This blog is about part 1 of my 20,000+ mile car-camping trip with my dogs from DC to Alaska via Labrador. Part 1, in 2011, was to the end of the road in northeastern North America in Labrador and then on to Quebec and Ontario, 7609 miles. Part 2, which took place in 2012, picked up where Part 1 left off in Ontario and was supposed to extend to Banff and Jasper National Parks in the Canadian Rockies, but Leben, my male German shepherd, became paralyzed on the trip so we cut it short. We will finish the journey in 2013, when we will return to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.

August 19 - Tomorrow we're off again, I hope.

After $5.00 in parts and one hour of labor, my Defender is back in commission again, and so, unless there are more last-minute snags, early tomorrow morning we should be off for Labrador for the second time . If everything holds up this time, our immediate destinations over the next few days will be the same as two weeks ago: the pleasant lakeside campsite (Clayton Park), near Scranton, Pennsylvanin, where we stayed two weeks ago;  Wells State Park in Massachusetts; Peaks Kenny State Park in Maine; Mt Carleton Provincial Park in New Brunswick; and then a campsite on the banks of the St. Lawrence Seaway to await the 5:30 a.m. ferry the next day that will take us to the start of the long road through Labrador.  The loop around Labrador will take about eight days, and then the plan is to take the very remote northern route through all of Quebec and then onto Thunder Bay, Ontario and world famous Bukemiga  Lake, where we will camp out on an isolated beach for a few days. When I will return home is not something that I am thinking about right now.  Again, I know more surprises await us along the way, I just do not know where, what or when. My hope is that they are all pleasant.

Although the Alaska portion of my journey has been scrubbed (it will be too much of a chase to make my ferry), this interruption was fortuitous in many ways.  I am now an expert in Defender cooling systems (click here and then here); the dogs' recent medical problems are all under control; the Defender has been made more comfortable for the dogs in the front seat and back; and I spent time at home learning how to use my new iPad  instead of wasting time on the road to learn it. I can now leave my five-pound new translation of War and Peace at home since I loaded the e-book and audio CDs onto the iPad and,  thanks to Jayne Olderman's suggestion, I loaded 24 hours of music onto my iPad. And I lost 15 pounds in total since I started preparing for this trip on July 5th, without even trying to.

Let's see what tomorrow brings.

ED
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