August 9, 2018

Pistolet Provincial Park, NF to Blanc Sablon, Quebec 

Here is a map to follow our trip. You can play with the map (zoom in and out) and click on places we visited to learn more.

In the fall of 2018, Emily, Queen of 348 Sherwood Avenue, me, and our super curious Tom Sawyer dog, duly registered with the American Mutt Association, set out on a road trip to the Canadian Maritime provinces, including Labrador. August 9 is Day 28 of that trip and marks the start of the Labrador portion. The entire trip from Staunton and back was a two month odyssey.

Our adventure into Canada and ultimately into Labrador began in Chautauqua New York, the childhood home of Nancy Kyler, where she and Rob have a summer home now. Nancy and Rob live on Sherwood Avenue. We visited with them for a couple of days and left on July 19, the very same day that Rob had a tragic bike accident which left him paralyzed from the chest down. That is another story worth telling and I will tell it.

From Chautauqua we traveled busy roads up the northern coast of Lake Ontario, through Hamilton, Mississauga, and Toronto, Ontario, through Ottawa and Montreal, Quebec and to Montmagny Bay where we spent the night. From there we mushed on along the south shore of the St. Lawrence River in rapidly dwindling traffic to Rimouski, Quebec, then onward to the picturesque fishing village of Cloridorme Saint Yvon, on the Gulf of St Laurence where we camped in a nice rest stop which we had pretty much to ourselves.

The next morning, to my surprise, we had a flat tire on our “Little Guy” teardrop camper and discovered that our jack was useless. After much fuming, dancing about in a rage, and generally making a fool of myself, Lewis, parked nearby, traveling by himself from town to town doing dry wall jobs, walks over to see what the matter was. With all manner of tools as his disposal he got us fixed up in a snap. I think my ranting spurred him on to action.

I asked Lewis, “how much do I owe you, my new friend?”

Lewis grinned and said, “It does not cost any money to help somebody. Pay it forward.”

Good advice.

Lewis went back to fixing his breakfast of eggs, toast, Saskatoon preserves, Canadian bacon, and hot, black coffee.

Just about the time we were leaving, an eighty-seven year old French Canadian man drove slowly through the rest area and stopped to talk to us in broken English. He chatted on about his work as a fisherman and mine worker in his life. A moment came when his countenance changed, a darkness descended, and he spoke about his wife who had died of cancer five years past. Tears, droplets of grief, crept down his face, following a  map of wrinkles as he spoke of her.

A lovely man, in mourning.

As we left, a group of Caspian Terns appeared on the shore in the village of Saint Yvon, where he had lived for his whole life. They gathered there, I imagined, to comfort him in his grief.

I thought about that encounter for a long time.

To make an exceptionally long story short so we can get to Labrador, from Cloridorme Saint Yvon we traveled around the horn of the Saint Lawrence Peninsula down the east coast of New Brunswick on to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island and then to North Sidney, Nova Scotia where we took a  seven hour, one hundred nautical mile ferry trip to Channel-Port aux Basques, Newfoundland. After a fabulous tour of Newfoundland and many visits with fabulous, cheerful, and friendly Newfoundlanders, we made our way to Pistolet Bay Provincial Park where we camped for four days while we toured nearby fishing villages and viewed grand landscapes.

One day we visited the World Heritage Site,  L’Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site, at the northern most point of Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula, where circa 1000, Leif Erikson and a band of ragtag Norsemen and hardy women, armed with barrels and barrels of Norwegian grog, established a beachhead colony, open a bar and karaoke enterprise at the only confirmed Norse settlement in North America. Life was hard for these folks in those times. Winter temperatures average about 30 degrees below freezing. Cold enough to make a grown man cry.

Later I will write about the journey from our home to this place, but this entry, and subsequent ones for a while, are about Labrador.

In Saint Barbe we boarded the “Apollo”, a three-decker, and ferried across the Gulf of St. Lawrence, with whales dancing in the frigid waters and thousands of seabirds zooming about producing a cacophony of sound, to Blanc-Sablon, Quebec, smack dab on the border with Labrador.

In this picturesque village we begin our Labrador journey.