Newfoundland and Labrador -- 150!

Since our Labrador sojourn was abbreviated, this has given us time to explore Newfoundland at a more casual pace.  Loving the most northerly region, we headed east again on the Viking Trail, skipping L'anse aux Meadows and heading to St. Anthony's.  St. Anthony's is a 'real' place with facilities like a hospital and, okay, a Tim Hortons which was our first stop.  Earlier when at Port au Choix, we had bought a book called 'Our Seniors', in which the eldest people were interviewed about their lives in Port au Choix.  This turned out to be a fascinating tale of pre-confederation times with much poverty, many children who died, deaths by drowning and tuburculosis.  They made clothes out of flower sacks.  During the war, the German U-boats were picking off fishing vessels in the Strait of Belle Isle regularly.  In this book, St. Anthony's figured repeatedly because it had the only doctor (later doctors).   Dr. Grenfell (there is a Grenfell College asso...

Dry and dusty but otherwise good It was actually a good gravel road, as gravel roads go.  When we booked the car, we made sure (several times) that they knew that we were going onto the Trans-Labrador highway and that we'd be on the gravel part -- 'off-road' or 'dirt road' wasn't permitted.  No problem.  Then we bought all the insurance possible.  In L'anse au Clair we borrowed the satellite phone (for emergencies only) because there is no cell service on the road to Mary's Harbour (not that ours worked anyway, but someone else's might have). But, sadly, the Ford Fusion wasn't up to the challenge. We must have done something right in our lives because just as we pulled in to Mary's Harbour, the car started to beep indicating low tire pressure and when we stopped in front of the motel the left rear tire was well and truly flat.  At least it didn't happen in the middle of nowhere, though there were actually quite a few road crews work...

Due to flaky internet service and unexpected developments, blog is temporarily unavailable.  Will resume asap. Stay tuned for explanations full of intrigue and excitement. J&R

We were almost ready to call the whole thing off.  These links give you an idea why.  People we met at the B&Bs were warning us about really bad roads, the surprising part being that it was the paved sections that were full of potholes.  Here are a couple of newspaper 'clippings' to give you an idea. Shattered highway has communities fed up Heated debate over hazardous trans-Labrador highway Not to mention foggy weather and we made the mistake of checking out the blog site of some biker guy who had videotaped his entire journey, complete with descriptions of mud and coming across a car that had rolled down an embankment. So we modified our plans, the first being that we would forego the journey of 700 km or so on gravel roads all the way to Happy Valley Goose Bay.  If things didn't look too bad, we'd carry on to Red Bay and then on gravel to our designated stop at Mary's Harbour. Onwards! (the next paragraph is kind of boring - you should probably ...