Tag Archives: http://www.erichall.eu

Sunday 3rd April 2011 – ONE OF THE THINGS …

… about staying in a hotel, especially a cheapo hotel like this one, is that when everyone else is up, then so are you.

Consequently, at 8:30 (on a Sunday?) I was up and at work, finishing off the work that I needed to do on my book about the Trans-Labrador Highway, which I posted to the internet, if you would like to read it.

And so back to Brussels where I fetched Marianne and we went off to the apartment and spent a pleasant hour or two stuffing some of the contents into Caliburn until it was full to the gunwhales. At 16:30 the daughter of the owner of the garage that I rented came round and inspected it and I returned the key to her, so that was that and I’n now €49:97 per month richer.

Spend, spend, spend, hey?

Off to pick up the trailer and the Minerva next and we towed that back to Brussels. And then while we were eating tea (Sunday is pizza day of course) we worked out a programme for Marianne to come down and see the Auvergne during the Easter school break.

Armed with a big flask of coffee I then set out for home again and it all went fine with no problems at all until leaving Auxerre when there was a mighty crash from the back. One of the restraining straps (luckily the one that stops the load shifting forwards) had broken and the Minerva had rolled forward into the headboard of the trailer. This had the effect of slackening off the strap on the front which had then become detached and there was nothing then to stop the Minerva sliding backwards (and then off the trailer into the roadway).

And so for a couple of hours I had to free off the handbrake so that it would work, mess about with the gearbox to lock it in gear, and then hunt down some more straps (not easy when you have a van full of rubbish) and then fasten it down.

While all of this was going on, a tin of paint and a container of oil became dislodged during the struggle and so that’s another mess I’ll have to clean up when I’ve emptied Caliburn.

Finally, to the chirping of the early dawn chorus I had the Minerva strapped down properly, locked in place, and by some judicious manoeuvring of straps and fasteners I could get the tailboard of the trailer in position as well – so that the Minerva won’t fall off again.

This is an excellent trailer and well-worth every penny that we spent on it, but it’s not a proper car transporter and its high centre of gravity makes for interesting cornering on mountain roads when you have a high-sided vehicle like a Minerva and there’s a cross-wind.

On a couple of occasions the trailer wanted to go in a different direction than I did and when you aren’t expecting it to happen it’s guaranteed to get the adrenalin flowing. If I’m going to be moving the Minerva – and other vehicles – about on a frequent basis (and that is the plan) I need a proper low-loader trailer.

The sooner that I have one, the better.

-1

Friday 18th March 2011 – I’m having another early night tonight.

Yes, I can’t last the pace these days.

I was awake again long before the alarm clock, and I was up, dressed, breakfasted and out working by 09:00. Caliburn is now emptied completely and everything is stacked in the lean-to. Some of those boxes were heavy and it wasn’t half a struggle as well. But there’s plenty of room in there ready for more stuff.

Once that had been done I had to pick up a pile of stuff that had fallen all over the floor in where the living room will be (so that’s what the crash was when I was in bed) and then I brought all of the clothes up here. And that wasn’t easy either.

I had a rest for a few hours after that and did more work on my web site. It won’t be long before the Trans-Labrador Highway pages go on line.

Finally I started to tidy up in the barn so that I can start to move the stuff that came from Brussels in February. You may recall that I had to come back twice and each time I brought a load of stuff back. I need to get that ready as soon as possible so that I can rescue the stuff round at Terry and Liz’s. And then go back to Brussels for the Minerva and some more stuff.

But it’s wearing me out, all of this. I dunno how many consecutive early nights this will be but I’m sure that it will be a record.

Thursday 10th March 2011 – I have to go to rescue my Minerva.

If you are fairly new to these pages I bet you don’t know that I own a Minerva. It’s something I bought years ago while I was on the lookout for an old Land Rover for hauling logs around the farm. Ever since then it’s been in storage near Antwerp but I received an e-mail today to say that the storage facilities are closing down and I need to move it.

Luckily we are here with Terry’s big trailer, and I reckon that the Minerva will fit on it. It’s rather a shame in a way because I was hoping to be able to move the Cortina 2000E estate and get that down to the farm, but it will still be nice to recover the Minerva after all these years. Ahhh well.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I’ve painted the door frame to the apartment and I’ve also prepared the wall at the back of the terrace. But when I went out to paint that, the wind blew me back inside again. It was rough out there, and so that will have to wait until another day.

This afternoon I cleaned all of the paintwork in the hall and then painted the ceiling in there.

Terry carried on with the odd jobs such as repapering part of the kitchen and fixing a few electrical items while Liz carried on with her marathon floor-waxing, with the help of Terry once the little jobs were finished. Once the floor was something like, we moved the living room back into where it ought to be and I’ve moved my bed and computer into this room while Terry and Liz started to paint the walls in the hallway.

Tomorrow I have to empty out my room of what is left there and then give it a good clean, put the second coat of paint on the door frame and paint the terrace wall if the wind will let me. Terry and Liz will finish the walls in the hallway and then paint my bedroom. The second coat for the hall and bedroom is planned for Saturday morning, and then all that will remain will be touching up in the blue bedroom where Terry and Liz are sleeping.

And that, dear reader, will be that. We’ll empty the place on Monday morning, have an estate agent round on Monday afternoon and then adjourn to a hotel for a couple of days so that the place will be completely empty so that we can do the touching up.

Such is the plan. And so you just watch something happen to upset it all.

-1

Sunday 6th March 2011 – Today was exciting.

Manure Knighted were well and truly stuffed by the Bin Dippers this afternoon. Seeing them have a good stuffing is something that always cheers me up and I always feel better afterwards. Even if it is Sunday and I’ve had a decent sleep for a change.

And so a leisurely morning listening to Terry cheering on the Barmy Army also made quite a change.

Later on Liz and I went round to Marianne’s and ended up going for a walk in the park. We took the ferry over to the island (cost €1:00 – no wonder the Flemish are good swimmers) where I had the coldest cup of coffee I have ever had in a restaurant while Marianne and Liz had the poorest excuse for a cappuccino that I have ever seen.

And all for €8:50 as well, plus the fare on the ferry to cross over to the island. It’s not been a very good afternoon from that point of view.

Marianne came back to the apartment where Liz cooked another one of her specialities – spicy Shepherd’s Pie (made with real shepherds, so I am assured) and then I ran Marianne home again.

In other news, in writing up my epic voyage around Canada I am just about to have my first glimpse of the sea and of Newfoundland. It’s getting to the climax and the tension is unbearable. I need to make quicker progress as the suspense is killing me. I must know what happens next.

-1

Sunday 27th February 2011 – Sunday today.

And I woke up at the comparatively early time of … errrr … 10:30. Definitely feeling the pressure, I am. I shall be glad when all of this is finished.

And so apart from helping Terry for 10 minutes with some wiring I’ve done nothing else of note.

I say nothing else but that’s not really true. One of the things that I have been doing while I’ve been in Belgium is to write up the story of my stay in Canada. There won’t be enough time for that and so I’ve restricted myself to the Trans-Labrador Highway. Over the past 5 weeks I’ve been doing this and at the moment I’m just pulling into Mary’s Harbour on the Labrador coast. Here I’ll be staying for my final night in Labrador prior to taking the ferry from Blanc Sablon over to Newfoundland.

There are lots more interesting things to encounter on the journey and I’m quite looking forward to finishing it and seeing it all in glorious technicolour. But it won’t be for a while though. Tomorrow night I’m off on my marathon drive back home.

-3

Wednesday 2nd February 2011 – You will hardly recognise this place now

Liz and Terry decided that we ought to empty some more stuff out of the apartment here today and so we had another mega-packing and sorting session. First thing that we did was to empty all of the stuff in the garage where the 2000E estate lives, check what I ought to be keeping, and then bin the rest. That was quite exciting as I discovered all kinds of stuff that I had carried about with me in my company car and which I had had to empty out when I handed back the car when I retired.

So with a comparatively empty garage (I say comparatively because you know that my idea of empty is different than everyone else’s), we had room to start moving more stuff downstairs. So while Terry was moving stuff downstairs and Liz was sorting, I was dismantling furniture and so on. Then we had a mega-bagging session of all kinds of bits and pieces and all of that has ended up in the garage too, and another pile of stuff has ended up in the trailer ready to go to the tip. You can actually move around here now, which is definitely progress from how it was 10 days ago.

We had a break at lunchtime for food, and as what with one thing and another we didn’t have time to send anyone for bread so it was to Carrefour at Berchtem St Agathe and the restaurant there. Just for a change there were nice, friendly and helpful staff – something I’m not used to in Belgium.

Brico couldn’t come up with a new lock for the other garage, which was a disappointment. No sense in breaking off the lock if we can’t replace it. But we did another load of shopping in Delhaize ready for the rest of the week.

And back home again we carried on with the sorting.

Tomorrow we may be starting on the third bedroom, and Terry will be attacking the bathroom, if the plastering that he did yesterday is dry.

-2

Tuesday 26th October 2010 – NOW LIZ, WHO READS THIS BLOG …

… saw my photo of Pictou last night and asked me what the place was like and how it looked in broad daylight.

And the answer to that is “no idea”.

I came here the first time in 2003 and it was absolutely p155ing down so I didn’t stay long. And today, as if in keeping with some kind of tradition, it was likewise p155ing it down. And how.

But this time I’m made of more sterner stuff and went for a nosey, getting thoroughly drenched in the process.

We’re lucky in that many of the buildings are quite substantial – made of stone, not your usual timber framed stuff. North American urban settlement is famous – or infamous – for being ravaged by fire and these stone buildings will have resisted that quite well.

However, escaping from the ravages caused by human modernism and “progress” is another thing, and Pictou has suffered some from that.

Now for those of you familiar with North American history, you will know that Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts is significant as it was there that the Pilgrim Fathers landed in late 1620 in the Mayflower.

And Pictou has a similar kind of significance for Canada as it was here in 1773 that a group of Scots landed in the Hector – a replica of which is on display here – and laid the foundations for Nova Scotia – or New Scotland.

Look at any of the graves of people who were born in this area during the following few years – there are dozens of people called Hector interred there.

And after that it was a drive to Springhill to do something else that I … errrr … overlooked when I was here before.

I didn’t visit the Anne Murray Museum this time (so I didn’t meet Anne Murray this time like I did the last time) and I didn’t have time to visit the mining museum even though it was open today.

Instead I tracked down the monument to the hundreds of miners who died in the dozens of mining explosions and collapses in the shameful situation that passed for coal-mining here from about 1820 until just a few years ago.

If you know Peggy Seeger’s song Springhill Mining Disaster – made famous by U2 – then that is about one of the explosions here.

Next stop was Amherst to look for something interesting and really I must have been asleep the two times I’ve passed through here and not noticed anything worth photographing.

Apart from the fact that it’s a beautiful sandstone-built town, there’s tons of other stuff that’s well-worth seeing.

I was having health issues both of the times I came here and that’s my excuse anyway.

When I was here in 2003 I went to visit Fort Beausejour – the second-last bastion of the French army in Canada, not the last one (despite what most history books tell you – that dubious honour belongs to Fort Gaspereaux across the isthmus).

Here they hung on grimly to a toehold at the head of the Bay of Fundy as the French possessions all around them crumbled away into nothing, and eventually they too were swept away with the tide.

The British built a fort – Fort Lawrence – about 5 miles away from Fort Beausejour in order to blockade the latter and so I went in search of that.

It appears that this is in fact the site of the Nova Scotia Tourist Board offices and once I had realised that, it wasn’t all that difficult to track down. It’s not easy to miss all of those flags fluttering away up there.

From up on the heights I noticed what looked like early Acadian dykes across the Tantramarre marshes. The Acadians had done their best to drain the marshes and ended up with, what one commentator called “the largest hayfield in the world”.

So I had a wander out across the flats and, lo and behold, indeed they were, complete with a handpainted sign, displaying the Acadian flag. That’s the “Stella Maris” there on the pale blue background.

In the 19th Century, technology began to catch up with human ambition. And one of the ambitions was to make a short-cut across the Chignecto isthmus between the Strait of Northumberland and the Bay of Fundy so that ships would save days of sailing time and all the risks of circumnavigating the Canso Strait.

Someone had the idea of building a ship railway, where ships would sail into a canal and then be loaded onto railway trucks in order to be transported to the other side of the isthmus.

But just as technology made this a feasible proposition, making larger ships became more feasible too and the ship railway was overwhelmed by events.

Work had actually begun but was soon abandoned. Nevertheless there still remains considerable evidence of the earthworks and I managed to track them down too. This would have been quite an impressive achievement had it been completed, judging by what remains.

Whenever I see this sign, I always end up laughing, even though I know that I shouldn’t. Coming from an oppressed minority myself, I can understand the feelings that minorities have about defending themselves and their cultures. But this sign is the kind of thing that brings this policy into disrepute.

I often ask about this sign – what’s the purpose of the “Nouvelle Ecosse”?. I’m always told that Canada has a policy of bilingualism (except in Quebec where their Anglophone minority is oppressed much more than the French minority ever was, but that’s another issue) and so every public sign in English has to be translated into French.

And I always wish that I had a camera handy to photograph their faces when I explain to them that “Nova Scotia” is Latin, not English, and so under the terms of the bilingual policy, there needs to be an English translation.

I’m now in Port Elgin just down the road.

Port Elgin is famous for its hand-cranked (so much for modern technology in the 1890s) pivoting railway bridge that moved so that ships could enter the harbour here.

Just on the edge of the town is not darkness but a motel, and next to the motel are the remains of Fort Gaspereaux. This is where i’ll be staying the night (the motel, not the remains of the fort).

There’s also the Confederation Bridge, the world’s longest bridge across iced-up waters. I saw that in 2003 but taking a photo of that with a compact digital was … errr … interesting so I’m going to do it again.

I hope that it’s still standing – I don’t seem to have much luck with bridges over iced-up waters – and that will be effectively my tourism over. It’s all downhill from here.

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Monday 25th October 2010 – I’M IN A BAD MOOD AGAIN.

Yes – I went into Truro today.

Now if Truro were ever famous for just one thing it would be the Teachers’ Training College. If you have been following my journey you will know that Nova Scotia is a province of mainly small villages in isolated situations and until the road-building process that started in 1918 and is still not yet finished these villages had no connection to any other.

But if you can’t bring the children to education the province realised that it needed to bring education to the children and in 1876 it created a small College in Truro to train teachers to educate children in the wilderness.

These teachers, once they had qualified, were sent to these isolated villages, lodging with parents and teaching children in empty fishing sheds and generally integrating into the village to which they had been sent. And this programme continued until 1960.

The college itself is a magnificent building crowned with a copper dome and spire, and features as the centrepiece of the Truro Heritage poster. And when I came here in 2003 I had a quick look for the building but couldn’t find it.

However today, with more time on my hands, I wandered around until I found it. And I had to find it too, because the people whom I asked, including the lady in the Tourist Office, knew nothing about it.

So here’s the building – the most significant in Truro and probably the most influential in Nova Scotia.

And the reason I couldn’t find it is that there is a huge concrete bunker – a public library – right in front of the building, built on the lawn, and a huge modern building – the police station – built in the old courtyard (this photo was taken around the back).

And of course the copper dome and spire have gone – sold for scrap, I shouldn’t wonder.

The building has been abandoned for probably 30 years and there’s a notice on the wall – “The Truro City Council is actively seeking new opportunities for this building”. So how about using the money spent on the new police station to refurbish the building and moving the police into here? Or demolishing the library and ……

But I’m not going to go on and on about this because I’ll get more and more depressed. My opinions about Canadian preservation efforts is starting to sink to the same depths as those of the USA. Or of France. Or of the UK. People no longer have any pride in their heritage.

So to cheer myself up I went in search of what may well be the oldest intact steam railway locomotive in the world.

My route north out of Truro took me along Highway 311 and Highway 326 took me over the watershed between south-western Nova Scotia and north-eastern Nova Scotia and I encountered some views that were truly beautiful.

However, it also took me into a load of traffic as you can see and I’m not at all used to this. Still, you can’t have everything, I suppose.

You can’t have this either, because the owner has no interest whatever in parting with it, although Strawberry Moose has a good go at driving it.

It’s basically a standard 1930s Ford 2-ton chassis with twin rear wheels, a single-wheel front and a Ford V8 flathead (sidevalve) engine and formerly belonged to a small paper mill out on the coast in British Columbia, a mill that was isolated from the main road network.

They built it themselves after a fire in the mill during the 1940s had caused considerable damage because they had no means of extinguishing it.

And the next fire, in 1994, he fire engine had been out of use for so long that it wouldn’t start and so the mill burnt down again. Consequently they junked it and the present owner rescued it and, having fixed it, drove it back here.

At least, that cheered me up considerably.

I eventually tracked down my steam locomotive, thanks to the owner of the fire engine who put me right.

A group of engineers have liberated it from its depressing situation on a plinth outside in all kinds of weather and, having restored it to something resembling working order, it’s now in the Nova Scotia Museum of Industry and I was lucky enough to be allowed in to see it.

The locomotive is called Albion and came to Nova Scotia from Newcastle upon Tyne in 1854.

For a long time it was considered that 1854 was the date of manufacture, but I would find this hard to believe without convincing evidence. If you compare this design with any other design of 1854 and the evolution has been considerable.

I’m not going to go into a long discussion here because I have expounded at considerable length elsewhere, where you can read at great length exactly what I think about this locomotive.

What is comforting about this is that the people who, while they might not know exactly what it is that they have, are fully aware of the fact that they are in possession of something that is truly special and they have gone to considerable lengths to take care of it. That can only be commended.

And that cheered me up considerably too

Having been bundled out of the museum with indecent haste because it was closing time, I wandered off to have a look at New Glasgow.

This was another town with quite an impressive past, growing rich on all of the industry and coal mining that took place in the vicinity, but now all of this is long-gone and the town is a shadow of its former self.

There were houses on sale here for as little as $26,000 which, for a European such as myself, is an astonishing price. You couldn’t buy a garage for that in the UK, never mind a house.

That down there is a new theatre, so if you did come here to live, there would be something to entertain you.

But on the site of the theatre and its car park, between 1821 and 1918, there were 5 shipyards and a total of 210 sailing ships were built there. The largest was one of 1400 tons, would you believe.

The ships were built by local men using local materials and from here they went out to sail the world. You would never believe that now.

You’ve all seen this before. This is the Lionstone Motel up the road in Pictou and I stayed here in 2003.

Time was marching on and I didn’t have time to look for another motel (I believe in spreading my largesse about) so I came back here. No reason why not, after all, I was quite comfortable here last time.

The restaurant that had served me a decent meal last time had closed down, so I bought some chips and went to look at the Bowater paper mill – one can’t escape the smell of wet paper around here.

With a better camera, this photo worked much better than the one that I took in 2003.

So having accomplished that task, I went to heat up some beans in my slow cooker. Pour them over my chips and I’ll have a meal fit for a king.

-2

Sunday 24th October 2010 – I ALMOST FORGOT TO BLOG AGAIN …

… “shame” – ed … but I remembered just in time.

So here in the comfort and privacy of a cheap ($60) but comfortable motel in Truro where I smuggled in my slow cooker and coffee machine, I can bring things up to date.

And I’m whacked. I’ve been on my feet from 9:30 until 17:00 and I’ve tramped everywhere all around Halifax and Dartmouth and the only time that I sat down was on the ferry across the Strait between the two cities.

And I’m still in love with the city

Today I tramped around the two towns and saw much more than I have ever seen before, and the more I see of the place the more I like it. I could really settle in a place such as this. Mind you, the weather has been astonishingly good – probably the best day since I’ve been in Canada and I deserve it too – the two other times I’ve been here, they have both been in snowstorms.

And if you are wandering why there are no photos, the answer is that they have all been moved. In the intervening time, I’ve completely written up my notes about my visit to Halifax and you can read them at your leisure.

I finished my visit on a poignant note – to track down the site of the legendary Pier 6. Back in 1917 the convoys to the battlefields of France assembled here. And the harbour was a busy place so a one-way system was operated similar to what is operated in the English Channel today. And as a small convoy was leaving port a ship came steaming in down the wrong channel. A collision was inevitable and sparks from the grating metal set fire to the errant ship.

Because the ship was not flying the special red pennant that it was supposed to fly, no-one knew that it was an ammunition ship, loaded with over 5,000 tons of explosive. And the crew, instead of opening the sea cocks to sink the ship as they are obliged to do when an ammunition ship catches fire – they simply abandoned ship, which then slowly drifted into the harbour, blazing away furiously.

Puzzled by this bizarre behaviour, crowds of people flocked to the shoreline to see the spectacle, and as the ship collided with pier 6, it exploded.

2,000 people were killed and many many thousands were injured in what is the largest non-nuclear explosion the world has ever seen. A primary school behind the pier was obliterated and no-one there survived, and they picked up bits of Halifax from gardens 60 miles away.

So armed with a little information and a couple of useful pointers I managed to track down the site. It’s now covered by the Halifax Shipbuilding Yard so there isn’t anything to see (mind you, after an explosion of that magnitide there wouldn’t be anything to see anyway) but it was something I had to do.

And tomorrow I’m going for my third attempt to take a photo of Amherst and also to look for the oldest steam locomotive in Canada.

-2

Saturday 23rd October 2010 – YOU WOULD THINK …

… that I would have learnt my lesson by now, but not a bit of it.

Does anyone still remember my voyage around Wyoming in 2002 and how I hardly had any sleep the first night due to having chosen, in the dark, a motel right next to a railway line?

So here I am, on the outskirts of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and there’s the Canadian Pacific main line between the industrial centres of central Canada and the largest port on Canada’s eastern seaboard, and it passes right underneath my window.

My excuse, back in 2002, was that it was dark, so I’m going to have to think of a pretty good excuse for this one though as it was broad daylight when I arrived here.

But then again, at the first place (a cheap B&B), no-one answered (they had clearly heard all about me). The second place was full. The third place – I took one look at it, made my excuses and left. Yes, even I have principles and scruples even when travelling on a low budget.

And so a convenient motel with kitchen unit at $69, and that will have to do. At least I can cook some food and that will save me something.

However, this is where I spent last night and I will say now that if I can ever find better value than this bed-and breakfast for just $45 per night all-in then I shall move in permanently.

Like everyone else that I have ever encountered on any of my voyages around the Maritimes (with the exception of those people in that museum – The Rooms in St John’s), the proprietors were extremely friendly, helpful and knowledgeable.

Furthermore, although they were Anglophones, the guy here had been a copper in Québec and so was perfectly bilingual and also had some kind of empathy with the Francophone communities around here.

They moved here about 30 years ago and in that time they reckon that not a week has gone by without someone leaving the area to move elsewhere, such has been the consequence of the collapse of the economy following the decline of the fishing industry. They recounted a long, almost endless list of local businesses that had gone – the loss of the local grocery stores being the most painful and now they have to travel miles for their food supplies.

It sounded every bit as depressing as the stories that I heard when I bought my house to the Auvergne in 1997

Now I have seen some strange place-names on my travels, that’s for sure, but the one just here is definitely the one that takes the biscuit to date.

It intrigued me, why they had singled this island out for special attention by giving it this particular name. The idea that there might be drunken islands lurching around in the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast here was rather a sobering thought.

But then again, maybe not. This coast is infamous for the amount of maritime accidents, collisions and sinkings of vessels and all that kind of thing, and that might explain it.

I had another leisurely drive along the coast today and nothing remarkable stood out (well, not that I am admitting to anyway) but I did encounter a mystery.

At a wharf alongside a river in a small town there was a ship (well, I think that it was a ship) that looked like it had just been raised from Full Fathom 5 after 50 years in the deeps. A rusting old hulk would have been embarrassed to have moored alongside it

So, with the silliest question being the one that is never asked, I headed off to the library. After all, librarians know everything.
“Ohhhh – that thing” she said. “They sailed it into here about 4 years ago ….”
“4? Or 40?”
“Definitely 4 or so. And it sailed in from Newfoundland” She replied. “And when it docked the people aboard ‘scattered like rats’ and they were gone. The police searched the ship thinking that there might be drugs aboard but they found nothing at all”

“So what’s it doing moored up there?”
“No-one knows” she replied. “But it’s a private wharf and as long as the mooring is paid the owner of the wharf doesn’t care about it”
“So who’s paying the mooring fees?” – I mean, you have to ask the question.
“Now there’s a good question” she repled.
And good question as it might be, she didn’t give me any answer.

What has taken my by surprise just here is that I came this way in the winter of 2003 when I was quite ill, and I made no comment whatsoever about the railway museum at Musquodoboit. Was it not here then? I ask myself. How would I not notice a railway museum? I really must have been ill.

Another thing that has taken me by surprise here is that for once in a provincial Canadian railway museum there is actually a locomotive. I mean it’s not actually a locomotive in the same category as a Pacific 4-6-2 or a Garrett articulated 2-8-8-2, but it’s here and not being turned into a thousand baked bean tins and that’s something, I suppose.

I’m having to really think if I have seen another engine before at a wayside place like this, and I can’t say that I have. There was the steam locomotive that was a stationary exhibit on the waterfront at Windsor but that was about it I reckon – "it was as recently as Baie Comeau actually" …ed

And so here I am in Halifax. I’ve been here twice before, in 2001 and 2003 and on both occasions I was rather ill, and so this evening I’ve been out taking pics – after all the ones that I took on those occasions with cheap compact digitals just didn’t work out at all.

This photo is much better.

It was taken from up on the Angus MacDonald Bridge, the bridge that goes across the Straits between Halifax and Dartmouth. That’s Halifax down there, with the Canadian Navy’s Eastern seaboard base in the foreground.

It really was quite eerie walking around here in the dark retracing the steps that I had taken in my previous visits when I was trying to take pictures like this armed with nothing more than a cheap basic compact digital.

Here, with a top-of-the-range DSLR and an optional-extra zoom lens that cost a lot of money at last I’ve been able to make some of the pics look like something useful.

And if you want to see more of the photos that I took, your wish is my command

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Thursday 21st October 2010 – I KNOW THAT I SAID …

… that I wouldn’t be blogging tonight but here I am in the harbour (well, the terminal, not actually in the harbour) of the ferry terminal at Channel Port Aux Basques with a few hours to go before I sail back to civilisation and I’ve discovered an internet hotspot.

And furthermore some very kind lady fellow passenger has shown me how to configure my computer to use it, so here I am

Last night’s B&B was exciting. $50 a night for the room and breakfast. Breakfast was help-yourself, make it yourself, cook it yourself – just like last night’s meal where my stock of food was put to good account.

And although the room was advertised as “with private bath” I quickly learnt that what that meant was that when it was your turn to go in, you could have it to yourself without 20 people clambering in with you.

And that’s not as strange as it might appear either as all through breakfast different people kept on appearing – out of the attic, from tunnels in the ground, all kinds of places. It was a hobbit-hole to go with the best. But who’s complaining? $50 with breakfast and I could do with some more places like that on my travels.

I wasn’t in a great rush to get to Channel Port Aux Basques as the ferry wasn’t until the late evening so I had a leisurely drive southwards.

The scenery along the road is typical of the western side of Newfoundland and in the early morning sunlight with a hanging cloud so typical of my own home in the Auvergne in France, I could be quite at home here.

Along the road I noticed a sign for the town of Stephenville and that rang a big bell with me. During World War II Britain mortgaged everything that it had in order to raise the cash to buy weapons from the USA and when the money ran out, they started selling off the land.

The US Air Force took over a large area of land here at Stephenville and built a huge air base, aimed primarily at refuelling the bombers that were always on patrol ready to attack the Soviet Union. It remained in service until guided missiles and rockets took over from bombers, whereupon it was abandoned.

I stopped for lunch by the seaside in the shadow of the Cap Anguille lighthouse. We’re close to the entrance of the Strait of Belle Isle here, and this is the short cut out of the Gulf of St Lawrence and Western Europe.

The Strait is narrow and is quite often beset with icebergs, so navigation is not as straightforward as it might be. There are hundreds of wrecks littering the shoreline of the Strait as we know, hence all of the lighthouses along here to warn mariners of the dangers.

We’re back on the road and back in the typical Western Newfoundland scenery again. This is what the road looks like between Woodville and Codroy, at Bear Brook Cove not far out of Channel Port Aux Basques.

But now you’ll notice something else, and that is that the weather has closed right in. Rain is something that it’s impossible to avoid in Newfoundland and although I’ve done well this last couple of days, it’s finally caught up with me as I prepare to leave.

At the entrance to the town of Channel Port Aux Basques is a small railway museum exhibiting relics of the Newfoundland Railway. As a good way to pass the time in the middle of this torrential rainstorm I went over for a wander around to see what I could find about the history of the railway.

However, as you might expect, the museum was closed, and that was that.

I wasn’t going to hang around in the town and so instead, I went for a drive along the southern shore of Newfoundland. After a short drive, I found myself at the harbour at Fox Roost.

In fact, this is what most of the southern shore of Newfoundland looks like and had the weather been better, I would have been happy to spend much more time along here having a really good explore around.

And not only is the area famous for its beautiful scenery, it’s also famous for being littered with old waggon bodies from the Newfoundland railway.

The metal frames would be quite valuable for scrap but there would be no market for the bodies and they would make excellent garden sheds and storage units. In fact I could do with a few around here.

The road only goes so far down along the coast – you have to take a ferry the rest of the way – but right down as far as it is possible to go, there’s harbour le cou road – the road to neck harbour.

And the view from down at the end is just as stunning as the view from this end, but there is a limit to the number of photos that you can put on these pages. To see the rest, you need to go to this page.

By now, it’s going dark and I can see my ship in the distance heading towards port. I need to be heading back or I’ll miss it. And it’s not the Joseph and Clara Smallwood either – it’s the “Caribou”, and so when I went into the ticket office, I did say to the girl at the desk that I hope it doesn’t get torpedoed tonight in mid-channel. But that went clean over her head.

But here’s a thing.

There’s a cigarette lighter socket in the boot of Casey, and it only works when the ignition is switched on. I’ve wired a small inverter in there, one that I bought the other day, and I’ve wired the slow cooker into that. At lunchtime I threw in some water, a couple of handfuls of pasta, a small tin of veg, half a tin of beans – and a while later 1/3 of a tin of sauce into it and that’s been cooking away as I’ve been driving around.

While I wouldn’t say that it was boiling, it was certainly hot enough to eat. I reckon that meal cost me less than $1:00 and if I can keep this up, it’ll go some way to bringing the budget back under control.

Eventually, we were allowed to board the ship and Strawberry Moose did well to park Casey correctly.

And having wined and dined, I’ve now found myself a nice comfortable reclining seat and I’m all set for a long voyage across the Gulf of St Lawrence, some of the most unpredictable waters in the world, submarine attacks notwithstanding.

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Wednesday 20th October 2010 – I ALMOST FORGOT TO BLOG TONIGHT.

Yes, I was about to go to bed for an early night. I’m in Corner Brook for my last night in Newfoundland – a B&B in a private house at $50 for the night and they even let me use the kitchen to cook my tea from my supplies.

So a cheap night tonight – but it needed to be, because this morning I had a nasty surprise. Casey had a flat tyre. 2000 miles down the worst roads in the world and not a thing, and a puncture on the Trans-Canada Highway. And so off to Canadian Tyres it had to be.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom because they were having a sale of inverters – and I picked up a 75-watt and a 150-watt for just $19.98 for the pair.
And then, incredibly, at Walmart, a 40-watt slow cooker for just $9:99. So off to the dollar store for a pile of tins and so on and I now have all that I need to cook my meals in the car as I drive.

We’ve talked about the Newfoundland railway before and every so often I’d been encountering relics that looked very, very railway-like.

Here from my good spec up on Joey’s Lookout, whoever Joey might have been, near Gambo, I had this view and I don’t think that I’ve ever seen anything looking more like a railway line than this. It’s ironic in a sense that the railway, the 20th Century form of transport, has cut off access to the bay for boats, the previous method of transport around here

Another good stroke of fortune was that the Air Museum at Gander was open and while the girl in charge knew nothing about the missing artefacts she did know two authors of aviation books who are “friends” of the museum.

One of these men worked on the project for the replica flight of Alcock and Brown’s Vimy to celebrate the 75th anniversary. So if anyone knows anything about these objects one of these will.

Outside the museum was a fur trapper selling rabbits that he had trapped.

This took me by surprise. I thought that they only did things like that in the Last of the Mohicans but here he was – a genuine 21st Century trapper doing his stuff at the side of a main road in the middle of civilisation. If you were to read this in a novel you wouldn’t believe it.

A little further on I can actually get in touch with the railway line.

This is a beautiful bow girder bridge across the river at Elmwood. And having been for a little walk along the line, I can tell you that it’s single-track and judging by the radii of some of the curves, narrow gauge too.

So now I know.

So now it’s an early night in my guest house at Corner Brook.

There won’t be a posting tomorrow as I’m spending the night on this 7-hour crossing to Cape Breton Island where I’ll be picking up where I left off from my 2003 voyage.

And if I don’t blog the night after, it will be either because wherever I will be staying won’t have internet access, or else the ferry will have sunk. And don’t laugh about that either. On October 14th 1942 the Caribou, one of the predecessors of the ship I’ll be sailing on, was torpedoed by a U boat while crossing over the Gulf of St Lawrence.

And the ship I’ll be sailing on – it’s the first voyage since its rudder and steering gear have been repaired. So anything can happen – and it probably will, but I’ve got my Strawberry Moose to keep me warm.

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Wednesday 13th October 2010 – I’VE SEEN A BEAR!

Yes, I really have!

Rupert sauntered across the road about 150 metres in front of me and then stopped by the side of the road waiting for me to ensure his immortality by recording his features in the camera.

But I’m ever so impressed by all of this, I really am. I think that all of the wildlife have been briefed to expect the arrival of the legendary Strawberry Moose and they are lying in wait.

So this morning having left my extortionate and over-priced motel (but then again everything is extortionate and over-priced out here and when you work out the logistics of bringing the stuff up here it’s hardly any surprise – you just need to be prepared for the shock) I had a wander around to see the air base at Goose Bay

its well-known airfield from World War II when it was one of the wayside stations in the Atlantic Ferry but there wasn’t anything significant to observe. It’s all seen much better days and is pretty much derelict now.

And so I headed off for part III of the route – the Labrador Coastal Drive.

This part of the road here towards L’Anse au Loup was finally opened earlier this year and it is this that has made my journey feasible. Prior to this, one had to go to the docks, stick one’s car into a container and wait for a ship for Cartwright.

The road was surprisingly good and I could keep up a good speed along it for the most part although there were a few bits that were thin.

But I did have a problem. Casey is doing about 9.5 litres to the 100 kms on good roads and much more on the rough stuff and so when I took it to be fuelled up, the guy put about 24 litres in, to account for the 300 from Churchill Falls yesterday.

I reckoned that the fuel consumption over that last bit must have been exceptional despite the roads and I was expecting Casey to need much more fuel than that.

But halfway round the route today I noticed that the gauge had dropped alarmingly. It seems that the guy didn’t fill it all the way to the top and it was about 8 litres (the length of the neck) short of fuel.

if ever I come this way again, which I really hope that I shall, I’ll have a 20-litre fuel can with me, and I’ll make sure that it’s full

And Casey is now thoroughly filthy … "and as if you aren’t" – ed … as the weather conditions were pretty awful with the torrential rain that we were having every now and again.

And with another 750 kms to travel, despite what it says on the sign (and how the towns are spelt – clearly someone in the signwriting service around here has a sense of humour) his condition was not going to improve.

But I wouldn’t have missed this journey for the world, even if I didn’t have much luck with the weather. In good weather this journey would have been stunning and even in weather conditions that I was having, it was quite spectacular.

Anyway, these are only a selection of photos and a short resumé of the journey. To see more, you need to go to this page, start at the beginning, and read on until the end

Eventually, I arrived in Cartwright (after seeing my bear) on fumes, and also with a semi-flat tyre, not that this is any surprise. I’m surprised that it’s the only problem that I have had up to date, given what I’ve gone through this last few days. But now, another one has presented itself.

There are two hotels in the town, and one of them is fully booked and the other one is closed for the season.

However, the owner of the fully-booked one rang up a friend of the owner of the second one and she came out from home to unlock a room for me, and gave me the key to the kitchen to help myself for cooking and for breakfast. It’s a good job that I had bought a few tins of beans and packets of spaghetti for emergencies such as this. I knew that they would.

But there’s about a year’s supply of beer in the kitchen – all kinds of things and I could have a field day in there if I were of that type.

Here at Cartwright, an old fishing port dating back to the 18th Century and one of these stops for the coastal ferry trade up the Labrador coast, the road is a new arrival.

Isolated and Remote Canada seems to have these really old and traditional kind of values, as the affair of the motel has provd and I shall always be grateful to them.

Tomorrow when I’ve fixed the tyre and fuelled up I’m going to look at the Norse Wunderstrand then drive back the 82 kms to the highway and go to the site of a historic early Pioneer village, Canada’s second-highest lighthouse, an early Basque whaling station and the Basque fishing boats from the 16th Century that have been salvaged.

Finally, it will be Blanc-Sablon where I may well spend the night ready to take the ferry to Newfoundland the next morning.

But the bear. I can’t get over that. What with the beaver … "it was a porcupine" – ed … on the first day, the moose on the second, the bear on the third – I’m going for the Loch Ness Monster tomorrow!

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Tuesday 12th October 2010 – I’M IN GOOSE BAY THIS EVENING …

… the town, that is, not the bay itself, and I’m goosed.

This morning got off to a rather bad start. I was walking down a street somewhere in small-town America in a howling gale. I don’t remember who I was with, and we were watching this 8-storey brick-built rooming house which was swaying alarmingly in the wind. Suddenly the top four storeys were blown right off the building and crashed to the street with an almighty bang. The two of us dashed over to start to rescue the survivors and suddenly in the middle of all of this I sat bolt upright in my bed.

It’s been ages since I’ve had such a realistic dream as this.

So this morning I was up long before dawn and took piles of photos of Labrador City, only to find that I had the ISO on the wrong setting after last night’s photos, and I had forgotten to change it back. Hence, not a one came out, and was I upset?

Well, not quite. It wasn’t quite light when I took the photo of my motel this morning so I managed to salvage that.

And I’m not going to say anything about the motel at all – I’ll wait for another occasion after I’ve recovered. I was expecting the prices out here to be different than in most other places – 500 kms of dirt road to bring stuff out here will be responsible for that – but I wasn’t prepared for this.

If it wasn’t for the huge iron-ore mines out here, there wouldn’t be anything at all. But what we do have is, apart from the mine of course, a huge railway network for hauling away the output and that was one of the things that I had wanted to see.

Having grown up on The Land God Gave to Cain and similar books, to come out to Labrador to see the iron ore mines, the railway lines and the dams has been my main lifetime ambition ever since my childhood.

But back to the story of my drive over the trail. Today I drove about as far as yesterday, but the roads were a different thing altogether. Leaving Labrador City we had a paved road for all of about 50 kms and then that was about that.

Seeing an enormous snowplough coming towards me with its front all thoroughly plastered with snow gave me a little inkling of what the weather was likely to be, and as we climbed up onto the Labrador Plateau it started to snow.

The more the road deteriorated, the more snow we had and it started to become quite an adventure. The higher I climbed brought me up into the clouds and it became a question of not even being able to see what the weather was doing, and that was probably the best idea.

But Casey, Strawberry and I pressed on relentlessly along the worst road that I have ever driven, deep into the wilderness.

And Strawberry was well-rewarded because at a certain moment right up on top of the plateau with the wind whistling around from everywhere, one of his Canadian cousins slowly ambled across the road as if he owned it, which he probably did.

Strawberry was ever so excited as you can imagine and it brought me to a standstill for a good few minutes as the two of them exchanged pleasantries. Eventually cousin managed to manoeuvre himself into a good spot between a couple of trees where I could get a really good shot of him, and once he was sure that he had made his entry onto these pages, he made his excuses and left

We arrived at Churchill Falls and had a good hunt around to find the petrol station – it wasn’t easy to spot.

Churchill Falls is not on the main Trans Labrador Highway – it’s way off to one side and you need to drive down this road in order to find it. Fuel was $1.15 at Fermont but here it was $1.22 and that’s quite acceptable for where we are – after all there is no train hauling it up into the mountains just here and from the railhead it’s quite a way.

The falls though were a little disappointing, and for two reasons too. Firstly, at this time of the year it’s probably all frozen up high up in the mountains.

Secondly, the river has had part of its course diverted to feed the huge hydro-electric power station on the other side of town. But there isn’t too much to see – everything is inside a hollowed-out mountain, rather like Doctor Evil’s lair.

After Churchill Falls as we climbed back out of the river valley onto the plateau the little bit of paved road immediately petered out and from then on I can safely say that I was on the worst road that I have ever driven in my life as you can tell from the photo.

One stretch of 122 kms took over 4 hours to drive, and I don’t hang about as you know

At another point we were held up by a construction team (there were about 20 teams working up here and they could have done with 200 I reckon) for 10 minutes while they dynamited a huge rock.

And then we were held up for another hour or so while they shovelled it up from off the road as they had miscalculated the amount of dynamite to use. It certainly was spectacular watching lumps of rock the size of giant pumpkins flying down the road just a hundred yards from where I was parked.

And by the time they had finished, quite a little queue had built up

But the road really was awful – at times it was just like a sea of mud in places and I didn’t dare stop because I would never have started again.

After 3 hours of driving from Churchill Falls with just 87 kms on the clock it all became a little depressing. But eventually, after 122 kms we passed onto an area where the construction crews had finished and we could roll along at a much more relaxed 60 kph – even though the roads were nothing like anything that you would get anywhere else. Ruts and potholes, lakes of water, huge stones, these were all commonplace

.But that being the case, every so often you would catch a glimpse of the old road – the one that they used before they had the idea to make the Highway about 10 years ago.

Just imagine driving on that surface -you wouldn’t even manage 60 kilometres in a week on that. There just aren’t any words in the dictionary to describe that road

But all of a sudden, at exactly 191 kms from Churchill Falls there was a huge steep climb up over the mountains and Casey struggled up that, I can tell you, and as we dropped down the other side we found ourselves in a deciduous forest.

Yes, the deliniation of the climatic zone was as dramatic as that – you could draw a line to represent it. And as we drove through a steep-sided valley it was curious to note that in the valley floor and the north-facing slopes there were conifer trees, mosses and lichens yet on the south-facing slopes there were deciduous trees and grass. This kind of area is a real marginal climatic zone that’s for sure.

But who is this “we” that I’ve been talking about?

Well, in fact long before Churchill Falls when I had stopped to take a photo of something I was passed by a Ford F150 pickup followed by a Pontiac 7-seater MPV. Half an hour later I caught up with them again, and then lost them as I stopped again to take another pic or so.

And we continued like this all the way over the Labrador Plateau and right until we hit the paved road a few miles from Goose Bay, when they piddled off into the sunset. It really was quite strange continually catching them up at roadworks and so on. We must have made quite a strange convoy along that road.

Now if last night’s hotel was the most expensive in which I have ever stayed, today’s is the second. And not by much either. I reckon that I could have stayed for a night with a lady of ill-repute in each of these places and still been ahead of the game. I shall be looking into this.

Anyway, these are only a selection of photos and a short resumé of the journey. To see more, you need to go to this page, start at the beginning, and read on until the end.

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Friday 9th October 2010 – TODAY WE CROSSED THE RUBI … ERRR ….. ST LAWRENCE

This morning quite early, we said goodbye to our host of the previous evening. And as you can see, Strawberry Moose was particularly sad to depart.

And what a nice motel that was – there was even a microwave oven in the room and that made me wish that I had some proper food on board. In fact, I’ll stock up with a few bits and pieces next time I pass by one of these supermarkets just in case I find another microwave in a motel room.

Tracy, where the motel might be found, is a small port on the south bank of the St Lawrence between Montreal and Quebec and you may remember that I had a good wander around there last night.

Next item of interest is this gorgeous bow-girder bridge, the Pont Laviolette that spans the St Lawrence on the outskirts of Trois Rivieres, which is on the other (north) bank of the river.

I had a good drive around to see if I could have a closer and better view of the bridge, but no such luck. However, I’ll be coming back this way and I’ll spend some time then to have a really good look around.

And while we are on the subject of bridges, what do you think about this one?

This is the legendary Pont de Quebec, built at the turn of the 2Oth Century to carry the road and the railway across the St Lawrence to the city of Quebec. It’s been the subject of two major construction failures and cost more lives than the Tay Bridge disaster did, although it was never immortalised by William McGonagall.

You can read more about the Pont de Quebec on this page.

There’s no doubt about it though, the southern shore of the St Lawrence around by the city of Quebec is absolutely beautiful at this time of the year as the leaves are falling (and it’s funny that the further north-east I travel the more the trees have lost their leaves – it’s quite remarkable).

I chose this spot to stop and eat my butty, with the St Lawrence over my left shoulder and the city of Quebec across the river.

It was something of a late lunch because I went to the Walmart just up the road to buy another SD card – they had Kodak ones on special offer – 4GB for $10 but they had sold out. And in line with my resolution of this morning, I bought a tim opener, a mixing spoon and a microwave bowl to go with the pile of pasta in tomato sauce (4 for $5) and tins of beans (99 cents each) that I bought in a food supermarket across the road in case I find another motel with a microwave.

I have to be prepared.

After my lunch I crossed over into Quebec and had a drive around. Old Quebec is really beautiful but I didn’t stop as I’m running to a tight schedule. I hope I’ll be able to fit a day into my return journey to go for a wander round. It’s just like a late medaieval European city in places and has somehow managed to escape the developer’s bulldozer.

After that I headed north-east along the north shore of the St Lawrence and this is really where the beautiful part of Canada begins.

After maybe 15 miles you abruptly leave civilisation and go right into the mountains. It is just so spectacular, as you can see in this pic taken from halfway up Cap Tourmente. The St Lawrence is down there in the valley and Quebec is on the skyline.

>And this is what it is like – all up hill and down dale all the way along the coast, with the St Lawrence never more than a mile or two away.

Here, at the top of Cap Tourmente, you can see what I’ll be encountering. The mountains, the undulating road, the deciduous trees shedding their leaves, and the possibility of encountering a moose, if the one sitting beside me wasn’t enough to be going on with.

Tonight I’m staying in St Simeon which is a ferry port across to Riviere du Loup on the southern shore where I crossed over last time I was up here. This is the view of the ferry terminal from my motel bedroom.

And what I don’t understand is that last time I struggled to find a motel and had to drive another 25 miles until I found one quite by chance.

Just now, I’ve passed 6 at Malbaie, a small town about 15 miles west of here and there’s 5 motels that I can see from my window just here. I really must have been asleep that evening.

But even now I’m not lucky. It’s quite expensive here and there is nothing – no coffee machine (although I’ve sorted that out) and no microwave either. And even worse, there’s nowhere around in the town where I can find a meal.

I’m really not having much luck, am I?

Tomorrow I’ll be driving the 4 hours up to Baie Comeau, going by the famous ferry at Tadoussac, which you will have seen from the last time I was here, and then it’s into the interior. 400-odd miles of dirt track through the interior of Quebec and then 600 or so miles through Labrador and out to the Atlantic Ocean.

Now that’s what I call the wilderness!

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EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality