The Road Trip

At some moment in the early part of 1963 my parents decided to move back to where my Mum was born.

In late September that decision was put into action. Mum, Dad, my two elder brothers, Skip the family dog and I crammed ourselves into the family car and started our journey from Edmonton in the far west of Canada to Montreal to catch a ship to Southampton.

Every available cubic inch within the car was packed with something that was going to make it to England. Astronauts in a Gemini capsule probably had more room to move about in than we did.

We were seen off by family and friends. The family car had a roof box containing our camping gear as the plan was to wild camp across Canada rather than stay in motels.

We didn’t.

We headed south on a main highway to Calgary and then headed east on the Trans Canada Highway. We had seen the bits on the news that this road stretching from Nova Scotia to Vancouver was completed. Dad that our drive to Montreal would be quite easy. That was on the understanding that “completed” meant properly surfaced and marked.

It wasn’t.

Soon after leaving Calgary the tarmac ended and the road was nothing but a gravel track marked out with white stones. It was night time, dark and by now the nine year old Alan was fast asleep and missed all of the excitement. Dad was stopped by the police and they asked where he was going? He laconically answered “Southampton”. They told him he must have come off the highway somewhere and was only a few miles from the American border. They escorted us back to highway and advised we should stay in a motel.

We did.

The following days were endless hours and endless miles interrupted with breaks for meals, stretching our legs, walking Skip and filling up with gas. After that first night and the navigational error the camping gear stayed in the box on the roof and we stayed in motels all the way.

To the nine year old Alan this probably looked quite glamorous with all the neon lights. The grim reality was Mum and Dad were on a tight budget and where we stayed would best be described as a bit run down.

At one hotel the railway line was almost in the back garden.. There were no fences sectioning the line for safety so my brothers and I would put one cent pieces on the rails when we heard a train coming and watch it rumbling past us shaking the ground. When it had passed we would retrieve shiny copper discs as souvenirs of our trip.

After two thousand six hundred miles on the road, we arrived at Montreal where we would board the ship for Southampton.

We didn’t.

The dockers in Montreal had declared a strike so there were no shipping movements. In light of this, our ship stayed at Quebec city where, if we drove the whole of the next day covering another one hundred and sixty miles we could get on board.

We did.