If you can't be bothered with the text, which I mostly wrote for my own benefit, scroll down to the first picture, click or tap it and then scroll through all the pictures by swiping or clicking forward arrow.
By the summer of 1989, Karen and I had been living
back in London for a year, and I had been freelancing by then for a year and a
half. Our expenses were certainly lower than they had been in Toronto or
Mississauga, and I was bringing in more than we had budgeted in our worst-case
scenarios. But we were still, with the loss of Karen’s income, pinching pennies.
A vacation involving air travel was out of the question. So we decided that
August to take a road trip to Ottawa instead.
I think we were only gone a week. We drove to
Mississauga first, where Lesley Classic was living, and stayed overnight with
Lesley and her new partner, Bob Kasher. The next day we set out to Ottawa. Our
first stop was a little village called Baltimore, just north and a little east
of Port Hope. We had arranged to stay in a bed and breakfast there.
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| Baltimore B&B |
They gave us a self-contained unit with a bedsitting
room on the ground floor and a loft above it with a day bed. Caitlin would
sleep in the loft, we decided. She was always a difficult sleeper with
separation issues. (She seems to have overcome the latter, but not the former.)
She was leery about being all the way
upstairs from us, but eventually settled. The one picture shows her in her bed,
looking a little scared. ‘You’re really going to leave me up here!?’
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| Baltimore B&B |
The other thing that strikes me about some of the
pictures of Caitlin is that she was already doing weird things with her mouth
when she was conscious of being photographed and wanted to look her best – or
what she thought would be her best. (It never was.) I was forever telling her
to stop pursing her lips when I photographed her – this was until she was well
into her twenties. But there are also some lovely ones of her when she's more relaxed.
She was a gorgeous little girl.
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| Baltimore B&B: Caitlin in her aerie (doing the mouth thing) |
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| Baltimore B&B: lounge |
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| Baltimore B&B: patio - Caitlin caught unawares |
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| Baltimore B&B: patio - Caitlin adopting an expression for the camera |
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| Baltimore B&B: lounge/breakfast room |
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| Baltimore B&B: Caitlin in her loft, ready for bed |
The next day (I think – it might have been the day
before), we popped into Port Hope, which already had a reputation as a quaint
and trendy retirement community for affluent ex-Torontoites. Caitlin, as she is
making very clear in the picture of her sitting on a park bench with her
mother, was not impressed.
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| Port Hope - I think: 'Can we go now?' |
She did like the next place we stopped, the Big Apple,
a country store just off the 401. It had, and still has, a huge, storeys-high statue of an apple, a landmark for miles around. In the one
picture of her I have, she doesn’t look
very happy, but she always enjoyed having things bought for her and I'm pretty sure we
had lunch and/or treats here. She remembered it fondly when we drove by on another
trip to Ottawa eight or so years later.
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| The Big Apple |
The next stop was Sandbanks Provincial Park where we
camped overnight – or maybe it was a couple of nights. We had our bikes with
us, mounted on the top of our blue ’87 Honda Accord, and I remember at least
one day riding to the beach with Caitlin on the back of my bike.
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| Sandbanks Provincial Park |
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| Sandbanks Provincial Park |
After we left Sandbanks, we drove to Morrisburg to
visit Prehistoric World, which is still there – with some of the same dinosaur
models, it appears. Caitlin loved it. She was mad keen about dinosaurs. That
has never really left her. I’m pretty sure she’d still list Jurassic Park as one of her all-time
favourite movies. We think Teddy, Caitlin’s number two bear, also enjoyed the
park. He appears prominently in all the pictures. (The famous Ted was always
number one, but I’m guessing he was left home for safety’s sake or because he
was too big to easily cart around.)
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| Prehistoric World, Morrisburg |
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| Prehistoric World, Morrisburg |
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| Prehistoric World, Morrisburg |
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| Prehistoric World, Morrisburg |
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| Prehistoric World, Morrisburg |
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| Prehistoric World, Morrisburg |
We stopped next in Gananoque where we must have stayed
in a bed and breakfast or small hotel. I don’t see otherwise how we could have
fit everything in that we did in the area. Besides Prehistoric World, I’m
pretty sure we went to a haunted house attraction, something Caitlin was also mad
keen about – and once again, still is, thirty years later. We definitely went
on a Thousand Islands boat cruise, as the pictures attest.
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| Gananoque |
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| Gananoque, Thousand Islands cruise |
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| Gananoque, Thousand Islands cruise |
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| Gananoque |
And then it was on to Ottawa. Gail Wreford, who had moved to Ottawa for work a few months earlier – leaving 17-year-old Tash to board with us for the remainder of the school year – had just moved into a townhouse with her new friend, Gini Tyrell. That left vacant the hotel suite her employer had been renting for her since she arrived. We moved into it. Sweet! Free accommodation.
Gail was working, but Jerry Lenton, the teacher, was off for the summer, so we hung out more with him. He was living
in a high-rise apartment on the Rideau Canal at that time, conveniently close to the centre.
I think we may have walked around the parliament
buildings one day. We also visited the Canadian Museum of Civilization (as it
was known then – it’s now the Canadian Museum of History). It had moved that
year into a splashy new facility. I was very struck by the eye-popping, almost Gehry-esque design by Douglas Cardinal, an indigenous architect. The Grand
Hall, with its totem poles and a giant photo mural of old-growth west coast
forest, was – I guess still is – spectacular.
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| Canadian Museum of Civilization |
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| Canadian Museum of Civilization: Grand Hall |
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| Canadian Museum of Civilization: Grand Hall |
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| Canadian Museum of Civilization |
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| Canadian Museum of Civilization |
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| Canadian Museum of Civilization |
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| Canadian Museum of Civilization |
Another day, or it might have been the same day, we did
a long-ish bike ride with Jerry out along the Ottawa River. I remember him
pointing out a park where he said gays went to meet up. Jerry loved to try and
shock us with his gay lifestyle, never with much success. He also took us to a
spot where there were these very cool rock cairns at the edge of the river. It
was like a little outdoor sculpture display.
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| Banks of the Ottawa River, Jerry Lenton |
There was one other place we visited. For the longest time, neither Karen nor
I could remember what or where it was. It appears at first glance to be the picturesque
ruin of a stone building. But we concluded it must be a folly – something built
to look like a ruined stone building. It's a little too perfect. We were right. It finally came to me as I was writing this. I did a search on Google to confirm. It’s the Mackenzie King estate in Gatineau, Quebec,
the home of Canada’s wartime prime minister. It’s just across the border from
Ottawa.
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| Mackenzie King Estate |
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| Canadian Museum of Civilization |
King was a nutcase who, it emerged after he died, took
spiritualism seriously and regularly employed mediums to put him in touch with the
spirits. Those contacted, he believed, included Leonardo da Vinci. The walls in
my pictures were indeed erected as a folly – or a 'garden feature' as the site's promotional material puts it – but apparently
using materials from a real ruin.
The
last picture in the album’s sequence – a sequence that may have been modified
by Caitlin at some point; she enjoyed messing about with our photo albums – brings
back no memories at all. What is significant about the M.J. Bennett Variety
Store, and where is, or was, it? I can tell by the eagerness with which Caitlin
is entering the store, pulling at her mother’s hand, that she’s anticipating
the purchase of a treat.
