The Trip

 The Trip
     by Fairly Well-Travelled

Joe Braun, Alvin Wiebe and I chose to make a trip to the East Coast the summer of the great exposition in Montreal. I must say that, though our choice was not to, necessity required us to travel in a Volkswagen bug belonging to Alvin. Three big, full-grown men, just recently adolescents, in a small space like that, subsisting on pork and beans and bread (we bought a case of 24 cans of Libby’s pork and beans because that’s what we could afford), makes for malodorous journeying. One of the most common activities on this trip was accusing this or that one of being responsible for the last episode forcing us to open the windows wide, rain or shine.
     Most of our gear travelled on top of the vehicle wrapped in a canvas tarp, tied down with ropes. One of these items, a canvas tent borrowed from my family, weighing at least 80 pounds, became quickly responsible for one of that trip’s most tenacious memories. We stayed the first night at the Falcon Lake campsite because, though we’d only left Winnipeg 90 miles ago, we felt like opening the twenty-four of Labatts we’d bought at the Montcalm and not driving any further. Mother Nature decided to test our endurance. It began to rain, and it rained hard. Literally, at once the canvas tent sprang leaks. By morning Alvin and Joe could be seen huddling against opposite walls of the tent where they had a slightly greater chance of not getting soaked, while I lay in the tent’s middle in a puddle of water a couple of inches deep with my sleeping bag as wet as if I’d chosen to lay it out in a tub full of water. Our moods began to improve once we’d put a hundred miles between the campsite and us and stopped for bacon and eggs at a greasy spoon somewhere on the way to Dryden. 
    When we got to Montreal, we immediately lost our way because we had no idea which roads went where, it being midnight, raining and pitch black. Every exit we came to, written surprisingly in French, told us nothing about where to turn off. At each exit we decided to continue a bit further on the perimeter that circled the city (number one est; no, not an error. We repeated the French direction over and over like a mantra throughout the rest of the trip, laughing uproariously. At the time it seemed funny). Confused, indecisive, we settled for simply continuing until we had made an entire, seemingly never-ending circle of that huge city and fetched up where we’d begun. We camped somewhere, and then drove blindly into the city’s heart the following day. 
     Quebec city gave us another experience, one that we boys (or men, as we would have wanted ourselves called) thoroughly enjoyed. That was introducing our stomachs to the rich decadence of Québécois poutine, a dish with more than enough calories to provide us with get up and go for the next 24 hours as well as flavours that begged to be washed down by tankards of ale.
     On the East Coast in Nova Scotia, we got what we considered a steal of a deal for an ocean sightseeing tour, until we realized that we’d purchased the privilege of spending four hours jigging for a commercial fishery. Sheepishly, we jigged along with the best of them and helped to fill the boat’s storage coolers with dozens upon dozens of great big cod. Free labour is always appreciated and we were offered all the cod we wanted. We decided on just one big one that they filleted for us and put into plastic bags. 

     On our return trip through rural Quebec we started to notice that the normal assault on our noses that we’d become accustomed to on the way in had become another sort all together on the way out. We looked around the vehicle and found nothing we could blame. About the time we got to Montreal and became desperate finally to pinpoint the cause, Alvin suddenly rose up from the backseat floor shouting, I’ve got it, and he held up a plastic bag with the cod fillets in them that had been brewing in the sun, the temperature around 30° inside the vehicle. What luck to have found the fillets! What exasperation with each other! How could we possibly have forgotten about them!
     On the way through Montreal we stopped at the exposition grounds and thoroughly enjoyed the international sensation that was Expo 67. We stayed for two or three days and then said goodbye to the exotic part of our trip and drove the rest of the way to southern Manitoba.