Nah! I have some local things to take care of first...But i'm officially on vacation!

 

They started directing trucks towards the Ericson ferry around 3 pm on Thursday, Dec-23rd. The guy in the orange suit looked at my trailer and said, "Stay left and go to the top deck". I looked ahead and saw that all trucks were keeping to the right - to the lower deck. Hm...

So, I go around all traffic and start climbing the steep ramp towards the ship. When I'm at the top, another orange suit stops me, then comes over and says, "You have to go back. Your trailer is too low." I say, "That guy down there told me to go to the upper deck. Suit #2 says, "He made a mistake. Wait for my signal and then back down the ramp to the lower deck." Let the fun begin.

A couple of trucks passed me missing the trailer's end by mere inches and then finally I'm allowed to back down the same 45% ramp. When I'm back at the bottom Suit #3 directs me to the lower deck and finally I make it to the inside of the ship. It looks like a regular warehouse, except the walls are made of metal and there's chains on the floor. They tell me to park near the wall and then proceed to secure my trailer with chains to the floor. Evidently these guys don't take any chances

I ask the guy who works on the chains where I go from here and he shows me where the elevator is. I go up and it looks like a very comfortable restaurant with a part that looks like an air-plane (rows of seats 5 across), and then there's small cabins with 4 bunks in each, where I catch some sleep during the trip.

There's no Internet though so I'm typing this while we're still at the dock and use my Bell USB stick to hook up to Internet.

 

You mean it was not funny up till now?

 

I truly hope to see you succeed Tracer, but for god's sake i hope this will help you make better choices in the future. I'd be going crazy by now

 

Oh common! Where is your sense of adventure! I would do it in a heart beat...if they would trow in another 6 grand!

А волны и стонут и плачут
И бьются о борт корабля
Расстаял в далеком тумане Рыбачий
Родимая наша земля.

 

Ah you guys are a bunch of killjoys. I'd do it for the $9300 and the chance to see a part of the world I've never seen before. Once might be enough though.

 

Ericson is an old and slow boat: we left North Sydney NS at 6 pm AT and we were at the dock in Port aux Basques NL only at 2 am AT or 2:30 am local time. By the time I was off the boat with the truck, it was almost 4 am and the idea of driving through the night to St. John's didn't look as appealing as it did before, especially with all those moose on the road.

I liked the comfort of the boat when it was docked in North Sydney. It looked like a very big airplane inside. Things changed when it started moving: I am okay with it pitching but that constant rocking from side to side made me nervous. It did rock pretty bad. Scenes from movies like "2010" and sometimes "Titanic" came to mind I have to admit - it was a scary ride.

I tried to sleep in the bunk bed I paid 30 bucks for, but it's hard to relax in a tiny room with no windows, especially when the said room shakes, vibrates, and tilts left and right. I got up and spent the majority of the time on the boat in a high back lounge chair watching TV.

When I drove the truck off the boat, I drove into the parking lot and stopped near their shunt truck with the driver inside. I asked the guy where I could park till morning so that I wasn't in the way. He showed me a good spot and I shut down near the water, away from traveling lanes inside the ferry terminal in Port aux Basques.

A call from the guy at the St. John's warehouse woke me up and we agreed I'd be in St. John's on the 27th at 9 am and they'd make sure someone would be there to unload me.

Before heading to the terminal for some quick breakfast, I walked around the truck and trailer and kicked the tires. The front outside tire on the trailer, the same one I already have spent $340 on, was low on air again. I couldn't believe it .... I grabbed the tire gauge and measured the pressure: it showed ... 15 PSI!

What do you do? I cursed and went inside the terminal to ask for a phone number of a local tire repair company. The girl at the Ticket counter said their Maintenance department might be able to help and a short while later their Security escorted me to the Maintenance building.

The first thing the Foreman said afterI explained my situation was, "We cannot fix commercial truck tires!" But he was helpful and called the only 2 tire places in town. Both were closed for the holidays. I borrowed his Yellow Pages and found a 24/7 tire repair shop in a town called Corner Brook, some 2 hours away on the TCH-1 (TransCanada Highway) in the same direction I had to take to get to St. John's.

Since the tire was okay on 23rd and only got flat on 24th I decided it was a very slow leak and if I put air into it, I might be able to get to the tire place in Corner Brook. I talked to a David and he said he can fix my tire any time, but he does not have the new one (he later showed me on the computer that the nearest place this 245/70R17.5 was available was in Truro, Nova Scotia).

So, I borrowed an air hose from these Maintenance Shop guys at the terminal and pumped the tire to 115 PSI, the maximum their compressor could make.

2 hours later I was in Corner Brook and David the tire guy got to work on the tire. I measured the tire pressure before he took it off and even on the hot tire it was now 70 PSI! After a long search David found a tiny hole on the outside of the tire and thena hole inside. For some reason the 2 holes were not in the same place! He explained to me how the tire was hollow inside and if there was a leak from inside the outside hole can be anywhere. Basically it looks like I hit a pothole and the tire was pinched in 2 spots on the opposite side. The repair I had on Dec-22nd in North Sydney only fixed Hole #1, while Hole #2 was still losing air.

To cut a long story short, David was able to fix the tire and only charged me $7.85! I gave him a twenty, plus a bunch of decent DVD movies I had in my truck. When he was done after 1.5 hours he shook my hand and wished me a Merry Christmas. Thanks, David from Corner Brook, NL!

A couple of words about the terrain... From what I've seen during the short drive from Port aux Basques the Island looks pretty much like Northern Ontario (if you drove on Hwy 11 or 17), except occasionally you catch a glimpse of the ocean and there's no mountains - just huge hills in the distance. The TransCanada Highway (TCH-1) was a 2-lane most of the time with rare 4-lane spots. The speed limit is 100 KM/H or 62.15 MPH. The temperature is around 40 F and there's no snow on the ground .. Sliight rain falls pretty much all the time but it's no big deal.

The big deal is the wind: it was constant and very strong, at times almost blowing me off the road. The guys on the boat were often mentioning the name "WreckHouse" and I couldn't find it on the map ... But I saw the sign with this name just 10-15 minutes north of the ferry port on TCH-1: in this place the highway runs right next to the ocean, and there's no protection: no trees, no barriers, no houses. The ocean wind just hits you with all its might. I got lucky and it wasn't that bad this time - I flew by with my cruise set at 102 KM/H and enjoyed the view.

To put things into perspective, my last Xmas I spent somewhere in Northern Ontario, pulling a 20 ft sea container (it weighed a ton!) from Edmonton AB to Hamilton, ON. This time it's more decent: I'm in a town, with a whole bunch of food in my truck that I got in the nearby Loblaw's, parked near the WalMart and the non-alcoholic Rose Celebration wine actually doesn't taste that bad

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, guys!

 

Your pics remind me of northern Montana

 

I woke up in Corner Brook, NL at 9:30 am local time. All stores were closed: Canadian Tire, WalMart, Subway, Tim Horton's, even the tiny gas station on the corner seemed deserted. Which meant: no washrooms and no coffee. Thanks to my 2009 Truck Stop Directory, I knew just 50 km (30 mi) down the road there was an Irving truck stop so I headed there on TCH-1. But before I left the parking lot of the WalMart, I did a walk-around and checked the tire pressure on the trailer tire that had given me so much grief over the past few days.

The pressure was at ... 90 PSI. Either David the tire guy didn't air it up all the way or it leaked again. At this point I didn't give a damn about the tire. All I knew was I had to reach St. John's by 9 am on Monday, Dec-27th, so that I can email the signed bill of lading to Landstar and get paid for this crazy trip on Wednesday, Dec-29th. Even if it meant airing up the tire at the end of each day...

I reached the Irving in Deer Lake, NL and I felt like my luck was slowly changing. The pressure on the hot tire was now 115 PSI, and even though the restaurant inside the truck stop was closed the convenience store and washrooms were open. I washed up, then got some coffee, an apple and a couple of bananas. I also ran into a female trucker I talked to at the ferry terminal in North Sydney, NS. "You made it," I said. To which she said, "You mean, 'made it alive'?" She added, "I got really sick on that boat. I'm afraid now to go back." She said she had delivered her load and was now driving back to the ferry empty. She looked in her early fifties, probably one of those women who change careers later in life when they get tired of sitting inside an office and want to see the country. We chatted some more, then I headed east towards St. John's. I never asked her name.

My goal for the day was to reach an Irving truck stop in Goobies, NL which was only a couple of hours away from St. John's. The terrain was pretty much the same as the day before - a typical Northern Ontario/Michigan landscape, with plenty of lakes, fir trees, birch trees, and huge hills. During the entire day I only saw 5 big trucks but probably 10 cop cars, and at one point there was an overturned car in the ditch wrapped in the 'do not cross' tape. Moose warning signs were posted every couple of miles and I managed to read on one sign, "660 accidents last year". Which means that last year 2 people hit moose almost every day. That kind of gets your attention. My truck is falling apart as it is, so the last thing I need is a meeting with a moose probably still a little bit tipsy after the Christmas celebrations

At one point the speed limit dropped from 100 KM/H to 90 KM/H (56 MPH) and the moose signs multiplied. I cannot drive that slow in my top gear, so I dropped a gear to 8 'low' and started cruising at 80 KM/H or 50 MPH. That's one thing I don't like about my current 3.42 axle ratio: it's either 50 MPH in 8 'low' (Gear 12) or minimum 61 MPH in 8 'high' (Gear 13). There's nothing in-between. Sometimes I really miss that slow 3.73 ratio I had before, especially when I have to drive heavily loaded through mountains and big hills at night (as it happened on Monday Dec-20 when I pushed my way through the storm on Hwy 105 in Nova Scotia towards the ferry). That's one of the reasons I want to put on RY023 Yokohama tires on my drives: they spin at 520 revs per mile (my current TY517 do 512 RPM now), so my speed would go down a bit and my torque at wheel would go up. 520 x 3.42 x 0.73 equals 1,298 RPM at 60 MPH and 1,341 RPM at 62 MPH.

It became dark at 4 pm local time (1:30 ahead of the Eastern Time) and I slowed down, keen on avoiding moose. By the time I stopped for the night in Goobies, I failed to see a single one!

I took two more measurements of the faulty tire pressure during the day and both times it was at ... 105 PSI when hot. I think I had just misread the gauge the first time I checked the pressure in the morning: it must have been 105 back then too, not 115.

The sign at the truck stop said St. John's was only 160 km or 100 miles away. The restaurant inside the Irving was closed but the store was open and they even had a driver's room with a TV and electric plugs (see the picture below). That's where I'm writing this as my laptop's battery died yesterday and my 12V inverter went 'kaputt' last month: I need electricity to charge the computer. The TV is a satellite from Bell and it has only 5 or 10 channels with the rest being 'on-demand'. I'm watching a 'Cave' program called "Build or Bust" where a rookie is trying to build a performance motorcycle from scratch, with a bunch of experts watching his every move and cracking mean jokes.

 

That's reminds me something.....