June 18A beautiful morning! Still a bit cool, but blue sky bodes well for a great day for walking all over a Historical Site.
We were a bit early for opening, fortunately there were items that needed to be checked out…. park rangers let us in early, probably to keep us out of trouble.
Castle Hill National Park is the remains of a fort built to protect the community of Placentia NL which was the Capital of the island in the 1700’s, heavily fought over by the British and French for its profitable cod harvest. There is enough of the stone walls left to give an excellent idea of how it was built. Two stone walls were built 14ft tall and 14 ft apart and then filled with dirt to repel cannon fire. The entire complex had up to 60 cannons overlooking the bay and channel.
We certainly can appreciate why they selected this site for a lookout 
Once we were done with the park and finished chatting with many other visitors who were attracted to our license plate. We did a little more highway touring before arriving at the ferry terminal.
We stopped in Placentia for gas, wasn’t expecting to find a rainbow crosswalk!
Marine Atlantic has a 2 hour before sailing rule. At least the terminal is heated. It remained sunny but cooled off close to the ocean again.
A great time to chat with many fellow travellers, including the gent from Didsbury who took our pic at Cape Spear. A lovely Newfoundlander couple who are land shopping in the mainland. They were shocked we had a hard time finding all their favourite meals on menus. I had heard of jiggs dinner, cod tongue, cod cheeks(which was not recommended) but only the cod tongue was found on local menu. We did eat a lot of excellent fried cod, so we can say we did enjoy a provincial favourite. Met up again on the ship over a drink or two that evening. This very modern looking bar had a very old country music band playing. Anyone who was a Hank Williams fan would have recognized most of it.
June 19, The sea had been rough between 1 and 3 am, apparently waves reaching 4 metres (we found the data later). Scot tried to take some video of the waves during the night, too dark to be very effective. Raining quite hard in the morning, leaving all the travellers a little glum getting ready to disembark. A bit of a scramble for us, as no passengers allowed below decks until fully docked. All the bikes then have to have tie downs removed and we needed to put gear on. Quite a few cars were off before we bikers had ourselves sorted out.
A lot of low lying cloud as we climb out of the harbour into the hills.
We missed a heavy rainfall by a very short timeline. Trucks sure kicked water off the pavement. Black clouds fortunately headed away from us, leaving us a promise of future sunshine.
Central Nova Scotia TCH is lined with forest and lupines in the ditches. No less than 4 colours in the patch we found at a rest stop. Temps closing in on normals this afternoon!
So nice to take one of a multitude of layers off.
Today somehow I moved faster than my camera and most of my pics were too blurry to use. oops.
canyouwingit 