L’Anse aux Meadows
Today the silver surfers took to the Buick and headed off on the highway to l’Anse aux Meadows. Small matter that the Buick turned out to be a Chevy and a compact one at that. One of the silver surfers actually managed to qualify for a museum entry concession on grounds of seniority.
Our plan was to visit the UNESCO World Heritage centre at L’Anse aux Meadow which is where the first Europeans came ashore in the New World a thousand years ago.
A Viking expedition, searching for wood, wool and trade, had fetched up in northern Newfoundland where they built a temporary settlement. They didn’t stay long but they brought iron smelting technology with them and left behind artefacts that have been painstakingly excavated since the 1960’s.
The site is beautifully presented and, on a fine summer’s day, is a riot of wild flowers leading down to the shores of Belle Isle Strait. Replica huts built of sod stood within a sun bleached palisade and a boardwalk threaded past the ancient hearths and foundations. A great experience.
Back in the Chevy we headed to the Norseman’s museum which is where Snnori, a replica Viking longboat, came ashore after it’s epic 88 day voyage in 1998 from Greenland to Baffin and onto Labrador before crossing the Straits of Belle Isle. It now rests in a purpose built, turf roofed museum and is the proudest exhibit in this wonderful little Norseman’s museum.
With the culture box ticked it was then time to turn to things technical. For some reason North Americans insist on doing their electricity differently and, in order to hook into shore power here, we needed to tweak the boat a little.
We bought a Canadian mains extension lead to covert into our shore hookup only to discover that Canadian wiring colour conventions are different so Mr Google was called in to help.
Then we had to reset the jumpers on the isolating transformer so that we could step up the volts from North American 110 to European 240. The transformer manual wasn’t entirely helpful so Joe helped me think through the logic as we measured input and output voltages before throwing the switch that connected the boat’s systems to the Canadian grid.
All went well. No blue smoke, no smell of burning and, low and behold, SHIMSHAL mutated into a North American boat.