| Summary | |
| Owner | Matthew Gilbertson |
| Creation Date | 2013-03-19 22:52:03 UTC-0400 |
| Description | Newfoundland, Labrador, and the 3,700 mile road trip
Aug 7-16, 2012 Jacob, Matthew, and Eric Gilbertson LINKS: Our Adventures webpage Canadian High Points Page Statistics: 206 hrs total (89.9 hrs moving) 71.9 hrs / 3,723.6 miles driven 19 hrs / 450 miles on ferries 1 mile paddled 20 miles hiked 1 cracked windshield 3 countries 3 Gilbertsons 2 moose 1.5 hrs to spare when we dropped Jacob off at the airport at the end §§§§§§ LABRADOR OR BUST “What is your destination in Canada?” the border crossing dude asked with a thick French-Canadian accent. “Labrador,” Eric replied firmly. It was 11pm on a quiet Tuesday evening at the Rock Island, QC border crossing. A cool Canadian breeze blew welcomely through the windows. The border dude slowly repeated after Eric but didn’t comprehend. Then, after a slight pause, a light bulb of epiphany. “Oh, you mean Lab-ra-DOR!” he said, with emphasis on the last syllable. Then, a moment of silence, while he recalled where that province is located. “That is a long way from here.” “Yes,” Eric answered, “we’re planning to drive up to Labrador, swing around to Newfoundland, then take a ferry back to Nova Scotia.” “And how long will you be in Canada?” he asked. “One week.” “Wow,” he said with a smile. “Welcome to Canada, and good luck to you.” §§§§§§ THE IDEA The seeds of inspiration for this adventure were planted gradually over the course of the past eight years at MIT. Or, to put it another way, we didn’t exactly dream up this expedition during our first week in Boston back in 2004. Back then, a 3.5 hour drive to Pinkham Notch seemed pretty far. It had taken countless long road trips with our Dad and by ourselves over the past 25 years to put a weeklong adventure of this magnitude into our realm of possibilities. It took eight years of trips in New England to raise this trip to the top of our list. And in the end, it would take ten days in August to bring it to reality. I’ve got a big National Geographic world map on my wall that serves as nice wallpaper above my bed. On it, I’ve traced out with a marker all the major roads we’ve ever taken in every country. It had always sort of bugged me how much of Canada we hadn’t touched yet. There were plenty of lines crossing the US, but there wasn’t anything in eastern Canada. Yet. Sometime in mid-2011 we began to add some “internationality” to our adventures. We were nearing completion of the state high points list as well as the New England Hundred Highest and were searching ever farther for untilled ground. The next logical step was of course the Canadian Provincial High Points list. We started in July 2011 with a 35 hr/1,970 mile trip to the Nova Scotia, PEI, and New Brunswick high points during a 3-day “weekend.” Then, a few months later, a 36 hr driving + 30 mile mtn biking trip to the Ontario high point. With no provincial high points left within easy reach, we headed for the Hudson Bay on a 50 hr long-weekend trip to Waskaganish, QC in April 2012. The map was starting to fill in more satisfactorily, but still there was a vast empty area left unexplored: Newfoundland and Labrador. Then we started to ask some questions of our favorite geographer: Google Maps. How can there be this vast region called Labrador that’s as big as California but with fewer than 30,000 people? How do you even get to Labrador? Is it connected by road? And what about Newfoundland? We were getting intrigued. It wasn’t so much the scenery that intrigued us – although that was spectacular too – it was the sheer remoteness. THE PLAN After some research, we discovered that indeed there was a road that connected Labrador’s capital city, Happy Valley-Goose Bay, to the rest of the world: the Trans-Labrador Highway, completed in 1992. Even more intriguing, there was another section of road that had just been completed in 2009 that would enable you to drive from Goose Bay all the way to Port Hope Simpson, which made it possible to drive to Newfoundland from the north. That meant that you could make one gigantic loop! We read that most of the road was gravel – even better, we thought, that’d make it a real adventure, à la Alaska’s Dalton Highway. We now had a plan. We just needed a summer week to bring it to reality. In late summer 2012, things were beginning to line up for an epic trip like a celestial syzygy. Eric and I didn’t have class, our younger brother Jacob was free, and there was plenty of daylight up north. At first we considered hitting some Central American country high points, but the appeal of the great “Circle Tour” was too hard to resist. We knew that an opportunity as golden as this wouldn’t reappear anytime soon. We sketched out the skeleton of the big trip at about T-minus two weeks, but much of the detailed planning actually occurred during the night before we left. Eric and I wanted to watch the Mars Curiosity Rover landing at 1:31 am, and trip planning gave us a good excuse to stay up that late. Around 6pm we suited up for battle. We brought the laptops into the living room, brought in the external LCD monitors, spread out the maps, started the Excel spreadsheets, fired up Google Earth, and began to plan our assault. By the time the rover (successfully!) landed, we had a gameplan. Drive up to Quebec City, continue north to Baie Comeau, QC, then Labrador City, Goose Bay, Red Bay, Blanc Sablon, take the ferry to Newfoundland. Drive north to L’Anse Aux Meadows, site of the first Viking settlement in North America. Drive south to the Newfoundland high point (the Cabox), hike it, swing over to touch our toes on the French Islands of St. Pierre et Miquelon, hopefully climb the high point on Miquelon, then a ferry back to Nova Scotia, then book it back to Boston in time to drop Jacob off at the airport for his return flight to Pittsburgh. Google put the entire trip at 100 hours. Jacob would fly in on a Tuesday afternoon and needed to leave the following Thursday at 7am. We had 8.5 days, so about 206 hours. So that meant we’d have to be moving for about half of the trip. 12 hours of driving, 12 hours of fooling around/sleeping per day. That didn’t seem so bad at first, but we started to think more about it. What if the gravel roads are slower and rougher than Google assumes? How much time will it take us to climb the Cabox? What about the Miquelon high point? What if the weather’s too bad and the ferries are delayed? We absolutely couldn’t miss the Newfoundand-Nova Scotia ferry since it takes 14 hrs and there’s only one every other day… THE TRIP Jacob landed Tuesday at 1:30pm and the clock began ticking. We didn’t want to take any chances with the 14-hour Newfoundland-Nova Scotia ferry at the end, so we decided to give ourselves an early lead by putting in some serious miles at the very beginning. Eric and I polished up some last-minute work in the lab, rendezvoused with Jacob, and walked over to the Budget in Cambridge (next to Shaw’s) to pick up the rental car. We’d read that the roads would be rough, especially in Labrador, so we had reserved an intermediate SUV. “Hey guys, how’s it going?” asked Greg, the manager at Budget, “another big road trip to Canada?” By now, Eric and I are pretty well-known at the Cambridge Budget so we’re on a first-name basis with a few of the employees. Greg always greets us with a big smile. “Yep, another big trip up north,” Eric answered. We don’t usually like disclosing too many details of the trips to car rental companies, it’s not really something that they necessarily need to know. And besides, “Canada” is usually a detailed enough description for most people anyways. In the parking garage, a Budget agent pulled up in a small red Mazda 5. “OK, this is your car,” he said. “Um, I thought we reserved an intermediate SUV,” I said, “I don’t think this car will work for us.” I mean, it was a nice-looking car and everything and probably got good gas mileage, but it was lacking one thing: ground clearance (just 5.5” to be exact). We didn’t want to be driving 500 miles of rough Canadian gravel in a low-rider. After some negotiations, they agreed to upgrade us to the only SUV that they had in their garage: a silver Ford Edge. As we approached the vehicle, I began to wonder, if that car could talk, what would it say? Would it say “pick me, pick me!” or would it say, “oh no, not you guys. All my car buddies here in the garage have told me to watch out for you two.” Did the poor car have any idea what it was in for? In the end, with AWD and a solid 7.9” of ground clearance, the Edge would end up being perfect for us, and we would have a good bonding experience with it over the course of the next week. We hit the highway around 4pm and headed north, avoiding most of the rush hour traffic. Darkness descended by the time we reached northern NH, and we pulled off in Littleton to stock up on groceries. We also grabbed some large fuel tanks at Lowes to carry extra fuel on some of the more remote sections in Labrador. PROVINCE 1: QUEBEC We crossed into Quebec without incident at 11pm. “Wow, you can drive 110 miles per hour up here!”Jacob said enthusiastically. “No,” Eric answered, “sorry to burst your bubble, but that sign is in kilometers per hour, so it’s basically the same speed limit as in the US.” “Aw, man, I got excited there for a minute,” Jacob said. We didn’t expect it then, but in just a few days Jacob’s wish for unlimited speed would be granted in Labrador. There wasn’t a whole lot to see in southern Quebec at night so we just kept on driving. By 2:30am we had reached Quebec City and made the first gas stop. Soon we were driving along the north shore of the St Lawrence and a dense fog began to close in, forcing us to slow down. A few driver rotations later, at about 5am, we reached the Tadoussac ferry, a mile-long crossing over the Sanguenay River. We couldn’t see much through the fog, but it was pretty clear by the presence of the ferry in front of us and the lack of cars that the ferry wasn’t running yet. “Great,” I said, “I wonder how long this is gonna take.” In our rapid planning session a few days earlier, we hadn’t thought to check the schedule for this ferry, we had just assumed that it would work out. Waiting here in the darkness was a bit frustrating because every minute that we waited could have meant leaving Boston a half hour later if we had simply researched the schedule. As we waited, we glanced at the map and noticed that we could take a side road and cross at the nearest bridge upriver, but that would add a few hours. But soon a few large trucks pulled up alongside us and within half an hour we were motioned to board the boat. We crossed the river in the early morning twilight just as the fog began to lift. “Well, that’s the first ferry,” Eric said, “now it’s just 2,000 km to the next one that’ll take us to Newfoundland.” A few hours later, we arrived in Baie Comeau, the last town of any size for the next 350 miles. We grabbed a few essentials like meat and fruit which we wouldn’t have been able to bring in from the US. “Wow, check it out, they’ve got a KFC in this town!” Jacob said. “Wait a minute … what’s the sign say? ‘PFK’? What’s that mean?” As natives of the same town in Kentucky where Colonel Sanders had opened his very first restaurant (Berea), me, Eric, and Jacob were all intimately familiar with what a KFC should look like. “Well I guess that’s just the French equivalent of ‘Kentucky Fried Chicken,’” Eric said. THE GRAVEL BEGINS Full gas tank? Check. Food and water? Check. Excitement? Check. We were ready to go. We followed the signs to Highway 389, the only road number we’d need to remember for the next day. At the entrance to the highway, there were a couple of cool signs – one said “Happy Valley-Goose Bay 1100km | The heart of Labrador.” Another, larger sign listed all the points of interest for the next 350 miles: Manic-Deux, Manic-Trois, Manic-Cinq (dams on the Manicougan River), Relais Gabriel, Mont Wright, and finally Fermont – the city on the Labrador border. Next to each point of interest was an onimous yellow light, which probably indicated whether or not the road was closed. Fortunately, it was August, and none of the lights were illuminated. The road started out paved, but soon deteriorated into gravel. As much as we enjoyed interesting roads, we still hoped that this one wouldn’t get too rough. We were driving an SUV, but we still didn’t have a full-size spare tire, just a donut, and it wouldn’t be a great place to need towed. We topped off the gas tank at a truck stop a hundred miles in and posed for one final photo next to our clean car. From now on, we would be counting by tens and hundreds of miles. Distances smaller than that would be insignificant. The road was paved intermittently all the way to Manic-Cinq, the fifth dam along the Manicougan River. As we approached the dam, at first it didn’t look too impressive, just another big wall of concrete. But soon the road brought us to the base of the dam and we began to appreciate its enormity. A large semi truck was in front of us, but when you compared the truck to the massive structure beyond it, the semi looked like a mere ant. The gigantic concrete barricade held back the Manicougan Reservoir, an intriguing 70 km wide annular lake formed by a meteorite impact 214 million years ago (ref Wikipedia). If you look at the map of southern Quebec, you’ll see a huge ring-shaped lake with a big island in the middle – that’s Manicougan. “Well I sure hope that dam doesn’t collapse while we’re driving down here or we’ll be underwater,” Jacob said. We later read that the dam, operated by Hydro Quebec, generates nearly 2.6 GW of power, some of which is sold to New England during the winter months. Some of the electrons used to type up this trip report, therefore, could have actually originated at that dam. After a quick picnic near the dam, we continued on 389 and found a short side road that brought us down to the lake. “Wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to say that you’d swam in a meteor crater lake?” I said. “We could probably use a good shower anyways.” “Yeah, we’ve got to,” Eric said, “it’s all about the bragging rights.” The water wasn’t actually warm – no surprise there – but at least it warmed us psychologically to know that we’d swam in Lake Manicougan. Every time I’d looked at the Quebec map I’d always been intrigued with the big meteor crater, and it was fulfilling to finally swim in it. 160 miles later, we approached a vast treeless area and a collection of buildings in the distance: it was the Mont Wright Iron Mine. As we neared the mine, a long freight train filled with ore roared by. It took more than five minute to pass by and had probably 300 cars. It was probably headed south to the St Lawrence for further processing. On the other side of the tracks was a big lake full of red-tinted water. The redness was probably just from all the iron and rust coming from the mine, but it was definitely one lake that we would not be swimming in. As the train passed by, we played around on some gigantic used dump truck tires that dwarfed our tiny SUV. PROVINCE 2: (NEWFOUNDLAND AND) LABRADOR After Mont Wright, the road roughened up a bit before we finally crossed into Labrador. Labrador! Or, I should say, lab-ra-DOR! We posed for some photos at the Labrador welcome sign and exercised our arms by doing some pull-ups. A ginormous dump truck bed was chained to a parked semi near the sign. “Well I hope we don’t have to pass any of those anytime soon,” Jacob said, “that thing takes up about the entire road.” In a couple of miles we reached the first big town: Labrador City. I had expected a dusty little truck stop in the middle of the Canadian wilderness, but it turned out to be a normal, respectable town, complete with a Walmart and even a Tim Hortons. The only other two things it needed in order to be an official town was a Subway and a Chinese Restaurant, but we were sure those were just a few blocks away. Our momentum was good, so it was tempting to just gas up and keep going. But we were about to embark on one of the most remote parts of the journey: the Trans-Labrador Highway, the first section of which stretches between Labrador City and Happy Valley-Goose Bay. That stretch is about 330 miles long, with just one city at about the halfway point: Churchill Falls. We’d read that, in an effort to try to keep travelers safe and promote use of the highway, the Canadian Government actually has a free satellite phone rental program. The way it works is that you pick up a satellite phone at one of the ten participating hotels and businesses along the highway, and then drop it off when you leave the highway. And you hope that you never have to use it. There had been emergency roadside phones every ~50 km so far, but they ended after Goose Bay. “Well if it’s that free and that simple, then we might as well do it,” I said. “Since the locations are all hotels, we’ll be able to drop it off anytime of the day or night, so we won’t have to worry about getting delayed by needing to drop off the phone. Besides, doesn’t it sound cool to say that we had to bring a satellite phone?” “Yeah let’s do it,” Eric said. We drove south into Wabush (pronounced “wah-BOOSH”), a neighboring town, and stopped in at the Sir Wilfred Grenfell Hotel (also known simply, and less glamorously, as the Wabush Hotel). It was super easy to pick up the phone – the clerk just jotted down my contact info and drivers license number – and in five minutes we were back on the road. KPH or MPH? And here’s where it got exciting. We had expected 330 miles of gravel all the way to Goose Bay, but miraculously, the stretch right outside of Labrador City had just been paved and was still as black as new. Google had predicted a top speed of just 45 mph on this stretch, but that seemed ridiculously low. The road was smooth, flat, straight as an arrow, and we hadn’t encountered another car for the past half hour. “Man, this seems pretty slow,” Jacob said. We passed a sign that read “Maximum 70.” “Hmm, you think they mean 70 kilometers per hour or 70 miles per hour?”Jacob asked. Cause I’m going 70 kph right now and it feels like we’re basically walking.” “Yeah, you’re right,” I said. “They probably forgot to update the sign when the paved the road. And we’re in Labrador now, so maybe they don’t use kilometers up here. Let’s just assume they mean miles. “OK, that sounds more like it,” Jacob said, accelerating accordingly. “This still feels pretty slow,” Jacob said after a few minutes. “Maybe they don’t mean miles per hour either?” “Maybe it’s nautical miles or something?”I said. “Well I don’t know about that,” Jacob said, “but I’d say this is a pretty good time to test how fast this car can go.” “Sounds good to me,” I said, “everyone got their seatbelt on?” Jacob stepped on the gas pedal and, well, let’s just say that we got some respectable speed. “Now that’s more like it,” Jacob said. I think we’ll wait until the statute of limitations is up before talking about any exact speeds. STEALTH CAMPING IN LABRADOR The late summer sun began to set, casting long shadows onto the orange-tinted boreal forest. Over the past 26 solid hours of driving, we had made excellent time, covering more than 1,100 miles – nearly a third of the total estimated trip distance. If the Trans-Labrador highway continued, paved, all the way to the coast then we might even have some time to spare. So we decided that we could probably afford some sleep and fortunately wouldn’t have to drive through the night. After passing through Churchill Falls just as the sun set, it was time to activate campsite-finding mode. Usually, it’s tough to find a stealth campsite when you’ve got a car; it’s way easier if you’re on a bike or on foot. But it didn’t take long before we spotted a nice looking side road. It might have been tough for a normal car, but the Ford Edge navigated the hundred yards of gravel without a problem. Fortunately, we wouldn’t need to employ too many of our stealth tactics tonight due to the remoteness of our location. For tonight, Eric and I took the tent while Jacob cowboy-camped in the comfort of the car. In an effort to pack ultralight in order to ensure that we wouldn’t have to check any luggage on the short flight to Miquelon in a few days, we had only brought one 1.5-person tent and a tarp. So it would be cozy camping for the rest of the trip. After a long peaceful sleep, we awoke with the sun and continued eastward. In some spots, road crews were busy fixing up the road and pouring new asphalt, leading to a couple of delays. But we thanked them for their efforts, because with a smooth road in front of us we could more than make up for any lost time. DANGERS OF THE ROAD Some of the rougher section reminded me and Eric of the Dalton – a desolate 450 mile stretch of Alaskan gravel connecting Fairbanks with the Arctic Ocean that we biked back in 2008. As we drove we’d often notice a big cloud of dust billowing in the distance and that meant a big truck was coming, and was dragging a hailstorm of airborne gravel behind it. We figured out that that meant it was time to pull over and give them space, and we learned this the hard way. Somewhere between Churchill Falls and Goose Bay, a big semi truck roared by, and threw a big rock right into our windshield. It wouldn’t have been a problem if it had hit in the center of the windshield. Instead, it hit near the edge and produced a small crack. For the time being, we chose to ignore the crack and hope that it wouldn’t get any bigger. If it stayed small, maybe Budget wouldn’t even notice, right? We also encountered a few somber reminders of the dangers that we faced on the Trans-Labrador Highway. In all, we spotted four mutilated cars lying on the side of the road; one had rolled down a steep embankment, smashing the front and all the windows. Another looked like it had been hit by a meteor: the roof was completely collapsed and the wheels had sunken into the ground over the years. They’d all been there for a long time – why hadn’t they been removed yet? We thought of a few reasons: 1) the cars were so mangled that they weren’t worth anything anymore, 2) even if they had any value left it’d still be too expensive to pull them out of the ditch and drive them 200 miles to the nearest junkyard, and 3) perhaps they were also there to serve as reminders to other drivers to slow down, watch out for moose, and stay awake. MAIN STREET GOOSE BAY By 10:15am, the first real “feature” of the day came into view: an intersection, followed by very nice wooden sign that proclaimed “Welcome to Happy Valley Goose Bay | The Heart of Labrador | Population 7,752.” After 1,350 miles and 28 hours of driving, we had made it! As we drove down Main Street, we were amazed at all the amenities the town had to offer. Gas stations, grocery stores, museums – it was a regular oasis here in an endless sea of Canadian wilderness. You wouldn’t think that you were far north, except for the fact that mostly all of the vehicles in town were trucks, and some still had their snowplows on, even though it was early August. (Did they “still” have their plows on, or had they just put them on early?) At that point we realized how unnecessary it had been to bring the extra gasoline tanks. The drive had been remote, but the longest gas-less stretch so far had been the 150 miles between Labrador City and Goose Bay, well within the range of our car. The next stretch ahead of us from Goose Bay to Port Hope Simpson was the longest gas-less stretch of the entire route (and I’ve heard, the entire western hemisphere), a distance of 240 miles. What if, our reasoning went, we made it to within ten miles of Port Hope Simpson and the road was somehow washed out? It wouldn’t make sense to walk ten miles into town to get some gas, so we had better have enough gas to get us all the way back to Goose Bay. That meant we’d need at most 2*230 = 460 miles of total range to be completely safe. The range of most cars is about 400 miles, so the gas tanks would have been a good idea. But over the past few days, we had discovered that the range of the Edge was closer to 500 miles. Plus, the town of Cartwright, a short 60 miles up a side road, would also have gas in case we got into trouble. Therefore, the fuel tanks would not be helpful as long as we gassed up at every opportunity. MECHANICAL DIFFICULTIES So, to drop some unnecessary weight, and rid the interior of our car from gasoline fumes, we decided to empty the five gallons of fuel that we had been carrying. I opened the car’s fuel door and tried to insert the plastic nozzle into the tank. “Um, looks like we’ve got a little problem here,” I said. “The nozzle won’t go in.” The three of us gathered around to investigate. “Maybe you need a longer nozzle?” Eric suggested. I went into the gas station and bought a longer plastic nozzle. Still no luck. “Maybe there’s some kind of electronic mechanism?” I said. “It obviously opens for metal fuel pumps, but this is a plastic nozzle. What if we touched it with something metal?” I grabbed my keys, pressed lightly against the small metal door with them, and magically it opened up. Voila! (Perhaps it needs to see an increase in inductance?) We took a brief tour through town, hoping to be able to drive down to the shoreline and touch our toes in some genuine seawater, but alas, a wall of houses and a hurried schedule prevented us from reaching the beaches of Goose Bay. No matter, we would find plenty of the North Atlantic farther south. SOUTHWARD We hopped back into the car and waved goodbye to Goose Bay. It might have been nice to spend some more time in town but we still had 2,400 miles of driving between us and Boston – we weren’t even close to half way. We turned south and continued onto highway 510: a newly-completed gravel stretch of the Trans-Labrador Highway. There wasn’t much to see over the next 240 miles, other than trees, a dead fish, and a few more beat up cars rusting by the side of the road. The Labradorian gravel was starting to take its toll on our own vehicle too. I noticed with agony that the windshield crack had grown a few painful inches over the course of the day. “They’re definitely going to notice that when we return the car,” I said. “No they won’t,” Eric said, “we’ll just have to return it at night.” As I examined the crack, I thought back to my 2.002 class, Mechanics and Materials II, in Fall 2006. A crack concentrates stress into a tiny area; in fact, an infinitely sharp crack actually produces an infinitely high stress. Therefore, once the crack had started, it would continue propagating, no matter how strong the glass was. The frequent, jarring bumps and the thermal stresses induced by heating and cooling didn’t help matters either. But, we could still see out of the windshield, so there was no need to do anything about it just yet. By 4:30pm we were back in civilization in the coastal village of Port Hope Simpson. Until just a few years ago, before the Trans Labrador was completed, this town had been almost unreachable. To get there from Boston, you would have had to drive a minimum of 1,400 miles over 33 hours, plus 8 hours of ferries to reach it. Now, it was just a mere 1,600 mi/34 hours from Boston, since we could approach it from the north. There was a very nice general store right next to the highway where we gassed up and picked up a few fishing lures. The view from outside the general store was the quintessential Canadian Maritime scene: a long, broad harbo(u)r, fishing boats bobbing up and down at the docks, the Maple Leaf flying proudly in the breeze, mud-splattered pickup trucks lined up next to beat-up old cars and, parked in the midst of everything, like any normal car, was a snowmobile. It probably hadn’t snowed for the past two months and probably wouldn’t snow again for a month and a half, but you just never know. You’ve always got to be ready. PACKRAFTING IN LABRADOR So far, we had driven 1,600 miles – about the distance from Boston to Key West – and we were starting to get a bit restless for a different type of adventure that didn’t involve sitting on our derrières and passively watching the scenery go by. Instead, were itching to place our derrières in a different mode of transportation: a packraft. Under the leadership of Mr. John Romanishin, MITOC had recently acquired two brand new inflatable kayaks. But these weren’t your run-of-the-mill pool toys, mind you, these were real boats. They each start out about the size of a sack of potatoes and inflate to something large enough to carry a full-grown dude and all his gear, and weigh just 3 lbs each! We figured that MITOC’s two packrafts, combined with my older-and-not-as-awesome inflatable kayak, would be our passport to some aquatic adventure in the Maritimes. The plan was to stuff the tent and some overnight gear into the drybag, paddle out to an island, and spend the night. At one point, the meta-plan had been to paddle all the way out so see some Greenlandic icebergs, but alas, Icebergtracker.com indicated that most of the bergs had already passed through in June, and the one or two that were still around were at least ten miles away from us, a bit far for an evening trip. We passed through Mary’s Harbour and saw some cool fishing boats, but no islands that would be suitable for a packrafting adventure. After a few more attempts, we happened upon a gravel road that passed through the tiny town of Lodge Bay. We followed the road until it dead-ended at a cemetery and spotted a beautiful little bay with calm waters. Bingo. Daylight was running thin, so we quickly inflated our rafts, assembled the paddles, packed up, and pushed off. The water was pretty shallow, but the small draft of our rafts allowed us to pass through without having to get our feet wet too many times. We paddled for about half an hour, just far enough to put some comfortable distance between us and the twinkling lights of town, and then headed to shore. The mosquitoes, which had been merciful thus far, descended upon us with wrathful fury. Jacob bravely volunteered to cowboy-camp again this evening; this time, however, a mere plastic tarp and a fine green mesh instead of an eighth-inch of glass and steel would separate him from the ruthless Canadian skeeters. While paddling, we had been a bit hesitant to place sharp, pointy bits of steel anywhere near our thin, inflated plastic rafts, but now that we were safely on shore, we decided to do some fishing. Unfortunately, the fish must have already been sleeping because neither Finnish Rapala nor Canadian Dardevle drew their interest. We supplemented our fishless dinner with a dessert of Labradorian blueberries and had a peaceful sleep next to the sheltered waters of Lodge Bay. We awoke the next morning to discover that the water level was actually lower now than it had been the previous evening, and we therefore anticipated trouble on the shallower crossings up ahead. But fortunately, the waters were calm, the temps pleasant, and the sun was even thinking of making an appearance. As we neared the car and our boats scraped the bottom, Eric and I opted to carry out boats the final hundred yards. Jacob, meanwhile, would not give up that easily. In an effort to spread his weight out evenly and make his draft as small as possible, he flipped over onto his belly and paddled, with his hands, the soccer-field-length stretch to the finish line. THE PLUNGE We packed up and continued south, passing through the halfway-point location of our trip near Red Bay. As we climbed into the highlands, the trees thinned considerably and the landscape began to resemble above-treeline in the Whites. By noon, the sun finally emerged and Jacob and I were itching to do some swimming. We knew that the water wouldn’t actually be pleasant, in fact it would probably be quite painful, but we had to do it anyway, there were potential bragging rights to be obtained. As we approached the tiny coastal village of Pinware, the golden opportunity for a swim came into view: a beautiful sandy beach! Soft sand stretched for a good half-mile in either direction; if this beach was 2,000 miles farther south in Florida, there’d be sunbathers, body surfers, and lifeguards to witness our impending feats of courage and bravery. Here, on this remote, desolate beach in Labrador, there would be no glory. There would be no trophy. There would be no applause. Instead, we would need to document our acts of valor with cameras, for the benefit of posterity, and humanity. We knew that the water would be only marginally above freezing, so we didn’t even bother to test it. In our experience, the best way to enter cold water is rapid immersion: you psych yourself up, get your adrenaline pumping, and take the plunge so fast that your body doesn’t know what hit it. THE HONOR SCORE Let it be noted in the annals of history that I was the first to volunteer. In preparation for the plunge, I punched Jacob in the arm a few times and he reciprocated in order to get the adrenaline flowing. I sprinted towards the water and dove in. I wouldn’t exactly call it a “swim,” it was more of a “dip” instead, but I did get a few strokes in, making it official. At this point, my Honor Score was now a 10, relative to Jacob and Eric. That’s 7 points for taking the plunge blindly, and 3 for being the first to volunteer. In an effort to try to level the score, Jacob volunteered next. After the same mutual punching ritual and some jumping in place, he took a deep breath, sprinted towards the water, and dove in, nearly losing his trousers to the North Atlantic. Jacob’s Honor Score was now an 8: that’s 6 points because he had already seen me do it, and 2 points for volunteering second. After some hemming and hawing, Eric finally took the plunge, earning an Honor Score of 5, because he was just merely copying me and Jacob. The final Honor Scores were therefore: Matthew 10, Jacob 8, and Eric 5. I had been victorious this time, but there would be plenty of more opportunities for additional Honor Points in the upcoming bodies of frigid water in Newfoundland. Jacob built a very nice sandcastle and we did some sunbathing below the sand dunes. Who knew that the shores of southern Labrador were actually one of the world’s finest spots for relaxing on the beach? NEWFOUNDLAND We continued south and turned in our thankfully-unused satellite phone at the Northern Light Inn in L’Anse-au-Clair. By noon, we had run out of Labradorian gravel and found ourselves once again in Quebec at the village of Blanc Sablon. We would enjoy the next twenty miles of travel to Newfoundland not from the confines of the car but from the upper deck of the M/V Apollo ferry. We walked into the ferry terminal and grabbed a ticket. “Have any icebergs passed through here recently?” I asked a worker. “No, the icebergs come through in May and June,” he said. “You ought to see them, they’re quite the sight when they pass through.” “Does the ferry run in the winter?” “Yeah, we run year round, but in the winter we go down to Corner Brook [instead of St.Barbe’s],which takes about twelve hours. We’ve usually got to follow behind an icebreaker in the winter.” “Wow, I’d like to come here in the winter time and see that!” I said. As we waited for the ship, we bumped into a long-distance cyclist who had pedaled all the way from Baie Comeau, Quebec – a distance of more than one thousand miles. He had completed the trip in just eight days, putting in almost 120 miles per day, and had actually had enough spare time at the end of his two-week vacation to do some cycling in Newfoundland. He was getting ready to board the three-day ferry back to his car in Rimouski, on the Gaspé. We chatted for a while about long distance cycling and commended him on his impressive feat. A tiny blue dot on the horizon grew larger and larger until the massive M/V Apollo towered into view. The captain skillfully backed the giant vessel into the Blanc Sablon dock, lowered its gargantuan drawbridge, and cars began to pour out from its belly. The most impressive vehicle that it managed to regurgitate was an oversize tractor-trailer which was hauling a big yellow John Deere excavator. Needless to say, our petite Ford Edge was but a morsel in the feast of cars and trucks that the Apollo devoured today. The pleasant journey across the Strait of Belle Isle took about an hour and a half, and as we pulled into St Barbe, we were greeted with an awesome spectacle. A giant, 400 ft-long oil tanker named the Jana Desgagnés from Québec was docked and was presumably offloading fuel to the massive white storage tanks at Black Duck Cove. It looks like oil gets delivered to northern Newfoundland by ship rather than pipeline. After crossing into northern Newfoundland from Labrador, most people probably choose to start heading south. But we weren’t done with the province yet; we had only scratched the surface. Next on the agenda was a place that held a very special meaning to us, as descendents of the Vikings (well, descendents of Norwegians, but most likely they were Vikings). It would be a pilgrimage to one of the most sacred sites in North American history; a site consecrated, in fact, 500 years before Columbus stumbled upon a beach in the Bahamas. We were headed to L’Anse aux Meadows, the 11th-century Viking settlement that provides the earliest evidence of European presence in the New World. |