Trans Labrador Highway Part 3

Monday

Getting three people’s gear around on two motorcycles was a bit of a challenge so it took us a while to ferry everything over to Frenchie’s from the hotel. One of the Dave’s needed a new tire and some other repairs so we set up shop with all of our stuff in their parking lot. We anxiously waited for them to check out my bike to see how serious the damage was. After waiting all morning we walked over to lunch and on the way back I heard my starter turning over so I went in to see what the deal was. It didn’t look good. The shop manager looked at me and basically said “yer fucked.” My bike wasn’t going anywhere on its own. When he hit the starter button you could see air getting blown out through the head gasket, and we didn’t know what else I might have been cooked inside the engine. Goose Bay is so far out in the middle of nowhere that it can take about ten days to get parts, and without knowing what else was broken staying and getting it fixed there wasn’t much of an option. I was going to have to find another way to get the bike and me home.

It totally sucked that the motorcycle part of the trip was over and the impending repairs were probably going to cost a shitload of money, but getting everything back to Vermont was going to be a real adventure, and that was the real reason for my trip, so I tried not to get too upset about the situation. The guys in the shop started helping me hash out some plans on how to get everything home. Their first thought was to have it shipped, but the last time someone had done that it ran about $1200, so that was a definite no go. Then the shop manager brought up a deal they had worked out a couple of times with JAG, a Quebec based shipping company that frequently had empty trucks driving back to Baie Comeau. He called the Goose Bay office and set up a deal for me, $300 in cash to the trucker and he would pick it up the next day and drive it to the Harley-Davidson dealership in Baie Comeau. No insurance, no paperwork, nothing official. At that point it was my only option so we set it in motion and hoped that the driver would let me ride shotgun, otherwise I might be hitchhiking home. I called my dad and asked if he felt like meeting me in Baie Comeau to get my bike the rest of the way home. He grumbled about it a bit, but he’s always looking for an excuse for some adventure so I didn't feel too bad about guilting him into it.

I walked outside into the late afternoon sun and found Dave and Dave talking to a mechanic who worked for the Goose Bay military base. He turned out to be a KLR rider and we chatted for a bit about my predicament. He kept joking that it was too bad I was on a beamer not a KLR, because he had three spare engines sitting in his garage that he would have sold me for cheap. As it started to get late it was time for me to meet up with my Couchsurfing host and the Dave’s were headed out of town to a campground. We wished each other good luck and parted ways. They had been extremely helpful in getting me into town and sorting out the whole mess. It was pretty incredible how two total strangers had invested so much of their time and energy in helping me get to Goose Bay safely. I guess that’s the way of the road… If you guys are ever in VT hit me up and I’ll buy you some beers.

The KLR rider gave me a ride up onto the military base to my Couchsurfing host’s house. Frank works in the Canadian military as a logistics coordinator for the local rangers, and has a sweet place up on the base. I was stoked to find out that he was a fellow climber and outdoor enthusiast, and we spent a while talking about the marginal climbing in the Goose Bay area, and an epic-sounding trip he took up to the Torngat Mountains in northern Labrador, a place I’ve always dreamed of exploring. After decompressing on the couch for a while he asked if I wanted to ride bikes (the pedaling kind) up to a hill above town where there was a good view. “Well fuck yeah!” There were some showers rolling in and it was almost dark but a hard bike ride is a great way let off some steam so we threw some headlamps in a backpack and headed for the hill. We rode a few kilometers on flat pavement then hit a steep dirt road up to the top of the hill. After suffering for a couple more kilometers of slick gravel and washboards we topped out as the last light was leaving the sky. It wasn’t the view we were hoping for but the lights of the Air Force base and the town below were rewarding enough. After catching our breath we blasted back down the sketchy road with dim headlamps and no helmets hoping we wouldn’t crash into the woods.

Tuesday

Frank gave me a ride down to Frenchie’s early and I started working with one of the mechanics to strap my bike onto a metal rack to keep it stable in the back of the truck. The JAG truck that was supposed to arrive at 10 am didn’t show up until 3 pm so I spent the day sitting on my bike and walking around the shop, agonizing over whether or not I would get a ride with the trucker. When he finally showed up I found out the driver was a French Canadian who spoke no English. It took a while for him to figure out that I was asking for a ride and even then he wasn’t sure. While we loaded my bike onto the truck he called his boss to see if it was cool for me to tag along. It turned out it wasn’t, so I watched him drive off with my bike and tried to figure out how I was going to make the seven hundred mile trek to Baie Comeau.

Flying out of Goose Bay is brutally expensive so the only realistic option was to hitch hike. Fortunately, there is only one road and it goes all the way to Baie Comeau, so I hoped it wouldn’t be too difficult. One of the guys in the shop gave me a ride a few miles outside of town to where I would be most likely to be picked up by someone going in my direction. I sat there with my helmet and dry bag for a few hours with no luck. Almost every vehicle was a work truck going to the Muskrat Falls project a few miles outside of town. A couple of people stopped, but they were only going out to their camps a few minutes down the road. It was starting to get dark so I gave Frank a call to see if he was cool with me crashing at his place another night. He said he would come out to pick me up as soon as he got off work. As I hung up the phone some riders on a KLR and two big 1300 cc street bikes rolled up. They had just ridden the 300 miles of gravel east of Goose Bay which was pretty impressive considering the bikes they were riding. We chatted for a bit before they headed into town for the night. A bit later Frank rolled up and headed back to town for what I hoped would be my last night in Goose Bay.

Wednesday

I woke up to a heavy downpour. Great weather for standing on the side of the road with your thumb out. Frank brought me back out to my spot on the side of the TLH and I spent the next couple of hours getting wet and cold. Just as I was starting to give up hope a big semi with a flatbed trailer pulled over next to me. I climbed up to the door and the French Canadian driver pointed at my little cardboard sign saying “I go der!” Perfect! It looked like I was going to get one ride all the way to Baie Comeau. The trucker introduced himself as Norman and told me to hop in. He spoke broken English but was fun to talk to, and I think he was excited to not have to make the sixteen hour trip alone. Norman told me he had been a trucker for almost twenty years, most of it as his own business, and had put over a million miles on each of the four trucks he has owned. Many of those miles he had spent driving between Goose Bay and Baie Comeau, so it was pretty hilarious how well he knew the road. He would point out spots saying “This is where the snow gets higher than my truck”, and “this is where two trucks went off the road into the lake last year,” and the best “Oh yah, this is where my buddy’s trailer got hit by a train last summer.”

A load of tires for the giant mining dump trucks at Fermont

Norman's rig

We drove on for the rest of the day and I got to revisit all the beautiful places I had been a couple days before. Just before dark we rolled into the bunkhouse at Relais-Gabriel. We had to be up the next morning at 5:30 to get back on the road and keep to Norman’s schedule, so I got a room, paid 16 bucks for a shitty pre-made sandwich and a Molson pounder, and went to bed.

The next morning we got an early breakfast and hit the road. A few hours later we were in Baie-Comeau, and we drove into the sawmill where Norman would pick up a load to bring south. He was in a hurry to get loaded up so we shook hands and parted ways. I really can’t thank him enough and I hope that wasn’t the only time we’ll cross paths.

I started walking down the road towards town and gave my dad a call so he could come pick me up. I dragged my heavy dry-bag in the dirt on the shoulder of the road until I finally saw my dad’s Ford crest over a hill with my bike loaded up in the back. He rolled up with the window down and we both laughed at the predicament I was in. He pretended to be upset about having to drive 10 hours to rescue my dumb ass, but I knew he enjoyed the mini-adventure and was stoked to have a good excuse to skip the in-service days before teaching started.

He seemed to be in a rush to get out of Quebec so I hopped in and we made tracks for home. He told me that getting my bike unloaded and on to his truck had been a shit show and he was convinced that every French-Canadian in town was out to get him. When we loaded my bike in Goose Bay the guys at Frenchies told the driver to just bring it to the Harley dealership in Baie-Comeau. I was more worried about how I was going to get there so I didn’t put much thought into it, and didn’t realize the nightmare it would create for my dad. He waited at the dealership (Where only one person spoke broken English) all day for the JAG truck to show up. Just as the dealership was closing and everyone was going home the JAG truck showed, and tried to back into the dealership, but screwed it up and ended up parking in some random driveway. My dad opened up the doors and realized that my bike was half way up the trailer and totally immobile because of the transport rack we had put it on. Back in Goose-Bay we had used a fork lift with 30 foot long forks to get my bike in and put a Polaris side by side bound for Lab City right behind it. It turns out the Harley shop in Baie-Comeau didn’t have a giant fork lift and the staff were already pissed off that my dad was keeping them from getting home. He couldn’t get help from any of them, or the fuming driver, so he grabbed some chains, hooked them up to the transport rack, and dragged the whole thing to the back of the truck. The angry French-Canadians pulled it off with a small forklift and parked it in their impound for a small fee of $120 because they didn’t want to deal with putting it in the back of my dad’s truck. He went back the next morning to get it loaded up and had just finished paying when he got the call from me.

In planning the trip I had known that some mechanical problem could happen, and that if it was anything more than a flat tire I’d probably be screwed because of my lack of any mechanical knowledge, but I really didn’t expect anything major to happen, especially not the way it did. It turns out the culprit was a small hole in the radiator, and the end result of my bone-headed decision to keep on riding that day was a melted cylinder head and about 3000 bucks worth of damage. Despite how much that totally blows I don’t regret the trip at all. I got to know some wonderful people who saved me from a situation that could have been a lot worse, and those relationships alone were worth the whole ordeal. I owe a huge thanks to Dave and Dave, all the staff at Frenchies, Norman, Frank, my dad, and everyone else who helped along the way. In the end it turned out to be a good experience for me. Shit happens and I think life is a bit stale without some crazy adventure. As Yvon Chouinard once said, “When everything goes wrong- that’s when the adventure starts.”