Back to Cape Cod

When I last updated you folks out there, I was telling the tale of being broken down in Goose Bay Canada. I will update you all on our further adventures in Goose Bay in just a moment. At the present however, I regretfully have to inform all four of my loyal readers of our current location.
No, we have not continued on to Greenland and Iceland. Not by a long shot. In a twist of fate, I find myself in the Starbucks in FALMOUTH MASS., once again, updating my blog.
That’s right folks….we have returned to Otis Air Force Base in Cape Cod.
Two days ago, our parts finally cleared Canadian Customs in Montreal and finally arrived in Goose Bay. Mike, our hard working mechanic, spent that afternoon installing the parts and tweaking the aircraft. Unfortunately for him as well as us, the part that the contractor sent was bad. But Mike, being the good maintainer he is, tried swapping components around and doing a little spark chasing in attempt to get things going. He was successful….the problem seemed to be fixed, since he and Hardy ran up the airplane and checked that all systems were a go. We were ready to buy Mike a bottle of Crown Royal.
Or so we thought. The airplane apparently had other ideas. The next morning (Sept. 20th) we rode out to the Goose Bay airport and made preparations to depart. Sure enough, when we started her up, the problem reappeared. Nothing we could do from the cockpit or anything that Mike could do would fix the problem. So we shut down, and went into the FBO (Fixed Base Operator…kind of like an upscale Truck Stop for pilots) to decide what to do. Rather than staying in Goose Bay, we decided out best course of action was to one time fly the ole bucket of bolts back to Otis AFB. The weather was good there, and there is a C26 maintenance base there. So we quickly got ready to depart and flew back to Otis AFB.
This was a good thing, because the weather was rapidly deteriorating in Goose Bay. As with a lot of Northern Locations, the weather here can turn on a dime. So we got out in the nick of time, because it would not be prudent to be flying around in the clouds with the type of malfunction that we had.
I promised an update on the further adventures in Goose Bay. We had time to have a few- On Tuesday of this past week, after we discovered that our parts were still in customs, we decided to take the Trans-Labrador highway out of town to a place we had heard about: Muskrat Falls. The Trans Labrador Highway runs from Goose Bay down to Montreal. It’s a very rural road….about 15 miles south of town the road becomes gravel and sand…and stays that way most of the way to Montreal. (It is a 35 hour drive to Montreal). Anyway, we took this road out to Muskrat Falls. You really get the sense that you are far removed from civilization, as there are no telephone wires, no streetlights, and no signs….just mile after mile of unpaved road over rolling hills. It is stunningly beautiful. We made our way down a steep trail of off the road down about a mile or so through the trees until we came to the river. It was nothing short of spectacular. The river was about a mile or so wide, and flowed over a fairly step set of falls. It wasn’t very high, maybe 30 feet or so but what a sight. It was at this point we started seeing fresh Bear tracks…and what I am convinced was wolf tracks. I suppose at this point you could say we had officially entered the food chain. After that we went back to Goose Bay for more pizza and Beer at the El Greco. I believe that Pauly is going to engrave our names on the table.