Time Warp

Like the house in the photo above, Trinity, Newfoundland, is a colorful place a long way from anything. We drove three hours north from St. John's to find this tiny town. It was once the center of the wildly profitable cod-fishing industry for Newfoundland. Then the cod fishing industry crashed, some 25 years ago, and Trinity reinvented itself as a time warp. No houses can be built except in the style of the 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s. Trinity is full of quaint B&Bs, museums, a walking tour, a pageant, a gourmet restaurant, and a theater troupe which stages plays based on local history.

We also took a break, between pageants, plays, and museum tours, to drive to Cape Bonavista, an hour north, to see the crashing surf, the lighthouse, and the place where John Cabot supposedly made his first landfall in the 1540s, while searching for the Northwest Passage for England. (We visited another John Cabot first landfall site in Nova Scotia, complete with similar statue, earlier in the trip.)

Back in Trinity, we got comfortable in the Campbell House, built in 1840, and furnished with antiques and pine siding on the walls.

We bought a combo ticket to the seven museums in town, including restored houses, a forge, and a general store. Townspeople wore period dress to show us around.

Gretta enjoyed the vintage sewing machine and kitchens, as well as the crocheted bedspread and trunk just like her Grandmother Eyring owned.

It was disconcerting to see a display of WWI hats and gas masks and then to pass a monument next to the church, honoring the Trinity men slain in WWI.

Local ladies knit and crochet during the long winters, and then sell their creations at a local craft shop.

We took part in the daily "pageant," during which visitors followed cast members to various spots in town and played "backup singers" to vignettes of local history. We performed the Newfoundland anthem at the beginning and close of the show, along with the cast. We also sang hymns during the mock funeral.

The narrators were two old guys telling Trinity's history--one an upstanding, patriotic Newfoundlander and the other a local cynic who liked his rum. The mock funeral was for Trinity boys and men who died while hunting seals, after a freak summer storm engulfed them.

We saw Richard Whitbourne, a "windbag" admiralty judge from England who held court in Trinity in the 1600s, and we watched a mock paternity trial from the 1700s.

We heard songs about the pain of marrying a sailor who is then lost at sea, and we overheard a discussion between two matrons bewailing the lot of women in the harsh life of Newfoundland. Gretta thought of her own Calder ancestry, including her great-great-great-grandfather, a fishing captain in Aberdeen, Scotland, who was lost at sea, leaving a wife and three children who ultimately immigrated to America.

And we watched a vignette about the politics and economics of the cod industry, managed by rich merchants from England.

The tiny Twine Loft Restaurant served a gourmet dinner of tomato soup with basil, green salad with borage and nasturtium blossoms, salmon, and lemon souffle.

We finished the day at a play, "Peter's Other War," about the struggles Newfoundlanders had, in 1956, deciding whether to become an independent country or a part of Canada.