I've taken to sleeping in my car. My plan for free lodging was to stick to dispersed camping on crown lands or Couchsurfing. But Couchsurfing hasn't really taken hold here and involves planning ahead, and right now I am feeling uncharacteristically averse to planning ahead. And declining the passenger seat to nearly horizontal and sleeping cozy in my sleeping bag in my car is so much easier than setting up a tent, plus more protected from cold and rain and bugs and bears. A shower is surprisingly easy to find when you ask around when passing through a town. The sun doesn't set until nearly 10 p.m., and the sky isn't totally dark until midnight. My sense of time is thoroughly warped and each day seems to last a week. There is waking on a side road adjacent to the only highway (much of it still rough gravel) across the province, nothing around but trees and bogs and sky, driving and driving, sometimes 250 miles between gas stations and settlements of any kind. Stopping for gas and maybe to restock my food and check my e-mail where possible and then driving again, into the amazing colors of the Labrador sunsets as the backdrop to more mountains, more forests, more enormous rivers and countless, unnamed lakes. Taking walks wherever possible. Otherwise just stopping to pee alongside the road, and then do some jumping jacks and stretching before resuming the drive. The gravel giving me a flat tire to change, careless monster-truck drivers giving me a seriously dinged windshield that will need to be patched later, on some other day in some other place. All of it feeling like a good and necessary part of the journey. Understanding the utter bliss and miracle of pavement after hundreds of miles of gravel. A black bear loping into the trees at the roadside, my car engulfed in mosquitoes within seconds of me slowing to a stop to try to get a picture of it. Driving again until the sun sets and I pull the car off the road to read for awhile by headlamp and then sleep again wherever I happen to have made it to when the light fades on another long day. I am in the travel zone. Will remember this time with great fondness and nostalgia, I can already tell. Such beauty and freedom.
Near Forteau:
The Pinware River:
North of Red Bay:
Close to St. Lewis:
The only three gas stops between the coast and Quebec (though the numbers are in kilometers):
Approaching Happy Valley-Goose Bay (Lake Melville):
Flat tire fixing. I'm not sure how long it was flat on the rough gravel; I only heard the problem once I turned onto the pavement for the first time all day, just outside of Happy Valley-Goose Bay. Being near town meant there were cars going by relatively frequently, and every single one of them stopped to make sure everything was okay and I didn't need more help. It wasn't until the task of changing the flat was actually set before me that I realized that my jack was buried under my voluminous stuff, which would take an hour to pack and unpack. So I did ask a passing car-full of Port Hope Simpson-bound kids if I could use their jack, and they immediately hopped out and insisted on doing the entire job for me, despite the insanely swarming mosquitoes (not pictured). One Newfie warned me to take a baseball bat to Labrador for the flies, and the Canada guidebook I have with me calls the insects in Labrador "murderous." Because of the coastal winds and unseasonably cool temperatures for the past few weeks, I hadn't really met that many bugs until I got to central Labrador...and I learned during this tire-changing episode that "flies" refers to all insects including mosquitoes. And I met a lot of them, as did these poor helpful souls.
Dust from the gravel roads collected everywhere--and it turns out the hatchback of the car is not at all sealed and a similar grit covers pretty much everything in the back of the car after so many miles.
West of Churchill Falls. There is apparently never a bad sunset out here.
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