We just finished with Labrador. My blog is coming but here goes...
We took the ferry from Newfoundland to Blanc Seblon with no reservation about a little more than a week ago. You can reserve a few days in advance but sometimes that is hard to know where you will be. Locals will reserve for a few days or times because the deposit is only $10 to reserve. The ferry company automatically books 10 commercial units (tractor trailer trucks per trip); if they don't get used the waiting list can take those spots. The waiting list...get there early on the day you wish to go and start the line up for the wait list in front of the door. If you are 1 - 12, you should get on...sometimes they will take more (one lady told me she got on as number 17). I know there were at least 20 on the day we got on. People cancel also.
The roads from Blanc Seblon were fine. The roads from there to Labrador City were no problem for our 24 foot Class c. There were washboard spots and when it rained some of the rock dust washed away....but all doable. You can read about my hubbies technique for riding these roads. I wouldn't recommend taking a nice unit up there...and I probably wouldn't do a class A. They are working on the roads (paving) from Hv/gb west to Lab City. They are prepping the the road for paving just before HV/gb....but the first step is widening the road.
Oh, I had no complaints about the width of the roads (okay, spots on 389)I thought they were good about width. On 389, the sides of the roads were more sandy soft so there you had to be more careful.
I have more details in my blog but....route 389...is not nice. If we had started our journey at the worst spot (between fermont and relais Gabriel is the worst part)we might have turned around...just brace yourself for weaving, winding, washboard roads. Because the roads were so weaving and up/down, it was impossible to get any kind of speed going where you could bounce over the tops of everything. Then there were the fast moving tractor trailer trucks that were running between baie comeau and Labrador city. There were very few spots to move out of their way. The good part was that at the time we were on the road, most trucks were going north and we were going south so it wasn't bad for us...not breathing down our backs. We tried to time our travel so we could avoid the trucks...like leaving at 4:30 am. Be prepared for it to take a long time to drive these short distances.
Nothing we read online was accurate in regards to time. You could tell when someone was coming by the dust cloud coming towards you....so we could kind of tell when to find a spot to inch over.
Traffic is not much...maybe you wait for an hour, maybe more, maybe less if you are lucky. We periodically checked our crappy canadian cell phone and it was pretty useless for us (bell). You can look online for distances bewteen Red bay and Happy Valley/Goose Bay and HV/GB and Churchill and Lab city. They are not close....Lab city and Churchill are almost completely paved now though and will be the end of this year's work (as per the workers). They actively are grading the roads in Labrador and have these graders staged at intervals. My hubby says that the one guy who was grading the nasty section after Fermont didn't have a clue how to do it. There was not much of a difference after he did his work! Baie Comeau to Labrador city is a major route for trucks: goods for the population, BIG parts (think wide load) for the mine machinery, and logging. It was funny seeing a walmart truck go that route.
Your best bet when you travel up there is to make sure that your tires are good and your vehicle is in tip top condition. If you need an rv part...good luck with that.
That all said, I loved its ruggedness and limited accessibility. If we had a problem, I might not have been so happy but we did not. All of the roads in Labrador where good enough and I would do that part again. We overnighted in L'ans au Loup (on paved section just after the ferry), Port Hope Simpson (that is real nothing town and rather depressed), churchill, Manic 5.
Oh, we were told that the fact that this was an election year, the roads would be better:)
Our blog should be up tomorrow some time for Labrador/quebec 389.
