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Kate and I were married on August 2, 1980 and shortly after made a "honeymoon" trip back to Vancouver (where Kate had been a graduate student at Simon Fraser University) to pick up some of her things. We visited and stayed with some of Kate's friends, and saw some of the sites around the area, and drove through the mountains (I had never been to the west coast and all the travels were new sites for me) to Calgary before flying home.
The picture at left is a "mug" shot taken at the Hope RCMP detachment where my brother Dale was stationed — no, we were not under arrest, he was just showing us around.
In Vancouver, we got a "Rent-a-Wreck" car for the duration of our visit. Kate showed me around East Vancouver where she had lived, Chinatown and the bars of Vancouver that she had studied for her Master's research. We visited the market at Granville Island — when I first met Kate she had arrived from Vancouver with a box of fresh prawns packed on dry ice from the market. I recall that we bought some fresh lobster at this visit to the market and shortly afterwards recognized that lobster comes from the east coast — they don't have them on the west coast. Lobster, like us, would have been flown in! There's a picture in the album of a fresh prawn feed we had with Alison and Bruce whom we stayed with for part of the visit.
There's a funny story about Bruce. He managed a record store in North Vancouver, where we bought the D.O.A. album "Something Better Change", and had a huge record collection. He was telling us that some high-school aged girls were in his shop one day recently and they were looking at the latest Paul McCartney and Wings album. The one young girl turned to the other and said, "Did you know he used to be in this band called the 'Beatles'?" How soon they forget — the Beatles broke up some 10 years before but if you're just a teen that's pre-history!
In Vancouver Kate took me on a tour around Stanley Park. There's a collection of "Totem Poles" overlooking Coal Harbor, a little further on there's a bronze statue of a "girl in a wetsuit" sitting on a boulder a little ways out in the water with North Vancouver and the Port of Vancouver in the distance. The statue is something like the "Little Mermaid" of Copenhagen. Further on along the seawall you pass under the Lions Gate bridge which crosses over from Stanley Park to West and North Vancouver. Alison and Bruce lived near the Lonsdale Pier in North Vancouver where there's a ferry you can take back to the city proper.
Alison, Kate and Patti (a friend Kate had worked with in the bars) visited Simon Fraser University (SFU) which sits on top of a small mountain (or large hill) to the east of the city in the Burnaby area. Kate told me stories of her biking to the Admiral Bar on Hastings St. in Burnaby and the Army and Navy Club in South Burnaby. Both were about 10km or 10mi each way to her home but also downhill for coming home after work at 1:30am. If you were to bike to SFU the hill up would be an awful obstacle to be mounted, the way down would be a fast descent! Kate had finished her undergraduate work at SFU after several years working and travelling around after dropping out at McGill. When we met she was working on her Ph.D. in Psychology, having just finished her Masters at SFU, but was able to transfer her scholarship and program to UWO in London where I was at school. Kate was cleaning out her office at SFU and saying her farewells to faculty and friends.
From Vancouver we took a drive up the coastal highway to Squamish, visited Horseshoe Bay (where the ferry to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island leaves) and took a ferry across to Bowen Island where we stayed with a friend, Cindy, who had shared a flat with Kate back in the Montreal days at McGill. We visited the Capilano Suspension Bridge in North Vancouver and took the ski lift to the top of Grouse Mountain with Alison one day.
Kate, who comes from Winnipeg and loves the big sky country of the prairies, has a saying about Vancouver: "The problem with Vancouver is the mountains get in the way of the view."
Leaving Vancouver, to drive through the several mountain ranges through to Alberta (I naively think of them all as the "Rocky Mountains"), we first visited the Fraser River Historic Park near Mission. It's something like the Black Creek Pioneer Village in Toronto. We took a small ferry across the Fraser River near Abbotsford, and I recall crossing the US border on a "beer-run" as there was a beer strike in BC at the time.
We visited Harrison Hot Springs and spent some time exploring in the woods one day. My brother Dale, and his wife Sherie, were a little further up the Fraser at Hope and they hosted us for a night. Dale was stationed with the RCMP and showed us around in his old Willys Jeep. At the RCMP station we took the mug shots posted above.
Further up the Fraser River we visited Hell's Gate where the river rushes through a narrow canyon. There's a ski-lift kind of ride you can take across river as well as the footbridge. On the far shore of this narrow canyon you can see the train tracks with snow sheds to protect the tracks from snow and falling rocks. The muddy river surges through a narrow gap in the canyon below and we saw a white water rafting group make their way safely through the gap. It would be no fun to capsize there, no fun as in probably fatal! I recall going out onto this huge narrow rock face overlooking the river and bridge — once out there a frightening case of vertigo over came me and I had to crawl back to safety on hands and knees. It's that same fear of heights as when walking onto the swaying Capilano Suspension Bridge back in North Vancouver.
From Vancouver on to Calgary you're in the mountains. Kate, who had made this trip many times, warned me that I would be in awe of all the mountain scenes but would not likely be able to capture it on film. She was right, I shot a lot of film and most of the pictures are pretty disappointing. You need to get out of your car and hike a bit into the mountains to get the better pictures. I was surprised how dry it was in the interior, how there are these snow capped mountains even at summer's end and how cool, grey and wet the weather could be. It must be frightfully cold in the dead of winter.
Near Lake Louise we had a break and a swim in some hot springs.
In Calgary we visited a museum (with more west coast totems and carvings) with our friend Joan.
Our last night in Calgary, we went with Joan to the Calgarian, a downtown beer hall/dive, to catch a couple of young punk acts — "The Verdix" were the main act with "Random Scrapings" as the opening act. The bands were energetic and fun to watch. People were dancing/pogoing and having a great time. But the bar was a bit rowdy (you may recall Kate studies "barroom violence"). She was in the women's washroom and another woman tried to start a fist fight with her — they're tough women in Alberta! We liked it that the shows were early in the evening and that nobody got hurt.
A late night flight had us winging our way home.
Slides scanned and these notes composed during the OMIGOD! pandemic of February, 2022.
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