Autumn in Iowa

I love autumn in the Midwest. My son gave us fresh homegrown tomatoes, apples and zucchini squash. I like zucchini best in a bread so I tried a new recipe for pineapple zucchini bread this morning. Tomatoes were used in salads and for BLTs. The cinnamon applesauce is great too.

The corn and soybean fields are turning yellow but we are waiting for the leaves to change. From our living room window, we watched two deer walk the fence line.

The weather is mild with temperatures in the 50's Fahrenheit at night and 70's during the day.

We are in Iowa visiting with kids, grandkids, brothers, sisters and my parents. We will help my parents move into Fair Haven in Pella. It is an independent living facility but the next building is assisted living and another building is a nursing home.

It’s a good time to do fall cleaning since we can store things in my daughter’s basement. It’s fun to go shopping with Karol and redo the RV. I bought the flowers at Michaels and new rugs at Kohls. The bedspread was bought in Shipshewana, Indiana at the Amish flea market a month ago.

We will help mom to celebrate her 90th Birthday on Oct. 3 and go to my nephew's wedding a week later. When we move, it will be to go to Texas.

RV/MH Hall of Fame

Sorry about not sending emails or blogs lately. We had very limited Internet coverage in Newfoundland. Then we had no coverage while traveling to Elkhart, Indiana to get the windshield fixed before it fell out completely. (Little edges were raised on the glass but it stayed intact in the scotch tape.) Friday our windshield was replaced! It is beautiful! We are now in Illinois visiting with friends.

While we waited for the work to be done on the RV, we went to the new RV/MH Hall of Fame near Elkhart, Indiana. Terry took this overview of one section of the vintage RVs. The kitchens and bathrooms are sure different today. In one RV, the driver’s chair was a $35 “accessory”.

The dark blue RV is the one that Mae West used in 1931. The sign said that “This 1931 Chevrolet based custom made house car was one of the enticements offered by Paramount Studios to get Mae West to leave the Vaudeville circuit and make movies for them. It is designed as a chauffeur driven lounge and not as a ‘camper’ unit. It features a small hot plate stove, an icebox, and a small table to enjoy lunch or a spot of tea. It was used for several years to transport Miss West from her home or hotel to the shooting location. The story indicates she had a rocking chair on the back porch where she could enjoy the breeze when appropriate.”

I spoke with Al Hesselbart who is an author and historian and works at the RV/MH Hall of Fame about my RV books. Guess what? He wanted my books for the RV/MH library! That means that my books with stories by Terry Hager, Joan Pomeroy, Bill Miller, Jerry Leroy, Michele Quau and myself are in the RV/MH Hall of Fame.

Wildflowers

Most of these wildflowers were photographed near the Rose Blanche Lighthouse in southwestern Newfoundland in a small amount of soil since the area is very rocky. Signs with their names accompanied many of the flowers such as the buttercup so I think that I have named them correctly. But I’m not a botanist so if I have incorrectly named a flower, please send a comment to tell me what you think the correct name is.

The red Pitcher Plant is the provincial flower of Newfoundland. Bakeapples are a favorite jam plant that produces a white flower and an orange berry that resembles a raspberry with large seeds but has it’s own unique flavor. Next is the white three-toothed cinquefoil. Sometimes the bushy white Labrador Tea Rose is used in a beverage. The small Harebell or Blue Bell is very delicate. Another purple flower is the wild Iris. The yellow flower is the Common Buttercup. The large white Queen Ann’s Lace, Purple Clover, Daisies and Yellow Buttercup often cover the hillsides. The Fireweed beside me isn’t only grown in Alaska but you often see hillsides covered with it. As you can see from the two pictures, the fireweed booms that were beautiful are almost gone. That is a sign that COLD WEATHER IS COMING SOON. I’ve more stories and photos but they will need to be written on the blog later. It’s time to leave Newfoundland.

Vikings

At first I wasn’t too impressed with the Viking museum and its copies of artifacts and items behind glass of long ago.

The modern building of the L’anse Aux Meadows UNESCO World Heritage Site showed a sample of the recreated boat that brought the Vikings to North America. (It seemed very small.) Nails and a cloak pin that the archaeologist Anne Stine and her husband, Helge Ingstad used to authenticate the site as to a Viking 1000AD village site, were interesting. At first the distant sod houses didn’t look like much but on closer inspection, they were interesting. The site was more real as I walked the boardwalk to the recreated houses and met the enactors near the sites where the artifacts were found. They not only showed us what life was like 1000 years ago but also invited us to handle the reproduced artifacts. I could see them weave and make yarn and even look through the fence and see the icebergs like the Vikings did. But I think that Terry looks a little too happy to be handling an axe.

Churches Near Water

I wondered why so many of the churches we have seen are built by water. When I saw a photo of a bride, dressed for her wedding, getting on a boat to go to the church; I realized that a boat was the usual mode of transportation.

I was told that most of the roads that are in Newfoundland have been built in the last 50 or 60 years. Most of the churches were built long before then. It makes sense that when your mode of transportation is via water that the churches are located conveniently beside it.

We were riding a ferryboat to Fogo Island when I met a family who was returning to the island where the parents lived when they were children. Somehow the father brought the conversation to religion. I asked what churches were on the island. He said that most churches are Anglican, United Church of Canada and Roman Catholic and that their social life was centered around the church they attended. The upper class attended the Anglican, the middle class the United Church of Canada and the poorer people, which included most of the Irish, attended the Roman Catholic. He was Anglican and married a Roman Catholic. He commented, “My family wasn’t happy with that.”

I noticed that most cemeteries, even those that aren’t close to a church building, are named for a particular denomination. I wonder if this causes problems in families even after they are dead.

Newfoundland has many lighthouses along its shoreline. Some of them are still operating today but they are automatic now rather than having a lighthouse keeper.

Since I didn’t have Internet for so long, I took lots of pictures that are in one big group. Therefore I’m not putting chronological pictures on the blog but rather impressions of Newfoundland.

Most people won’t care where a particular lighthouse is located so I’m not spending the time through the Newfie literature to locate them. If you want to know where a particular lighthouse is located, I will do research on it and try to tell you. Email me or leave a comment.

We are going on the road again so I probably won't have internet until after we arrive back in Nova Scotia which is scheduled for August 21.

Newfie Lighthouses