Thursday, July 27, 2006



I'm in Goose Bay, Labrador at the moment. We took a group of guys here so they could go fishing. We landed and a helicopter picked them up to whisk them a further 100 miles into the bush to a fishing lodge for a few days, and myself and my F/o are left cooling our heels here in northern Labrador. Overall it's a lot like Northern Saskatchewan, except with funny accents. Most of the roads are gravel, and ther eis a reserve about 15km from here. I wanted to go there to ask around for Labrador carvings (you know, inuit carvings made from whale bones etc) but the rental car guy said I couldn't take the rental car on the reserve. I'll have to figure something out as I want a souvenir of this place and I don't feel like paying the $2,500 they want at the local art galleries around here.

Anyway, here's me wandering along the beach of some local lake - they say it's only ice-free for 2 1/2 months a year. The second pic is of me in front of a Hudson's Bay store that has been around since 1670. I bought a Red Bull, presumably of a more recent vintage.

Goose Bay used to be a huge military base, training thousands of European air force pilots, but it all shut down over the past 2 years and the town has taken a huge hit. The base that used to house 8,000 air force trainees now houses 40 caretaking staff. I met a nice crew of pilots who fly a privately owned 737-500 out of Victoria BC - they are stranded here for a few days waiting on some aircraft parts; it went mechanical over the north Atlantic on their way to Amsterdam, and they limped here to fix it up. We are gonna head to a local steakhouse for supper and presumably talk about airplanes. The cool part about the steakhouse is that you grill your own food - a fun thing for us to do, and a great way to save money on kitchen staff for them :)

More on Goose Bay over the next few days as I'm here until Saturday. At least this place has highspeed.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey there, My dad was stationed there from 1967-1969. It was blue Goose cold in the winter and we loved the northern lights. Lot's of American alumni have fond memories of the Goose. May God bless, Don.