Churchill Falls – or not

The good news is that the road between Labrador City and Goose Bay looks to be excellent. They have just finished paving the first half of our trip through Labrador and it makes the driving very easy. We are still in the middle of nowhere but it doesn’t seem so bad when we are moving at a reasonable speed on a paved road. This luxury ends around Goose Bay.

We had planned on spending the night in Churchill Falls and touring the generating station on Monday. This didn’t happen. First, let me tell you what I read from other individuals on the internet about Churchill Falls. I didn’t really believe this. I read that people basically worked till they died or they had to move away. As soon as you stopped working, which included retiring, you lost your home. I assume that is because Churchill Falls is a company town and that generating company owns all the houses. I thought that this was just some exaggeration that one reads on the internet and it still easily could be. We did meet someone in Labrador City who personally told us the same thing which made it a little more real. Driving around Churchill Falls actually felt quite depressing. Normally that would be because a place looked rundown which it didn’t. The houses looked fairly well kept but they looked stark somehow. Although the area is heavily forested there were no trees on any of the lots. Mike thought that it looked like temporary houses set up as a camp for workers, which I guess is what it is, just not too temporary. We did buy gas while we were here at $1.38 per litre! Mike said that the mosquitoes were biting liking crazy while he filled up with gas. Although there were some big bugs in Labrador City we didn’t actually get bitten while we were there. Oh well, we were warned.

It was a Sunday when we were in Churchill Falls and there were no people to see anywhere. When we left our RV campground this morning there were kids and their parents all over the place. It was really nice to see. Churchill Falls looked dead and deserted. As I said, depressing. We decided that we would rather just drive on. At this latitude it is still very light out at 9pm at night. If I had agreed Mike would just have kept driving. By 8pm I said enough and we stopped at the first pull over at the side of the road. We have expanded our RV and are sitting at the edge of a forest. Mike is currently cooking dinner while I update our map and blog, or as much as I can with no internet. Mike calls this great teamwork. I call it heaven!