Day 37: Long Point Park to Pinware Provincial Park via Red Bay

It was cool overnight. Great for sleeping. As per usual, we woke up to a superb view. This is going to come to a screeching halt at some point.

I checked the news this morning about the situation along the Labrador Hwy between Labrador City and Happy Valley-Goose Bay. Had we decided to set off one day earlier, we would have been part of the evacuation. The choke point of the trip had always been gas. There is only one gas station in Churchill Falls along a 560 mile stretch. Yesterday afternoon there were 1000 vehicles lined up for gas in Churchill Falls. If you recall, Churchill Falls had been evacuated to Goose Bay a month ago. Volunteers were pumping gas and the station was open all night. Several thousand people had already arrived in Goose Bay by last night with room for all. Even the hospital and the nursing home in Labrador City had been successfully evacuated. Everyone ready to help someone else. That’s the way they are here.

Our German friends were supposed to be heading up there today to do the same trip we had originally planned. They didn’t know about the fires.

Today has turned out to be a people day.

We have reservations for the next 2 nights at Pinware Provincial Park, just south of Red Bay. We had eaten well at the Whalers Restaurant in Red Bay so we made that our destination for lunch.

If you recall, Red Bay is the site of the UNESCO World Heritage site for the Basque Whalers. There is also another museum there on whales that we missed the first time through, so we headed there for something to do.

We spent a happy hour learning about Bowhead and Right Whales and looking at a re-assembled whale skeleton (very dinosaurish), but the best part was the tour guide. She was a local woman who grew up in Red Bay, had moved away, and then returned to look after aging parents. She talked about what it was like to grow up in this isolated community that had no road until the late 1980s. Every male except for her father, who was the lighthouse keeper, was a fisherman. The women, including her mother, worked in the fish processing plant. All the fish that was caught, salmon, cod, herring was processed, not shipped out fresh. When the fishing moratorium in 1992 halted fishing, it basically killed Red Bay. The older generation felt they were too old to learn a new trade, some of the younger generstion re-skilled and the rest left. The school closed because there were hardly any children left. The lighthouse was still needed, and her own father still had a job. Now, it’s tourism that is revitalizing the area. That same story is repeated in communities all along this coast and Newfoundland as well.

There was also an exhibit here on rug hooking. I have come to really appreciate this craft. The women here use different materials. Everywhere else has been wool on burlap. Here the women still use left over cloth strips, preferably stretchy fabrics. Nylon stocking are best (who wears those any more?). There was a beautiful community rug on the wall made by 9 women in the area and pieced together. The gentleman in the museum proudly showed me one his aunt had made. She dyed the fabric to get the colors she wanted.

The young lady who served us in the restaurant was from Port Hope-Simpson, 2 hours north of Red Bay, where we stayed last night. Her parents owned one of the 2 gas stations there. We have really come to appreciate the need for gas stations! But she said she grew up in Williams Cove on one of the islands, a 45-minute boat ride east of Port Hope-Simpson. Her father must have started the gas station after the moratorium in 1992. There was a polar bear skin hanging on the wall in the restaurant. Our young lady server told us that polar bears used to come here all the time. She would see them on the island where she grew up. Not so much any more.

It was a very interesting afternoon overall and one we weren’t expecting.

Once we got into camp, it started to rain. It is cold as well. Brian spent the rest of the day booking reservations for the rest of the trip. We can’t get out of Labrador over to St.Barbe until Tuesday afternoon. We have a full day’s drive down to Port aux Basques for our overnight ferry to North Sydney on Thursday night. We have 3 days to get from North Sydney through Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to get to Montreal. We have family to visit.

Basically, we have lost a week of this trip and will not be able to do the north eastern parts of Quebec we really wanted to do. Mother nature dictated that. If you have been following my blog, there is also a whole area of south eastern Newfoundland around St.Johns we couldn’t get to either because of the ferry situation. That was a man-made fiasco. That ferry still isn’t running 😕.  It has upset a lot of people who rely on tourism in south eastern Newfoundland for their livelihoods.