I'm in Goose Bay this evening ...

... the town, that is, not the bay itself, and I'm goosed. This morning got off to a rather bad start. I was walking down a street somewhere in small-town America in a howling gale. I don't remember who I was with, and we were watching this 8-storey brick-built rooming house and it was swaying alarmingly in the wind. Suddenly the top four storeys were blown right off the building and crashed to the street with an almighty bang. The two of us dashed over to start to rescue the survivors and suddenly in the middle of all of this I sat bolt upright in my bed. It's been ages since I've had such a realistic dream as this.

But back to the story of my drive over the trail. Today I drove about as far as yesterday, but the roads were a different thing altogether.

Leaving Labrador City we had a paved road for all of about 50 kms and then that was about that. Seeing this enormous snowplough coming towards me with its front all thoroughly plastered with snow gave me a little inkling of what the weather was likely to be, and as we climbed up onto the Labrador Plateau it started to snow and the more the road deteriorated the more snow we had and it started to become quite an adventure.

The higher I climbed brought me up into the clouds and it became a question of not even being able to see what the weather was doing, and that was probably the best idea. But Casey, Strawberry and I pressed on relentlessly into the wilderness.

And Strawberry was well-rewarded because at a certain moment right up on top of the plateau with the wind whistling around from everywhere, one of his Canadian cousins slowly ambled across the road as if he owned it, which he probably did.

Strawberry was ever so excited as you can imagine and it brought me to a standstill for a good few minutes as the two of them exchanged pleasantries. Eventually cousin managed to manoeuvre himself into a good spot between a couple of trees where I could get a really good shot of him, and once he was sure that he had made his entry onto these pages, he made his excuses and left.

We arrived at Churchill Falls and had a good hunt around to find the petrol station - it wasn't easy to spot. $1.15 it had been at Fermont - here it was $1.22 and that's quite acceptable for where we are - after all there is no train hauling it up into the mountains just here and from the railhead its quite a way. The falls though were a little disappointing, probably because it's frozen up in the mountains. They would be quite spectacular in July and August.

After Churchill Falls as we climbed back out of the river valley onto the plateau the little bit of paved road immediately petered out and from then on I can safely say that I was on the worst road that I have ever driven in my life. One stretch of 122 kms took over 4 hours to drive, and I don't hang about as you know.

At another point we were held up by a construction team (there were about 20 teams working up here and they could have done with 200 I reckon) for 10 minutes while they dynamited a rock. And then we were held up for another half an hour while they shovelled it up from off the road as they had miscalculated the amount of dynamite to use. It certainly was spectacular watching lumps of rock the size of giant pumpkins flying a hundred yards down the road, I can tell you.

But the road really was awful - at times it was just like a sea of mud in places and I didn't dare stop because I would never have started again, and after 3 hours of driving from Churchill Falls with just 87 kms on the clock it all became a little depressing. But eventually, after 122 kms we passed onto an area where the construction crews had finished and we could roll along at a much more relaxed 60 kph - even though the roads were nothing like anything that you would get anywhere else. Ruts and potholes, lakes of water, huge stones, these were all commonplace.

But that being the case, every so often you would catch a glimpse of the old road - the one that they used before they had the idea to make the Highway about 10 years ago - and you wouldn't even do 60 kms in a week on that. There just aren't any words in the dictionary to describe that road.

But all of a sudden, at exactly 191 kms from Churchill Falls there was a huge steep climb up over the mountains and Casey struggled up that, I can tell you, and as we dropped down the other side we found ourselves in a deciduous forest. Yes, the deliniation of the climatic zone was as dramatic as that - you could draw a line to represent it. And as we drove through a steep-sided valley it was curious to note that in the valley floor and the north-facing slopes there were conifer trees, mosses and lichens yet on the south-facing slopes there were deciduous trees and grass. This kind of area is a real marginal area that's for sure.

But who is this "we" I am talking about?

Well, in fact long before Churchill Falls when I had stopped to take a photo of something I was passed by a Ford F150 pickup followed by a Pontiac 7-seater MPV. Ha;f an hour later I caught up with them again, and then lost them as I stopped again to take another pic or so. And we continued like this all the way over the Labrador Plateau and right until we hit the paved road a few miles from Goose Bay, when they piddled off into the sunset. It really was quite strange continually catching them up at roadworks and so on. We must have made quite a strange convoy along that road.

Now if yesterday's hotel was the most expensive in which I have ever stayed, today's is the second. And not by much either. I reckon that I could have stayed for a night with a lady of ill-repute in each of these places and still been ahead of the game. I shall be looking into this.