The Squamidian Report – May 20 / 06
Issue #207
Also in this issue:
The Ontarion
Hi All,
Well, we drove up to Prince George last Sunday. Great drive. Sue and I left Squamish and headed north up #99 to Whistler and on to Pemberton. From there 99 takes you over the Duffy, an interesting and rather scenic part of the world. As you travel inland, you leave the rain forest climate of the coast and enter increasingly dryer zones. You can see it in the vegetation and in the more open under story. The road is paved, but it is narrow and windy with steep tight switchback turns. Really just a paved logging road, the type we ride our dirt bikes on. It takes you into the same kind of overwhelming topography that we ride into. Incidentally, the Duffy was closed on Tuesday and Wednesday, having being blocked by an avalanche.
Once over the Duffy you come out at Lillooet where the road crosses the Fraser River. You are now in very dry, almost desert conditions. The Fraser has cut a deep canyon with fifteen hundred foot high sides. The land is rolling and extreme. There was a small herd of bighorn sheep standing at the side of the road at one point. Sue saw a brown bear and her cub at another point. Deer or elk, not sure which, all over the place. Highway 99 ends at #97 just north of Cache Creek. From here its 500 kilometers of open highway all the way to Prince George.
You are now on the Interior Plateau with its many small lakes, open ranch land and forested areas. Sad thing about the forests. The pine beetle has devastated them, most of the trees are dieing or dead. They are all brown or a purple red instead of green. We stopped in 100 Mile House for a bite of lunch. Figuring that a fast food place would be safer than some unknown restaurant we ate at an A&W. Don’t, I mean DON’T ever eat that the 100 Mile House A&W. We didn’t finish our meal and were lucky to keep what we did eat. And the service was crappy too!
Prince George is the ‘hub of the north’, a staging point for the mining and logging industries. Population somewhere around 85,000 or so, it’s a good size city. It is sprawled out in several directions with the downtown built on the banks of the Fraser. Kind of funny but you could canoe from there to Vancouver, but it would be a long paddle. We had to find Sue’s hotel and the bank branch she will manage, and then we dropped in on Becky, daughter of Warren and Janice. That pretty well finished the day.
The next morning, Monday, we had a light breakfast and then headed to her branch where we waited until the person that opens came. She was obviously expecting Sue so they greeted and introduced them selves. At that point Sue reverted to banker mode and I walked away to wait for my ride. Janice had been in PG visiting Becky and was flying out on the same flight as me. Actually, I was flying out on the same flight as her. They had to come right past the branch on the way to the airport so it all worked out well. Prince George International Airport is still small enough to be kind of homey and checking in and boarding was a breeze. We took off on time for the hour flight back to Vancouver.
Kind of funny but we climbed all the way to 39000 feet during the first half of the short flight. We basically glided for the second half, loosing altitude as we came across the Coastal Mountains. Wow, I could see Vancouver Island, the St of Georgia, Comox, Powel River, Gibsons and so on. There is virtually no development through the mountains or out on the plateau, just wild space. The developed areas are on the coast and up the #97 corridor, so the whole flight took us over wild wilderness. There is so much snow in the mountains that whole canyons and valleys are buried by smooth expansive white covers.
I was going to catch a ride up to Squamish with Warren who was picking up Janice but Ryan turned up at the airport. He had been going to work that day, then it got changed to having him pick something up in the city so he decided to pick me up as well. So by the time we did his things and checked out a computer store it was late afternoon. Got home in time for supper. That finished my extended weekend. Back to the grind on Tuesday.
By the way, I only took 4 pictures on the trip, showing Duffy Lake and the mountain type highway. They can be seen at: http://members.shaw.ca/doug_b2/Misc/duffy.htm
doug
****
****
Hellllooooo
everyone!
Another
beautiful day in Southern Ontario!
I’ve had
an interesting week this week. Clyde shared an e-mail with me that he received
from an old school acquaintance who’d stumbled upon Clyde’s website on the net.
As it turned out, this fellow had also been in my class in 1963/64 grade 9 at
KCI. He now lives in Nova Scotia and has been there for three years. I shared
this connection with Clyde and mentioned that I might just drop Ron an e-mail
to see if he remembered me as well. Clyde said go for it so I wrote to Ron and
made him guess who I was. I gave him enough info so he wouldn’t think it was
some junk mail that he had no connection with. He wrote back and asked for a
few more hints and within the second letter, he guessed who I was. He was
totally shocked to have remade this connection as well. We had a ball in that
first year of high school and for the past week we’ve been writing back and
forth with the “remember when” thing going on. Talk about a small world! It
turns out that Ron had a first marriage and has two boys with his first wife
and that first wife with her two small boys eventually married a good friend of
mine on the fire dept. I spent the last 25 years working along side the man
that raised Ron’s two sons as his own. Even Ron said that they are more Donny’s
sons than they are his. I was amazed at this situation and that Clyde would
know Ron too. He’s got another whole family again and is very happy in NS. To
think that if it wasn’t for the internet I probably would never have heard of
or talked to Ron again. Ron and I did hang around together in ’63 but when he
moved to Grand River Collegiate we only bumped into one another at special
occasions. Like Sonny’s burger joint in Waterloo or roller skating at the Kitchener
Auditorium. Funny how these things work out isn’t it?
*
I just
finished writing back to Ron after he wrote to ask if I remembered some of the
local bands from back then. This led to an hour of e-mails about bands such as
that great old favourite The Thanes…………….
Copperpenny, The Trend Setters, The Jay Rockers, Major Hopple’s Boarding
House and many more from this area. He even asked if I remembered a band called
The Reefers from Hamilton. They played up here a lot and they were also a good
band. We giggled about the origin of the name of that band and I told Ron that
the first time I ever heard that word was from my own dad. He said that’s what
they called joints when he was a young lad. Now that amazed me because my dad
was born in 1913 and was a teenager in the 20’s. I didn’t know they even had
Marijuana, weed, Mary Jane, MJ, Hemp, doobies, joints, roaches or whatever back
in those days! I guess as it turns out, dope wasn’t invented by the kids of the
60’s after all! LOL!
Kitchener
Waterloo area was a hot bed for entertainment for the young. We not only had
many great local bands but we imported all the HUGE names in the entertainment
industry at the time. There were a couple of booking agencies in this area that
brought in all the big talent. The Glenbriar Curling/Roller Rink was one of the
venue’s that held the big acts shows. I remember seeing legends like Roy
Orbison, Gary Lewis and The Playboys, Paul Revere and The Raiders, Jay and The
Americans, Gary Puckett and The Union Gap, The Beach Boys and many many more on
the stage up at “The Briar”. We used to pack into that place like sardines and
by the end of the evening we’d all be sopping wet with sweat from the lack of
air movement in the place as we stood shoulder to shoulder for 4 to 5 hours listening
to the bands. What ever happened to that type of show anyway? I guess it’s not
that they don’t exist anymore it’s just that us old fogies don’t attend
concerts like that now that ……well…………we’re OLD! Hahahahaaaaaa………..! Oh well,
the memories live on and I’m sure many of my fellow Squamidians will identify
with the bands I’ve mentioned, won’t you?
I
remember one band that was really amazing and they were one of the few bands
that had horns in it, it was called “Dublin Corporation”. I don’t remember where
they were from but whenever they played somewhere in the area we’d be sure to
check ‘em out. I think I heard them three or four times and the last time I
remember was in a hall in Cambridge on Hwy #24 that is now a fitness club. My
how time changes. The Glenbriar is now a hardware store, the Waterloo Arena is
torn down and there are no more “roller skating” rinks in the Region, that I
know of anyway. I still have my old black boot skates and I’ll have to dig them
out sometime and see if I can still stand upright on them. LOL!
Oh well,
I think I’ll save that topic for a future column.
Thanks
for tuning in this week and I look forward to talking to you all again next
time in The Ontarion Report.
Bye for now…
Greg.
PS:
Something To Think About>
A “jiffy”
is an actual unit of time measuring 1/100th of a second.
None of
us can even leave in that amount of time let alone “be back in it”!
*
PPS: If any of you know where “Dublin
Corporation” originated please let me know. I’m just curious and it’ll drive me
nuts till I find out more about them.
GP (Clyde
will probably know) or what the heck…….maybe even the “internet”???
PPPPPPS: ALMOST FORGOT THE MOST POPULAR BAND OF THEM
ALL!!!
The one
band that drew a crowd no matter where they went………..the Multi-Talented,
Stupendously Sublime, World Renowned……………..
“whisky sam”
Sorry for
the belated recognition Doug………I’m sure all of Maryhill remembers!
****
The Family and the Squamidian sites:
http://members.shaw.ca/doug_b/ and http://www.thedougsite.ca
Have a good one..
the
doug
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