and I’ll be home.
Changing Schedules
Monday, July 13th, 2009Another relatively uneventful day, most of it spent trying to cope with the results of sleeping from 19:00 last night to 4:00 this morning (although not nearly as much of that time as I would like was actually spent sleeping). In any case, I ended up mighty tired most of the day. Now I’m just trying to stay awake until I can finall crash at about 19:00 tonight, gonna aim for a 3:00 wakeup tomorrow. Then it’ll be off to bed at 18:00 and up at 2:00 to get ready for my flight Wednesday.
The Joys Of Geotagging
Sunday, July 12th, 2009Not a whole lot happened today: it turned into a day off of sorts. I spent a little while geotagging on Flickr, which I’ve found to be wonderfully amusing. You just drag photos from a strip onto a map of the world, and it marks their locations. Then you can see all your photos on a map, and other peoples’ photos from the same areas. Admittedly, it’s going to take a while to go back and find where I made all two hundred photos in my library, but it should be awfully amusing to look at the map afterwards.
Cellars and Puffins
Saturday, July 11th, 2009We drove over to Elliston today, which is further up North on the coast, and saw some more puffins, and some root cellars. Since Elliston is the root cellar capital of the world, apparently, I’ll address those first. A root cellar is basically a basement without a house attached to it, dug into a hill. They look a lot like the hobbit houses from the Lord of the Rings movies, except that a gnome could live in them instead of a hobbit. Well, and they have no windows and only one door. In fact, they’re nothing like a house at all, other than the outer appearance. Inside they’re just single, dark rooms that stay nice and cool during the Summer underground. Some of them are centuries old, and now a lot of them are open to the public. They look nice and dark and cavernous, so I decided to go ahead and set up a couple of lights inside and take some shots.
Vegan Pizza Redux
Friday, July 10th, 2009Today we went to St. Johns, which turned out pretty well. It’s pretty much the only big-ish city in Newfoundland, and we found a nice little vegetarian restaurant there called The Sprout. I had a lentil burger, which was alright (a little dry), but they also had a curried chickpea dish, which was just delightful. They also had some vegan deserts, which were pretty great. After that, we went on to a Dominion grocery store, which was pretty impressive. The place is more or less the size of a Wal-Mart, but almost entirely devoted to foodstuffs. They have a natural foods section that could almost put Whole Foods to shame, and I was able to pick up some Amy’s prepackaged dinners (here’s hoping they’ll turn out good), some soy yogurt, soy ice cream, and granola. But most importantly, we found that they had Follow Your Heart’s Vegan Gourmet Mozarella, and some frozen semi-fresh pizza dough (vegan) in the bakery section. So I picked up a block of the cheese, a couple of crusts, some veggie pepperonis, and went about making a vegan pizza tonight.
Out On The Bay
Thursday, July 9th, 2009Today we got up and went out for a little trip to a park, where we walked through some woods and down to the coast. There were ruins at the bottom of an old, old town that apparently got washed away in some great storm. There were foundations left for an awful lot of buildings, and they tended to be very small (think around 10′ x 8′ for an entire house). Generally all that was left was basically a rectangular frame of stone, but in some cases there would be a little bit of a chimney left over.
Not-So-Wild-Life
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009Today we made our way over toward Bay Bulls, on the East side of Newfoundland. Along the way we ran into a nature park of sorts, where they keep animals who have been rehabilitated but aren’t fit for release into the wild in enclosures. It was set out in the woods, with a boardwalk going through the whole thing and animal areas set up throughout. They varied in size and nature, but in general it was far from a zoo. It was a wild habitat for the animals, it’s just that they had enclosures preventing them from leaving it. For instance, the snow owl to the right was in a big fenced-off section of the park that the boardwalk actually went right through, with unlocked gates at either end (apparently he wasn’t a flight risk).
Gobs of Gannets
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009Today I woke up on the ferry. Sleeping on a ferry is most certainly no pleasant affair. The bunks were tiny, and crowded probably 20 or 30 in a room. Without any place to stow luggage, I had to stick my bag up on the bunk with me by my feet, which left me sort of curled up in an odd position. Consequently, I woke up with knees aching from being bent all night long, after a night of none-too-restful sleep. I got up and had a little time to wander around before docking, and then we got into the car and drove out into Newfoundland.






