Rreliminary posting, 3:00 p.m.
Got a late start today (3pm) to get to PHS, the next town down the road, 250 miles away. Decided to do my laundry and stock up in HVGB. Since my Defender only gets 225 miles on a tank under the best of circumstances, I had to take two 5-gallons of glass with me. (they only sell regular in this part of the world, although my cat takes supreme.
It is raining and cold. No big deal. We will spend the night camping somewhere along the road, where I do not know. I will revise this day's posting when I get Internet service again, perhaps four days from now.
I heard there was an earthquake that hit DC. I wonder if I suffered any damage. That can wait. I have other problems on my mind now, like where I am going to sleep tonight.
Continuation later...
This the leg of this journey I came to make, the road from HVGB to Blanc Sablon, The Coastal Highway, almost 500 miles of dirt and gravel. In 2002, they had just started the southern portion of it above Red Bay, but I drove about 75 miles of it to the end before I had to turn around and backtrack 600 and six days, including a three-day ferry ride. When I discovered that the road was done, it was then I decided to return here.
The weather today was just foul, the tale of the hurricane that hit the east coast over the weekend, rain all the way. The good news is that the rain kept the dust down from the traffic, but there was no traffic, perhaps one vehicle very three minutes in either direction.
If the weather was just foul, the conditions of the road were as bad. Although the road was just finished five years ago, it was terrible, pot holstein everywhere, mostly in the center of the road where people drive. Driving in your own lanes is not advised except going up a hill because you do not know what might be coming from the other side, as I learned several times. It was thought those cars were waiting for me before navigated the crown of the hill. At first when I saw a huge potholes, I would try to avoid them, but I learned that that was not a smart thing to do since inevitably I would hit them or their nearby relatives anyway. But worse, if you tried to avoid them by swerving, when I emerged from the pothole I did hit, my car was flung off in some direction other than the one in which I wanted to travel. Depending upon my speed, the direction I was heading and the distance to the edge of the shoulder, usually hanging over some sharp drop off ranging from six to tan feet, I several times found myself inches away from a trip interruption, if not life interruption or termination. The key to navigating these potholes is to hit the brakes once and slow down, drive straight through them, hold onto the wheel with all my might and get day to get back on course. And God forbid that you should be momentarily distracted at the moment you hit them, as I was at least a dozen times.
What did cooperate were the views. Again, I never case to be amazed at how I can drive through mile after mile, hundred or mile after hundred of mile of this part of the word and lover very minute of it. If I stopped to take a photo of very interesting scenev, I would have stopped every minutes, but I could not since I had little time to find a campsite. No one I spoke with in HVGB could tell me about any interesting places to stop to camp along the way, although one couple I met told me they saw a place by a lake a few hours down the road on the right, which another couple from Goose Bay I flagged down on the road told me the same thing. But since neither had stopped there themselves, I did not want to rely on that information.
What happens on these trips into unknown territory is that I develop rules for myself for stopping to camp for the night. My first rules is to get off the road by 5, but no later than 7. So if by 6 I have not found a suitable place to camp, my rule is to take any spot where I can pull off the road to bivouac for the night, although I have never had to do that on any of my gripes, except the night in Newfoundland in 2002 when my car's electrical system shut down. For the first 50 miles or so, I saw that there were cutouts off to the side of the road (remember, the road is built up by rock walls on both sides) every 10 kilometers or so, and I reasoned that they would continue for the remainder of the road, but they did not. In fact, there was no place to pull over. At 6:45, I reached what I thought was that lakeside cutoff, but the road to it from the highway was much too steep and made only of dirt. While my Defender could have navigated the slope, I was unsure what the rain would do to the road overight, and so I flew right by the spot hoping to find a place to bivouac soon, but there was none. Then, 30 minutes later, I came to a bride crossing over a narrow river connecting two lakes on either side, and like an oasis in the desert, it had a cutoff road leading to a spot to camp for the ngith. And what a spot it was. But there was already a ca parked there, and so I thought I would give my search for that lake a few more minutes and return to the bridge spot since I knew I could campt there. two minutes down the road, I abruptly turned around, heading back to the bride and campt there for the night. As it turned out, the other vehicle there was abandoned, and our night there next to a bubbling river was fantastic. Also, the rain stopped as soon as we got there and we got our evening's chores out of the ways by dark. But true to form, the weather had to take at least one swipe at us and at three in the morning, we were hit with a fierce three-hour wind storm, but the tent held up and I slept right through it, as did Leben and Erde.(no surprise there.)
Tomorrow our goal is to finished the direct and gravel portion of the road and drive towards Red Bay, about 250 miles away. When I get to the cutoff for Cartwright I will decide whether to take a side trip there, although that will take hours. I will also look out to see if I can find that lakeside cutoff, and hold the wheel with both hands.
One of the predictable things about these road trips, where you can bring only s many items with you, most of them essential, and where you bare using those things frequently, is that things will break. And when they break, you cannot say that you'll get to it this weekend, or take it to a repair shop. So, high on the priority list for the evening's chores is to repair it es that need to be repaired. One night it was the tent pole that split. I already told you about the emergency brake in the car, hut there's nothing. Can do about that except create some rules. And today, when I went to recharge the satellite phone I rented, wouldn't you know, I could not get the recharged unit to fit onto the phone, and here I was on the most risky part of the trip, the part for which I got the phone. As it turns out, the little hook on one end of the recharged that latches onto the phone had broken off. I knew that the recharged was on its last legs when I opened the shipping container, but I thought it would make it through this trip, but I was wrong. Not to worry, the solution was simply to tape the charger to the device, and I had brought along some electrician's tape that did the job quite nicely. My only question now is, what will it be tomorrow that I have to repair. I think I'll add the subject of repair to the daily features of this blog. Life on the road. Oh that things were as fun as Kerouac's life on the road.n
By the way, I am on that portion of the trip where "keeping things clean, neat and organized" takes on a new standard. I guess that comes with the turf.
Ed
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