more details later... got to do laundry!!!!
The ride from Cartwright to Blanc Sablon (both in Labrador) took me every bit of 7 hours. It would have been faster but I had rain from 7:30am till around 1pm today. Then there were the graders out with their small stone which makes life on two wheels tough and slow. But I knew I was going to miss the 1pm ferry and once I realized that, I was able to sit back and relax a little more, not trying to make the ship. I stopped and ate at a little coffee house that makes their own bread and home made soups. I had a ham and cheese grilled sandwich and a bowl of beef barley soup, which is a favorite combination! It was so delicious and the proprietor really seemed to be interested in my feedback. He asked where I was from, and before you know it, she shared a slice of pie with me (separate forks, of course). She was a nice lady, a retired mineworker from central Labrador. She has to make a go of the shop for about five months of the year as no one goes outside for much of the winter season.
The southern coast of Labrador is exquisite and looks so much like Scotland’s Highlands. The accent is there in the voices of the locals too. What little music I’ve heard in restaurants and hotels has been mostly Celtic. Labradorians are a mixture of aboriginal peoples and whomever beached on their shores, so Irish, Welsh, English, Scottish, French, Portugese, etc… I spend some time with a heavy equipment operator whose people were from an aboriginal line. He told me there are very short in stature and so they are easier to spot. “The shorter they are, the more pure their blood,” said he.
Riding was really fun today as I was only pointed south and west, rather than the obvious opposite. There is some measure of relief now for me that the trip is now past it’s halfway point and will be ending soon. Tomorrow I will ride down the West coast of Newfoundland and go to Port Au Basques, where I will board one last ferry headed for North Sydney, Nova Scotia. She steams at 1am and it’s a 6-hour ride across the sea, so I need to get good rest tonight. Tomorrow’s ride in a car takes about six hours. I will take my time and stop to make more photos as I have all day and most of the night to get there. I might even find a movie to go to, if a theater exists in one of the larger towns along the way. More later as the dryer cycle is ending here in the RV park that I stopped to do wash at. Still have to find a place to stay tonight… Everyone says to stay off the roads at night in Newfoundland as the moose and deer are plentiful, so much so they warn even locals away from night-driving.
The ride across the water last night was really nice. the weather was clear, pretty warm by their standards, and we steamed past many ice-burgs. They are beautiful to watch and, like clouds often do, they resemble things. One looked just like swan in the water.
I met some really nice RV people that were traveling together and they talked me into coming with them to their RV park where I could do my laundry. While my stuff was in the dryer, I started to talk to a guy that lives just North of Goose Bay. He is a wildlife officer in Labrador and was taking his family on a vacation to Newfoundland for a couple weeks. He invited me into their travel trailer for tea and he showed me some pretty disturbing video of natives poaching deer and caribou on snowmobiles. There were over 100 of them all chasing down animals with rifles on their backs. They have barely enough budget for the airtime for the helicopter and so there is no money in the budget for a video camera that would capture faces for prosecution. There are always two sides to every story but this was pretty horrible. It was nice to actually have a conversation with some people. He and his wife had a daughter Sophie's age. I can't even get away from the Jonas Brothers in Newfoundland!!!
After I finished my laundry, it was getting dark so I walked across the street to the only hotel in town and they have only one room available but it was a smoking room. I don't do smoking. So the RV park lady called a few places down the road but to no avail. I hadn't showered in two days and needed a shave. She took pity on me and showed me down the hall to the utility room where there was a massive gas furnace cranking away supplying heat to the building as well as all the hot water for the bathhouse. It was carpet over concrete and I couldn't have been happier! I took a long hot shower, shaved, and crashed hard around 11:30pm.
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