Robert Matzinger's Cycling Trans-Labrador
Highway Pages 
Robert Matzinger's Cycling Trans-Labrador
Highway Pages
Cycling Trans-Labrador Highway
The weather has changed to rainy and cold - it's automn now. Still it's nice, flat and the gravel is often not so bad (beside the washboard sections), so we can do the 250 km to the Churchill Falls in three days. In between there's virtually nothing, beside incredible amounts of landscape.
Churchill Falls is the only village on our way to the coast. About 2000 inhabitants solely live here to maintain the underground power plant here. We encounter strange atmosphere of toughness and remoteness.
The last about 300km from here to the coast are the worst. We just make
it because we know it's over then.
The road is nothing than bumps and gravel with lots and lots of frustrating
steep grades being built arbatrarily in a mainly flat landscape.
The weather is rainy and quite cold. Moreover we get in a hurry to catch the mid-week ferry from Goose Bay, but it's too cold to rest anyway. The bikes are gradually falling apart and I have a hard time to keep them going. The last day we take our headlamps and cycle until midnight to reach Goose Bay in time. I fall off my bike about five times, because I cann't see the sand holes at night.
Cold, hungry and exhausted like Ican not remember having felt before, we
reach Goose Bay. Still we will always remember this land as an amazing
wild, remote and powerful place and we are quite proud of having cycled
it.
From
Goose Bay we take the ferry to Newfoundland. 36 hours of non-cycling! We
feel dizzy, sleepy and tired to an amount that will not go away for the
rest of the journey. We always enjoy travelling by ship, but at this trip
we mostly engage in sleeping.
Only an early-morning iceberg (quite seldom at this time of the year) catches our attention.
