Marg and Koichi's Labrador & NFLD Adventure: Day 5: Off to the Rock, but first back to Quebec

Day 5: Happy Valley Goose Bay to Blanc Sablon, Quebec

After a good nights sleep in HVGB, we packed our car in pouring rain for our next segment back south on the Trans Labrador Highway. This is the last, but longest and hardest driving since the road is completely dirt/gravel for over 550km. Once we left HVGB there are no services (No gas stations/restaurants/stores) until we reach Fort Simpson about 390km into our drive, so it was important that we carried extra fuel.

The first 100km of the gravel road was smooth and we could travel at 80kph, but soon after became very bumpy, with lots of water filled pot holes. It was tiring trying to dodge all of the pot holes, and some of the massive pot holes covered the windshield with mud when we drove through them. It was truly awesome drive and so glad that we had a bigger truck to absorb all of the spine shattering bumps. The trans-labrador hwy didn't disappoint. At this point we were driving the most northern road in the eastern side of Canada.

HVGB to Blanc Sablon, QC

The stretch between HVGB and Fort Simpson was really lonely. We saw on average 1 car every hour passing us...even the traffic of the large transport trucks disappeared for some time. We arrived in Fort Simpson with only a 1/4 tank of gas left, and very happy to see that the local gas station was open.

Gassing up at Fort Simpson

Once we left Fort Simpson and headed south, the time zone changed to St John's NFLD time. This gets kind of confusing. HVGB at the west coast of Labrador is in Altantic time, where as the east coast of Labrador is in NFLD time.

Our hotel is located in Blanc Sablon, which is 10km west of the Labrador border, so once we arrived at our hotel, it returned to Eastern time.

So when we left our hotel in HVGB we should have arrived at 5pm, but in the east coast of Labrador we lost 30min, so our arrival time increased to 5:30pm. But when we arrived at our hotel, it was actually 1.5 hours at eastern time, so arrival time ended up being 3:00pm.

Blanc Sablon is interesting since it is in Quebec, but they are more strongly tied to NFLD. Most people here speak English, and there are currently no roads from Blanc Sablon to main land Quebec. Due to the time difference, you could wake up at 7am, go to the store in Labrador 3km away at 8:30, and then have time to get back before work...pretty convenient !

In reality, we ended up arriving at our hotel at 6pm since there was tons of construction on the Trans Labrador Hwy

Tomorrow is off to Rock with the Ferry.

Oh...and even though we are in Quebec, the ferry leaves at 10:30am NFLD time...which is actually 9am Quebec time