September 13, 2025
Today was a museum day. After breakfast, we drove to the Labrador Military Museum. When we arrived, the building initially looked as though this was going to be substantial. Then we realized it was cohabitating with other services such as CanEx, housing services and more. We quickly discovered that the museum only occupied one small area upstairs.
While interesting, and including photos of my missing elementary school and adjacent high school, we came away with the feeling that the museum didn't go far enough. It focused primarily on the history of the airbase itself, with one small corner for the nearby radar station, and nothing whatever about any of the other military installations that were present in Labrador over the years, as the name of the museum suggested.
From here, we drove to North West River to visit the Labrador Heritage Society Museum. As we drove across the bridge, I noticed a collection of white buildings with green trim along the shore and immediately thought, "Hudson's Bay store". Indeed, the museum to which we were headed was in the former Hudson's Bay store and retain much of its look inside as well as out.
There was a large assortment of items and artifacts, countless models and diaramas, all trying to make the past understandable to the casual visitor. This, in many ways, was everything the previous museum was not.
When we were finished there, we drove around the community, visited the local beach, and had lunch at the local restaurant. We decided to end the day a bit early as tomorrow would likely be a long day.
September 14, 2025
This morning, we got up and had our now traditional fish-cake breakfast at the restaurant next door. We filled the car with gas and set out on today's expedition, a three-hour drive to visit the area of the Churchill Falls Hydro-electric Project.
When we arrived, we began looking around and noticed the large red and white towers that held power lines that spanned the river valley. It was stunning scenery, and I was eager to get out of the car with my 360 video camera to capture it. I could hear sizzling in the lines high above me and knew the voltage must be quite high.
I put the camera on the end of my selfie-stick and raised it above my head. I quickly heard a weird static sound coming from the speaker of the camera, and very shortly after felt a tingling sensation through the stick and down my arm. I quickly brought the stick down, and the sound and feeling immediately stopped. Perhaps this was a bad idea, I thought to myself, and we moved on.
We found a road down into the valley with a nice river-side park. After this, we toured the town with its uniform, company-made houses. I wondered what life must be like here for these people. They were raising families in such a remote, isolated place. The winters, I'm sure, must be quite significant and I suppose supplies must sometimes be short. On the bright side, I suppose there's little chance of them losing power.
Butter chicken on rice at the Nepalese restaurant awaited us in Happy Valley upon our return from another great day of exploring.
