Port Au Choix and the Great Northern Peninsula, Briefly: RVing Newfoundland with Kids and Teens

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Travel dates: June, 2023

North of Gros Morne National Park, Highway 430–aka The Viking Trail– hugs the western coast of Newfoundland for 150 miles or so up the Great Northern Peninsula, before turning eastward, finally ending in the town of St. Anthony. The drive is beautiful and the road surprisingly good by Newfoundland standards. People travel this road to take the ferry and make their way to Labrador and the Trans-Labrador highway, to take in the excellent whale-watching and iceberg spotting in St. Anthony, or to geek out with some history at L’Anse aux Meadows, where archaeological remains of a Viking encampment mark the first known site of European contact with the Americas.

We fully intended to do some of these things (everything but the Labrador part), but June got in our way. We made it as far as Port Au Choix, two hours north of Rocky Harbour and three hours south of L’anse aux Meadows. We spent one lovely but very cold and windy day there, looked at the forecast for L’anse aux Meadows, which promised to add rain to the cold and wind, and decided to bail on it in favor of a few extra days in the comparatively balmy Gros Morne National Park. The other major deciding factor was our realization that most of the programming at L’anse aux Meadows doesn’t start until July. No fireside storytelling with Vikings! No Viking themed escape room!

We enjoyed every bit of our extra Gros Morne time, but I remain mournful about not getting to see Viking stuff. This, incidentally, is a great example of how hard it is to find the perfect time to visit Newfoundland. June is great for icebergs but bad for costumed Viking interpreters. In Newfoundland, you can have everything, pretty much, but you can’t have it all in the same month.

At any rate, after our few days on the south side of Gros Morne, we made our way north to Port au Choix. It was just a three hour drive, and an incredibly scenic one. I was worried about wind since the road is so near the coast, but it was smooth going. The iffiest part of the drive for RVers is the road that leads to Rocky Harbour on the north side of Gros Morne; there are some long steep grades here, but it’s all manageable.

There are a number of stops on the way that looked intriguing, but we opted to stop for lunch and prettiness at Arches Provincial Park.

This is pretty much just a roadside stop with a parking area and these very cool…arches. But it was easily accessible with the trailer in tow, and it was a great place to stretch our legs:

And then onward to Port au Choix! We decided on a stop here because of Port au Choix National Historic Site; I’m not really one to pass up a Parks Canada site–we bought a pass after all! Port Au Choix preserves an archaeological site where artifacts from 6000 years of human habitation in the area were found, as well as as stark and beautiful landscape of limestone barrens.

I won’t do a full campground review here, because we didn’t stay in a campground. We stayed in the parking lot of the Sea Echo Motel, where they have several spots with w/e hookups for $20/night. The main camping spot in town seems to be Oceanside RV Park, in a lot attached to the local Lions Club. We tried here first, but were having trouble getting in touch with anyone over the off-season (not at all uncommon in Newfoundland), so we panicked and booked at Sea Echo. When the guy from Oceanside eventually returned our call and we told him the situation, he said, “oh, yeah, that’s my aunt’s place!” Also not at all uncommon in Newfoundland. At any rate, we needn’t have worried. With very few exceptions, campgrounds don’t fill up in Newfoundland and booking far in advance is not necessary. We were the only RV at Sea Echo for the entirety of our two night stay. Which was probably good because that parking lot could get crowded fast if many others were there. But as it was we had plenty of space:

There’s no dump station on site, but there is one (for a small fee) at the aforementioned Oceanside RV Park, so we stopped there on our way out of town. We had hoped the Sea Echo would be less windy than Oceanside (where sites are directly on the water), but I think pretty much everywhere in Port au Choix is windy a lot of the time; the town is on a narrow peninsula, so there’s ocean on both sides of you pretty much everywhere you go.

The hotel has a bar and restaurant attached; we didn’t try the restaurant but did have a drink in the bar one evening. It was a little sad and empty while we were there, but I imagine things are more lively on weekends. There are a lot of dandelions in Newfoundland. Here is Fergus pretending to pose amongst all the pretty flowers, but really he knew it was a travel day and time to get in the van, and he was trying to pretend it wasn’t happening. One of my favorite pictures of Fergus because it sums him up so perfectly: looking adorable and being an anxious disaster. My poor boy:

The Sea Echo is right in town, a very quick drive to the national park, and well-situated for walking and looking at the water:

We had a fun meal at the Anchor Cafe in town, because it’s shaped like a boat:

Incidentally, the cuisine in the western half of Newfoundland is not particularly varied: it’s mostly fried fish. There are interesting restaurants to be found here and there, but, aside from in St. John’s, you really need to seek them out. Or you can just be happy that your restaurant is shaped like a boat.

Port au Choix has a decent-sized grocery store, unlike anywhere we had found in Gros Morne, so we stocked up on food here.

Our first afternoon in town we checked out the Port au Choix visitor center. One of the guys working at the desk there gave us an introduction to the site and handed Abe an Xplorers dog tag before we could even ask for the book. Xplorer tags are a little more loosey goosey then junior ranger badges. You don’t even have to raise your right hand and promise to protect the national parks!

The visitor center has a nice museum, but it’s a little sparse because all the artifacts from tombs have been removed (owing to how we no longer collectively think tomb-raiding is cool), so there are a lot of empty display cases. Why do we still get to look at mummies, I wonder? (oh. Turns out people are indeed talking about this). Anyway. You can still read a lot about the human and natural history of the area, and look out the windows at the pretty landscape:

Then we made the very short drive over to the lighthouse. You can’t go up in the lighthouse, but you can explore the rocky shoreline around it, which is also great. We noted a lot of tour buses here, unloading swarms of passengers who would spend a few cold, windy minutes gawking at the lighthouse before climbing back on the bus. My perception is that a lot of people stop by Port au Choix for just an hour or two on their way to somewhere else, but we found it most definitely worthy of a full day’s visit.

As we were leaving that evening we had one of our favorite wildlife sightings, in the form of this fox who hung out right next to our van for quite awhile, no doubt hoping we would go away and leave it alone. I’m still not sure what kind of fox it was. Here is my blurry picture:

We returned the next day to tackle the Dorset Trail, a 6km out and back trail that takes you across the limestone barrens and through the forest to the archaeological site Phillip’s Garden. We didn’t make it all the way because we had so many other things we wanted to do in the area; we turned around after climbing the stairs to the ocean overlook. My notes from this hike say, “limestone barrens, rare plants, forest, ocean views…10/10.”

The park maintains a few different geocaches, and we found some of them. Just doing some geocaching on this cliff overlooking a startlingly blue ocean:

There are a few different trails in Port au Choix, and we wished we could have done them all. We did walk along the Port Riche Trail, which runs along the coast from the lighthouse to Phillip’s Garden, for a bit before night started to threaten. Fossil!

And, back in town, we visited the French bread oven, where they make bread in this stone oven, just like old times. French old times.

You can sample the bread inside. It’s a little hard to figure out in advance how it all works, so I’ll give you a head’s up: once you walk inside someone immediately greets you and tells you that you can buy two rolls with jam and butter plus tea or coffee for $10. And then you might feel a little awkward, if you are us, just walking back out again, so you buy the rolls, even though your 10 year old doesn’t eat wheat. They are very good rolls. It’s not a bad deal or anything (and they refunded us $5 when they realized Abe couldn’t eat the bread)….but just so you know. We got there too late to watch the costumed interpreter (!) actually make the bread.

And, thus, filled up with bread, it was time to head back to Gros Morne for more exploring, north side style this time.