My parents loved to travel. In 1966 my father shipped our car out to Edmonton on the train with us and we drove from there through the Rockies to Vancouver via Jasper and drove home back via Banff, Saskatoon and a cottage rental in Kenora.

As a teenager, my dad found work as a truck driver for SHELL Oil and had worked his way up to National Sales Manager. From his driving days he knew many, many of the gas station owners and from his management job, he wanted to know what the station workers had to say about their day to day jobs. At each stop, he would get out of the car and have a chat with the employees.

He had saved money for the gas portion of our trip by putting his change into a beige linen piggy bank sack every night. You can imagine his kids’ embarrassment as he pulled out the sack at each station to pay his gas tab!

When EXPO was held in Montreal in 1967 my father saw this as a great excuse to drive east continuing on to Nova Scotia where my mother could show us where she was born and meet the relatives. We had a great time except for the Nova Scotia bit where it just poured rain every day. My mother was never allowed to forget that.

There were 5 of us on these trips. I was stuck in the middle between a brother and sister. My father always did the driving and my mother always sat up front so there was squabbling every day over who had to sit with “the hump” in the floor in the back seat. I am sure you all remember “the hump”! 

We only ever got one room in the motels. It had to have 2 double beds and a cot. Everyone’s sleeping peculiarities were revealed and analyzed during this “together time” and as I remember it the sharing went like this. My little sister never moved when she slept and being physically quite small, she shared with my father who liked to sprawl so then had the room to do so. Apparently I liked to move a lot, kicking and rolling over etc., so no one ever wanted to share with me. I got the cot. This left my brother and mother to share - neither of whom had any odd sleeping behaviours.     

So that was the start of it.