[texmexis best]

The distance between Greenland and North America is about 200 miles. Not even a weekend fun sail for the Norse.

Most likely there were other earlier contacts with Europe.

“Sailors sail, that is who they are and what they do.”

[Verginius Rufus]

The Icelandic sagas report that Bjarni Herjolfsson, trying to sail from Iceland to Greenland (which he had never been to before), was blown off course and saw three bits of coastland which he knew could not be Greenland, so he did not land on any of them. Leif Eriksson later bought Bjarni's boat and retraced his route--the lands he had seen were probably what is now called Labrador and Newfoundland.

A Norse settlement has been unearthed at L'Anse aux Meadows near the northern tip of Newfoundland, of the right period to fit with the evidence from the sagas. The actual settlement seems to have been abandoned pretty quickly because of hostility from the local indigenous population, but a Norwegian coin from a later period was found at an Indian site in Maine, suggesting continuing visits to the New World by the Norse.