Thursday Doors – October 5, 2017

Thursday Doors is a weekly feature allowing door lovers to come together to admire and share their favorite door photos from around the world. Feel free to join in on the fun by creating your own Thursday Doors post each week and then sharing it, between Thursday morning and Saturday noon (North American eastern time), by using the blue link-up button below. 

Viking Doors – L’Anse Aux Meadows – Newfoundland (part 2)

Viking explorer Leif Erikson

Across the road from the L’Anse aux Meadows National Historical Site on Newfoundland’s northern peninsula you’ll find the privately run Norstead Viking Village.

Designed to appeal to tourists already drawn in by viking lore to the authentic Parks Canada viking settlement, Norstead is a recreation of a typical Norse trading village similar to ones found in Greenland.

It’s set up like a working village with sheep and chickens, small boats for fishing, racks for drying fish, and everything a self-sufficient community would need to thrive out in the middle of nowhere.

Interpretive guides roam the site in period garb engaging with visitors and answering questions about the Norse lifestyle.

The sod-roofed structures on the site include a repair shop, a traders bazaar, a typical home, a church, and a traditional longhouse.

The longhouse is used as a boathouse for a 54 foot (16.2 m) replica of a viking sailing ship called a knarr. I wish I had gotten a few pics of it but the lighting inside the longhouse was terrible 😦

Standing over the open deck boat it was hard to fathom how they could have sailed across the north Atlantic all the way from Greenland while so totally exposed to the elements.

In order to prove that these trips were actually possible, this ship named The Snorri, was built using traditional methods in Greenland and then sailed over by a crew of a dozen in the late 1990’s. You can read more about that here.

I’m not sure at what point in their history the vikings began converting to Christianity, but we were told that a village church would be fairly common by the time they discovered North America.

We went into the trading post but since we had nothing of value; keys to the rental car and digital camera equipment simply left our viking hosts scratching their heads, so no deals were made that day 😉

In the end all we left with were dozens of pictures and many fond memories of our visit.

Open from early June until mid-September between 9:30 am and 5:30 pm, Norstead Viking Village is a fun way to experience firsthand how Norse settlers lived over a thousand years ago.

As always, thanks so much for visiting 🙂

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