Katherine and I were looking for places to explore yesterday and one of the more interesting that we found was the Old Church Antique Shop in Portugal Cove. We’ve often driven past it and wanted to drop in, but never have. It used to be the old Anglican Church in Portugal Cove, but has since been converted into a shop and (I think) home. The entire main floor of the church/shop is crammed with stuff of all sorts, shapes, sizes and antiquity. They have installed a floor so that there are two stories to the building now, allowing for the top floor to be used as some sort of living accommodations.

It is a very, very odd place. There was a big sign in the window that said “OPEN,” so we parked the car and went on in.

There was nobody there.

As I walked through, I kept expecting someone to pop out from behind a pile of old records or that I would turn a corner and find a wizened old man staring at me from behind a rack of fur coats, revealing that he had been sitting there, watching me the entire time. But no. We couldn’t find a soul in the area and it was freezing cold. Possibly colder than it was outside.And so quiet in there that you could hear the creak of every floorboard like a gunshot.

We *did* hear voices upstairs and the thumping of feet, but were unwilling to wander up into someone’s apartment and scare the daylights out of them. Besides, there was something a little pleasant about having the place to ourselves.

We didn’t buy anything, but decided that it would be nice to come back again in summer, when it was warmer, to have another look around.