Allen and John were born in England. Here is a picture of me with them on the Maasdam on it's maiden voyage. Eva was seasick for the first few days out of Southampton so she was probably flat on her back in the cabin. Terry was born in Canada.
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John and Terry had a lot of nerve to tackle a trip across Canada to Vancouver in those days. Not only that but they took the ferry to Vancouver Island and drove to the West coast of the island. Terry wrote an article about the trip and had it published in the Canadian Biker magazine. That was then and this year (2004) Terry drove from Vancouver and John drove for two days out to meet him and when Terry went home John drove to Tennessee with him before turning back. When they left they lined up the bikes as they had been at the start of the original trip except that this time the bikes were quite a bit different. Should I mention also that the drivers are a little bit older?
John still has three motorbikes. Maybe I should have said that Eva and I still have three motorbikes because we have been storing John's bikes for more than ten years. We are hoping that one day we can have our garage back.
Well it finally happened! John took his motorbikes out of our carport. He has his BSA Thunderbolt all tuned up and polished up and it looks like a million dollars again. It didn't suffer at all from the long storage. (twenty years in all.) I have a picture for you to see.
Skipping on a few years: Eva and I always said we did not want a summer cottage but our sons had other ideas. Allen bought an undeveloped lake front lot near Haliburton. Ontario.
Guess what? We found ourselves up there helping him to clear the lake front. Before long we were up there every weekend cutting down trees and building a log cabin.
We had some good times up there but most of the time it was darned hard work. We were eaten alive by blackflies in May and June and the mosquitoes took over and plagued us the rest of the time. When we were building the log cabin we had a hard time finding straight logs long enough so we put a door in the back wall of the cabin and nailed it up. It came in very handy later when we decided to build a veranda on the back to increase our living space.
We were so tired after working all weekend on the cabin that we welcomed the three hour drive home so we could have a rest.
Not content with this John bought a lot near the ski hills outside of Barrie. Ontario. We found ourselves 'Volunteered' to build a prefabricated 'Viceroy' cottage for use as a ski chalet. A lot of John's friends helped us to build it but I found myself in the role of superviser because nobody knew what had to be done. I didn't either but I had to study the blueprints and figure it out. There were a couple of people that helped that were experienced so it relieved the pressure on me.
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It served as a tool shed when we were not there.
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..........................................................................The finished Job.
Terry has been trying to buy one of John's motorbikes off him but John wasn't about to part with either of them so Terry shopped around and finally found a 1969 Triumph in very good condition. It did have some carburation problems though and I was recruited by e-mail to try to help solve them.
Here is one for you! Breaking concrete the hard way.That boy has tough hands.
Terry surprised us recently with the release of a book he has written and had published called 'The Hunt'. It is a thriller and we were very impressed. So impressed in fact that We ordered copies from Amazon.com for Allen, Berniece and Fred. (Eva's sister and Brother).
After reading Terry's book we are convinced that it would make a very good movie.
My sons are spread across Canada. Terry is in North Vancouver. B.C.
Allen is in Truro. Nova Scotia, and John is in Barrie Ontario. This has involved a lot of Cross-Canada travelling, most of it by road.
Now John has bought himself a new motor bike, a BMW shaft drive. Here is a picture of it.(and him of course.)
