Our Early Years......

After Jim and I moved to Vancouver Island, we spent the first four months in the small community of Duncan, BC.  As jobs were in short supply and our itchy feet wanted to wander, we picked up our socks and packed up our 1971 Datsun 510 with all our belongings and left Duncan in the first couple of weeks of December 1988.  What a stupid time of year to do that......LOL.  We arrived in the Okanagan Valley, in Penticton and spent a bit of time with my family before we packed up the car again with our remaining belongings.  As we travelled east, we were heading for Burlington, where Jim grew up and where he knew there were lots of jobs for us. 

After 3 days of travelling night and day as we knew that there were some winter storms chasing us, we decided we couldn't drive anymore and stopped in Dryden, Ontario for some much needed nourishment and complete sleep.  Now some would say that it was a stupid idea to stop in that town as it's reputation for being cold, but we had enough.  BIG MISTAKE!!  We woke up the next morning to find out that we were frozen into our motel room, and when we looked outside through the tiny space in the frozen window, we found our little Datsun to be sitting in a cave of snow and ice.  Yup, those storms caught up with us and hit with a vengence........snow and ice thicker than you could imagine.  We phoned the manager of the hotel who came with a hairdryer and hot water to pry us out of our room.  Then we found a towtruck and got our car towed to a garage where it took several hours to melt before we could get back into the car.  Needless to say, that was our last stop until we got to our destination.

Now, remember, I am a small town girl, born and raised so when we got to Toronto during rush hour traffic Friday morning, you can imagine the culture shock that I faced.  LOL.  We carried on down the highway with all communities blending into the next with no clear definition till we reached Burlington.  We went to one of Jim's "old haunts" to meet up with his friends and within 2 hours, we each had a job and a place to live.  Yes, things were looking up.

We lived quite happily between Burlington and Hamilton, both working and managed to get in some great camping trips to several parks around.  We had our Sunday drives to Port Dover where we would have perch dinners and enjoy the lazy drive back to Hamilton where we lived at that time......then in the summer, we would pack a picnic supper and head to the nightly drive-ins and would manage to get 2 movies a night and once every two weeks, there would be a 3 peat.  After we spent 3 years in the area, we both began getting itchy feet and wanted to travel once again........