Oh Canada! - Thoughts and observations from week 1

Thoughts and observations from week 1

We’ve been on the road North for a week now, and here are a few musings.

Our timing is such that we’re too early for some of the places we read about in the guidebooks to be open.

 

Our timing is also such that we are too early for the black flies.  So, all in all, I think our timing was perfect!

There is water, water everywhere – except where there isn’t water.  Where there isn’t a body of water, the land seems very dry.  So the land itself doesn't hold moisture.  

With all the water bodies we’ve passed, there is a noticeable lack of water fowl.  We’ve seen the odd loon and that’s about it.  Surprising that we haven’t seen more ducks, geese, etc.

       The Canadian Shield = massive amounts of Rock!  Sand!  Gravel!   Whatever it has is on a massive scale. 

    

       

        People love to write on the rock faces.  That was the only blight to the otherwise really beautiful rock we saw.  On the other hand, it was a sweet blight.  It was always Johnny loves Susie type stuff.  We never saw foul language or nastiness in the spray painted messages.  What a contrast to the kind of stuff we see here, eh?

     

        As I previously mentioned, but it bears repeating, the potties are always clean!

       The road from Manic 5 to Labrador City is gravel the final third of the way.  The road from there to Churchill Falls to Happy Valley-Goose Bay is paved the first third of the way, then gravel again.  And it’s been gravel since then, and will be till we get close to Quebec.  So with hundreds and hundreds of miles of gravel roads, the dust is becoming pretty tiresome.  It permeates everything inside the Highlander, even with the windows rolled up.