The Hellen Family: Playing on the rocks

Today we were going to take the ferry over to Bell Island from Portugal Cove (about 20 min from our house) but when we got there the wait to get on the ferry was 2 hours. We ended up not waiting in line to go to Bell Island headed back to St. John's, stopping at a roadside bakery along the way, Tilt House Bakery, where a woman was spinning yarn on the front porch and a couple other people spinning pottery on the other side. Inside the bakery was a lot of yummy looking food; breads, cookies, pies, sandwiches, soups, and of course pastries. It all looked good and smelled really good. We all picked out one item to eat on our little hike that we decided to take along the coast near the town of Torbay. After the bakery we drove to Torbay where we walked along the east coast trail to an area with a lot of rocks to play on and some streams flowing into the bay and tide pools to play in. When we got to the coast the fog had moved in, the wind had increased and it was chilly. Fortunately we had brought some warm clothes so we were not too cold on the trail. Some of us stayed on the trail, because we are not able to bend to climb the rock faces. Most of us were more adventurous and climbed the rock walls and did a lot exploring. This is a place I am sure we will go back to. On our walk back to the car Paul noticed a LARGE splash in the ocean off in the distance. We stopped to watch and see what it was or if it would happen again. It turned out there were some whales in the water. They were breaching the surface and making big splashes. We were pretty far away and could only make out the large splash and an occasional black thing exploding from the water. I had to crop the pictures in pretty close, so they are fuzzy, wish we had my long distance camera lens, but who knew we would see whales today. By the time we were headed back to the car the fog had lifted and it was warming up. Such a fun day!