Toronto 1970-1972

The first time I ever visited Toronto was in the summer of 1966. Growing up in Montreal I had heard a lot of things about the city of Toronto, that it was the kind of the center of Canada for all things English, that it was growing rapidly and a lot of Canadian head offices were located there, and that it was the home of the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team. For years, on many Saturday nights, I had heard the nasally voice of Foster Hewitt greeting hockey fans from across Canada with “ Hello hockey fans across Canada and the United States….from high atop the gondola in Maple Leaf Gardens…”

One day I decided to just go and see what Toronto was about and decided to hitchhike there. My guess is the trip along the 401 Highway that connects Toronto and Montreal took about 10 hours. I arrived late in the afternoon and was dropped off on Front Street near the Union train station. The Royal York hotel was across the street. I didn’t have much money in my pockets and there was never any consideration of paying for a hotel room for the night.

The Royal York Hotel and Union Station in the front of it.

I saw the newly built Nathan Phillips city hall with its two curved buildings. A bit later I found myself on Yonge Street and saw the endless neon signs that were now lit up as it was now dark out. It reminded me of St. Catherine Street in Montreal. I think I asked someone on the street how to get back to the 401 highway and was told it was quite a few miles north. I was starting to get tired and was trying to figure out where I could find a place to catch a few hours of sleep. I ducked into a three or four story older apartment building and stretched out the floor of a service stairway landing and managed to get several hours of shut eye. At around 6 the following morning I continued the long walk north on Yonge Street to the 401 and got a lift back to Montreal.

My next visits to Toronto were fairly frequent, starting in the summer of 1967 through the early months of 1968. I was working for CN as a waiter on the trains. The crew stayed at The Walker House Hotel which was right next to Union Station.  We were never in town long enough to do any exploring of the city. Now and then I would grab a beer at the hotel with some of crew before bed. I didn’t make it back to Toronto for about 3 years.

I hitchhiked out to Edmonton and Vancouver in 1970. I really didn’t have much of a plan and after some time out on the coast I decided to head back to Montreal. During this trip I had my only experience of riding on a freight train, on the third diesel. The noise was deafening. A guy about my age outside of an RCMP office talked me into it. We later learned that there had been a washout somewhere and the train we were on wasn’t going to be taking us any further very soon. I ended up crashing at this guy’s parent’s place in Orillia for a few days.

I headed south to Toronto and one the lifts left me in the downtown business sector of the city close to Bay Street. What now? It was a crisp fall night in mid-October and about 8 p.m. I remembered that an old high school friend was living in Toronto and decided to give him a phone call. I had no idea at the time that I would be spending the best part of the next 2 years in the city.

I had hung around with my friend from high school for a year or two after high school before the company he was working for transferred him to the Bahamas. He spent about two years in the tropics chasing women and visiting the casino before being transferred to Toronto. He used to have a casino chip attached to his key chain and once showed me a threatening letter for an unpaid debt at the casino in Nassau.  Back in the post high school days I had been a guest of his a number of times at a ski cabin he was member of in St. Sauveur, Quebec and we spent a number of weekend nights hanging around a folk singing club called the Café Andre in Montreal.

That first night we caught up on what we had been up to over the past few years. There was never any mistaking the fact that I had been living a totally different lifestyle than these two guys. For starters they both had permanent jobs and owned cars. After staying with these guys for a few days I was asked if I wanted to move in on a more permanent basis. After a few months of sleeping on the couch, I graduated to a single bed in the dining room area.

The two roommates never seemed to have a lot in common other than that they were both from Montreal and had mutual friends. Sharing an apartment seemed to be mostly about economics . They were also both avid golfers. I spent most of my time with the guy who had lived in the Bahamas. He knew that I was pretty well always up for anything and hanging out in bars was right up my alley. The other guy was more set in his ways. He had been married and had a young son by his former wife in Montreal. About once a month he would drive down to Montreal to see his kid.  He also became involved with a gal who was about 10 years older than him. He wasn’t much for carousing like us other two. He had a job at a nearby Canadian Tire store that his uncle owned running the sporting goods department. He was also on the frugal side and one of the few people I knew then who bought cigarettes by the carton in order to save a bit of money.

Shortly after I moved in I got a phone call from the guy I had ridden a third diesel with and he told me he was in Toronto. He kind of reminded me of the John Voight character in Midnight Cowboy, a good looking dude without a lot of smarts. I invited him for dinner and we went to pick him up. On the way home we stopped at a supermarket . He told us not to worry about buying any steaks. When we got back to the car we learned that he had stuffed some prime packages of meat inside his coat. I ran into him a few years later on the main drag in Banff, Alberta.

About a month after I moved in a bunch of people came up to Toronto from Montreal for the Grey Cup.  A number of them crashed in the apartment and I had to explain to one of them that I had dibs on the couch. (Miss Grey Cup that year was Nancy Durrell who lived across the street from me in Montreal for a few years. She walked out onto the football field in Toronto arm in arm with Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Her older brother Jim was one of my first friends in life and later became the mayor of Ottawa and president of the Ottawa Senators hockey club. He was recently awarded the Order of Canada.)

Pierre Trudeau and Nancy Durrell.

In the close to 2 years I spent living in Toronto (1970-1972) the hippy culture was in full swing and it had an influence on a lot of people who weren’t just hanging around doing nothing. On people who actually had jobs. The roommate I spent the most time with had shoulder length hair and a droopy mustache at the time which had no negative reaction to his performance as a sales representative. It was kind of interesting back then how the hippie counterculture influenced even conservative middle aged men. Even they were wearing bell bottoms and you might very well see 50 year old man with a brush cut and sideburns.

Up to this point I had only smoked pot about 3 times back in Montreal a few years earlier. I soon learned that the droopy mustache guy was into smoking pot several times a week. Also hash. We were stoned quite a lot of the time. In fact, he had a sometimes girlfriend that worked for the RCMP who was into smoking weed. We usually bought the stuff in a high rise apartment building in downtown Toronto called Rochdale that was crawling with hippies. I remember the distrustful looks we got when we walked into the lobby with ties on and the supplier nervously fumbling with his scales and the baggies in his one room apartment.

I got a job at a company called Irwin Toy on Hannah Street off of Spadina Avenue on the eastern side of downtown Toronto. They made toys like lawn darts, Jim Dandy lawn swings, and frisbees. Luckily for me, the company was located just a few blocks from where my roommate worked and I got a lift back and forth each day.

Old Irwin Toy building.

Often we would hit a bar on the way home. For a number of months we frequented a nightclub called The Coal Bin that had a free smorgasbord. One night I was in this joint alone and pulled off what some might call a nasty thing. I was invited over to a nearby table by a group of folks who were out for the night. I hit it off with a good looking gal and asked the group if they were interested in going to a house party in North Toronto that some people I knew from Montreal were having. They liked the idea and I asked the gal I was interested in if she would like to dance before we left. Long story short, she turned out to have really, really fat legs. There was no turning back I thought. We drove through a snowstorm for about an hour before arriving at the house party. Someone in the car said something about not knowing anyone at the party and did I really think it was OK for me to invite them. To be honest, I didn’t want to be seen with the gal with the heavy legs. I thought for a moment and then I did the dastardly deed. I said “You are probably right. You might be uncomfortable. Thanks for the lift.” and got out the car. I was a real prick.

Another place we hung out at after work was a place called Flannigan’s in the Holiday Inn closer to home. An Irish comedian told one filthy joke after another and the patrons were almost rolling on the floor with laughter. The beer was served in pitchers. One night I threw up in the lobby on my way to the washroom and went back to my seat and drank some more. Oh to be young again like that!

We bought a poster that was a picture of three prisoners holding a birthday cake that said “Fuck You Warden” on it and taped it on the wall over the living room couch which had a floral pattern and probably part of the settlement in the other roommate’s divorce.

As I said we were stoned quite a lot of the time. I remember a lot of the music we played back then. Neil Young’s “Harvest”, Janis Joplin, George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord”, Iron Butterfly’s “In La Gada La Vida” (my heart felt like it was going to burst), a lot of Moody Blues stuff (very trippy). We also listened to Cheech and Chong (“Dave’s not here!”).

Iron Butterfly.

 

 

Cheech & Chong

A typical Friday or Saturday night involved getting toked up at home and then heading downtown via the Don Valley Parkway. I’ll never forget being half out of my mind stoned and seeing the lights on the guardrails go by about 2 feet from the window and wondering how my roommate could keep his shit together navigating his Camaro.

We hung out in a pub on Jarvis street for a few months and then discovered a disco called The Studio that I think was part of the downtown Holiday Inn. This place is one I would rate as one of the all- time pick up joints. I could say that I was my roommate’s point man but that wouldn’t be true. He did it all on his lonesome. He was so good at it he could make eye contact with a gal across the room and moments later she would be standing beside him.  For some reason he had a picture of a rooster over his bed. Occasionally he would go skirt chasing on his own or with another friend and the telltale sign that he shouldn’t be disturbed in his room was if there was a foreign pair of women’s boots near the front door the next morning.

I, on the other hand, didn’t have that much luck with women at the time. I wasn’t exactly Mr. Independent .  I often didn’t have a job and lacked my own transportation. I do remember one night when we both picked up a couple of nurses at a club near a hospital. Another guy at our table was plotting which one of the gals he was going to take home and seemed a bit surprised when I aced him out.

For some reason, we decided to buy a gerbil one day when we were in a mall. I named him Munroe after the giant rat in one of the Monty Python shows that we regularly watched. We built Munroe a rather elaborate cage and bought a mate for him. The little buggers spent hours gnawing away on the metal mesh on the cage and broke out of their jail more than once. Somehow they found a hole in the wall beneath the base heaters and lived in there for a time only coming out to find food. They are really fast little critters and very hard to nab. We worked out a plan to catch them that worked. My roommate had a wooden “fickle finger of fate” (from Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In TV show) and we tied a string around the forefinger while resting a cooking pot on it. We then sprinkled some gerbil food under the pot. Eventually the little guys came out to eat and the string was yanked from the couch trapping them under the pot. Oh yeah. They also bred. And they also eat their young if they aren’t happy in their environment. We found a few legs but the heads and torsos were gone. Eventually the gerbils ended up at the other roommate’s girlfriend’s house.

Rowan & Martin

The other roommate didn’t smoke pot at all and mostly just shook his head when he came home and saw us with our eyes glazed. He had a pretty good sense of humour. One night we formed a plan to freak the other roommate out. We knew approximately what time he was expected home. We were sitting on the couch in the living room in our skivvies at the time. As soon as we heard the door open we got into position and wrapped our arms and legs around each other and acted like we were ready to kiss each other. The look on the other roommate’s face was priceless.

Somewhere along the line I was given a nickname. CT, the initials for my 1^st and 2^nd name.

Over the next year and a half or so we would get together with some other ex-Montrealers  and play golf. For a number of years there was a kind of annual tournament. I remember seeing a friend of the skirt chasing roommate throwing a golf ball over some trees onto the green. I was never that comfortable about seeing people I knew from high school in Toronto. It just seemed kind of surreal to me, kind of like moving a cast of characters to a totally different locale like the Star Trek guys dressed up as gangsters or something like that.

We saw a few of the Mohammad Ali fights on a big screen at Maple Leaf Gardens. I recall the one with Joe Frazier particularly. One of my roommates had an in with a guy who worked at or near the Hot Stove club and we got in for free by walking in that entrance.

I quit the job at Irwin Toy. I never seemed to be able to make it into work on Monday mornings.  I got a job at King Optical selling eyeglasses. I quit that too. Then I got a job in the dispatch office for Atlas Van Lines which was right next to a mushroom growing plant. I can still recall the stench and the mass of flies on the walk back home.

One day I saw an ad in the newspaper looking for summer staff at the Banff Springs Hotel. I had done some waiting on tables on the trains a few years before and this looked like it could be fun. I went down to the Royal York Hotel for an interview and was told I was going to be hired. I never heard anything more about the job in Banff and kind of wrote the whole thing off as a missed opportunity.

As fate would have it we were playing golf one weekend in early June in Toronto and one of the guys we were playing with was a Canadian Pacific personnel administrator.  I told him my little story and the long and the short of it is that I ended up working at the Banff Springs Hotel for the summer.

I kind of considered Toronto kind of my home at that point and when I flew back east from Calgary that fall I moved back in.

We would go down to Montreal about every two months. Sometimes I went with one roommate and other times with the other. We often ended up at the Winston Churchill Pub on Crescent Street. One weekend the roommate with the kid in Montreal invited me to stay at his family’s country place in Vermont.  Apparently he hadn’t told his parents. I remember overhearing his father from the lobby of their house in Montreal inquiring of my roommate if I had a family of my own to visit. It was a kind of uncomfortable weekend for me knowing that I wasn’t exactly warmly welcomed.

In the winter of the next year I took off to Jasper for a few months. When I got back to Toronto my roommates informed me that they were going to rent a penthouse together (Woodbine and O’Connor) and that I was going to have to find somewhere else to live. I wasn’t disappointed. They both had steady jobs and I was a bit of a rover. It was time to move on.

I found a room in downtown Toronto. I think it was around St. Clair and Yonge Streets. My room was half of an attic. It was an old wooden house with some strange tenants.  One of them was an older fat guy with swollen ankles and a drinking problem. He claimed to have been a roommate of Norman Mailer at one time. The house didn’t have a kitchen but every room had a hot plate. A Vietnamese couple cooked up some stuff that almost made me gag. Some of the other inhabitants were students.

I needed some kind of job to support myself and gravitated back to waiting on tables. Over several months I worked at 3-4 different places, the oddest of which was a private club called the Primrose Club that was exclusively Jewish. A German guy in his forties was my boss. He was pretty subservient to the Jewish members and the thought crossed my mind that he must of had some guilt about the Second World War. I worked as a server/bartender in a little area off of where the poker tables were. There were a few phone booths close by where some of the members would place their bets with the bookies.  There was a buzzer kind of thing that hung on a wire from the ceiling in the poker room. Occasionally I would be summoned by the buzzer to perform some task like picking up a piece of Kleenex off of the floor. I also made sandwiches for the patrons. I had never felt a cow’s tongue before. Kind od sandpapery.  I hated the place. The real kicker was one night when I was asked to stand outside the downstairs door to the dining room. The reason I was to be positioned there was to be on the lookout for someone leaving a parcel bomb on the doorstep. As politely as I could, just before quitting, I told them that if someone was to leave a parcel on their doorstep I would be at the end of the block in a nanosecond. My life was worth more than a few bucks an hour.

I moved on to the Ports of Call restaurant on Yonge Street. The restaurant had a sign outside that revolved and I think it had a sailor sitting on a barrel with a mermaid on his knee. I think?  All of the waiters were Greek and they made no bones about not being happy about having a non-Greek working with them. I would describe them as sleazy characters.  They used to talk about “snowballs” and it took me a while to figure out what they were talking about. “Snowballs” meant adding a little zero on top of another zero to make it look like an 8 on the tip section of the credit card bill. They all deserved a good punch in the mouth. It was at the Ports Of Call where I saw a number of the Canada-Russia hockey summit games and Paul Henderson’s big goal. Farley Mowatt, the Canadian writer turned up at the restaurant one night.

Russia-Canada hockey summit 1972.

My last job in Toronto was as a waiter at the brand new Four Seasons Sheraton Hotel. The hotel claimed to have the longest bar in North America.  It was quite a fancy place and we all wore tuxes. They had plates with pictures of the Ontario parliament buildings on them. I remember an Italian waiter who had a skin problem and claimed he had to wear white socks. Not exactly a compliment to the black tux. He was given the heave ho. I worked with a guy from France who I really enjoyed. He was what they call in fancy restaurants, a captain. I remember another waiter giving me the gears one time and the French guy telling him to F off with his delightful accent. I served Cat Steven’s back-up band breakfast one morning.

 

Whenever I had an excess of cash I would check out the local nightclub scene.One place I went to a few times was The Nicklodeon.  Ronnie Hawkins was the entertainment.  I once bet a gal that he was American and had it confirmed by the Hawk himself. I know the guy was pretty savvy in hiring musicians (The Band) but he never really seemed to be a hit maker.

The Hawk

 

A month or two after the hockey series there was a family tragedy and I moved back to Montreal for a few months to help out. I didn’t know it at the time but it was the end of my living in Toronto.  The west was to be my future home. I kind of knew that it would be, even back then. Coming from Montreal, Vancouver always seemed to offer a lot more to me than Toronto.

In the past 40 years I’ve visited Toronto several times. I had a friend who owned a house in Islington that I stayed at a few times. I met him in Banff and we once spent a month in the early 70s skiing in the western US. He told me stories about growing up in TO including working as a lifeguard at the beaches. He became a world traveller but even after being away for months at a time Toronto was still his home base.  As the years went by our lifestyles became more and more different and I imagine he is still roaming the globe.

I stayed in touch with one of my roommates for a number of years with large gaps between the times we talked. Occasionally he would be out in Vancouver on business. I had lunch with the other roommate at Ed Mirvish’s  Warehouse in Toronto about  20 or so years ago.

I went to the former pot smoking roommate’s 60^th birthday at a Keg restaurant in Richmond, BC about 6 years ago, along with a few other guys from high school who  were living on the west coast. He wasn’t into having a chat about those days long ago when we were stoned quite often. There were some other things that were not to be discussed and I thought to myself that after all these years what we had in common was very little. I haven’t talked to him since.

He did say something on one trip to Vancouver that left an impact on me. Actually he had said the same thing more or less years before. The essence of what he said was that he thought with all the travelling around I did when I was younger and all the things I had done that I had lived a life with 3 times more full than he had.  I considered that to be quite a compliment.

As far as Toronto goes it always seemed to have a kind of coldness about it to me. Too many high rise apartments close to the freeways, old people walking through underpasses carrying grocery bags, endless miles of office buildings and manufacturing plants, the back-ups on the highways and the constant lane changing in the rear view mirror. Perhaps like a lot of other Canadians I resented the place as it being the center of commerce in Canada. I guess it just wasn’t my cup of tea.

Whistler, BC

It’s about 4 p.m. on a bright sunny day in the spring. You’ve had about 6 or 7 good runs. You took a break for lunch at the crowded Roundhouse. You saw people sunning themselves outside the restaurant perched on hay bales. The air is pure and you feel both refreshed and a bit tired at the same time. You can feel the warmth of the reddened skin on your face. It has been a good day. Everyone you see seems to be enjoying themselves. All is right with the world for the moment. It is time for that one last run, the one that will take you right to the bottom of the mountain. As you make your way down the road that is the ski out you follow the gradual turns and notice the shadows of the evergreen trees. You are just minutes away. You know what to expect when you get to the bottom. The cool dudes and gals with their sunglasses are having a few cool ones outside of the Longhorn Pub watching the skiers as they make a few esses to slow themselves down and then there is that one last sharp cut that makes the snow or slush fly like a final touch to a glorious day. You ARE too cool for school!

The first time I ever set foot in Whistler was about 40 years ago in the winter of 1973. A friend I had met in Banff the previous winter who was from Toronto was out in Vancouver for a visit and we decided to check out the slopes 80 miles north. The road up to Whistler was pretty treacherous and it would be years before they really got serious about fixing the highway in preparation for the 2010 Olympics.

 

 

 

Back then most people were day skiers. By that I mean very few people stayed overnight. They would get on the road shortly after daybreak, drive for about 2-1/2 hours, on the hills by about 11:00 a.m., get in a half dozen runs or so, stop in somewhere for a couple of pints, head back to Vancouver as the darkness of night approached.

It was the real diehard skiers who owned or shared ski cabins back then. In later years some of them struck it rich when property values went through the roof.

We stayed at the Christiana Inn on that first trip. I remember that the room was very cold and there was frost on the floor by the windows. The window curtains were discoloured. The only other hotel I can recall at Whistler was the Highland Lodge. We skied for two days. There wasn’t much in the way of nightlife back then. The Boot (or Ski Boot?) was kind of wild and woolly place. A lot of the locals who worked on the lifts hung around there. The only other drinking spots that I can recall were two other joints, one that was kind of a cocktail bar around the corner from the Husky gas station that I think was called PJ’s and there was another place called Après Ski that was at the foot of the mountain.

The Husky gas station was kind of the center of things back then. I’m not positive but I think this was the spot where the bus from Vancouver dropped their passengers off. The train station was a couple of hundred yards away. Another place of note was Nester’s grocery store a few miles down the road.

I was kind of familiar with ski resorts having spent time working in St. Sauveur, Quebec and Banff and Jasper in Alberta. I was never an avid skier but more of a casual one. Skiing was mostly an every now and then thing for me although I did once go on a ski trip to the US that included Snowbird in Utah, Sun Valley, Idaho and Aspen, Colorado. I never had much style nor did I ever take any lessons. The skis I owned were Fischers. I was never totally comfortable with my ski boots on. They always hurt.

 

One of my early memories of skiing at Whistler is the number of times the chairlift would stop just before the last crest at the end of the line. Usually the stoppage was because someone down below had gotten tangled up trying to get on the chair. Back up at the top the chair would go up and down like a yo-yo for a few minutes. Once that stopped and that thrill was completed there was the long waiting for the chairlift to start up again. Then the cold brisk winds coming over the ridge hit you hard and you just couldn’t wait to get off the damned thing.

Over the next several years I moved around BC a bit and didn’t get back up to Whistler until about 1977. By this time things had changed dramatically. The Sea to Sky Highway (#99) was improved somewhat but it could still be a hairy road. Almost every time I drove up to Whistler I would see a close call in traffic or red flashing police car lights where someone had totalled their car. Mostly these accidents seemed to happen where two lanes merged into one and some goof thought he could squeeze in.

Whistler was starting to look like other more established ski resorts. The new place to hang out at night was the Keg restaurant. The mountain had a really long ski out. Sometimes it could get pretty slushy at the bottom of the hill and a few poor souls did a face plant in the icy slush.

Ski cabin shenanagans.

The land rush was on. New resorts opened up. Sharing a cabin with 20 or so other folks became more and more popular. The “Village” was still a few years away. I got married in 1981 and my wife at the time had been a cabin member previously at Whistler so we coughed up the fee for the winter season. We were living on Bowen Island at the time and for some reason or another we only used the cabin twice that winter. It wasn’t exactly a good investment.

A couple we knew bought a chalet near Alta Lake. I think they got the place for a steal as the previous owner was a lottery winner who was running out of funds. One summer weekend when we were up there for a weekend by ourselves I built the owners a coffee table. I wonder if it is still intact or was put to good use in the fireplace. I remember the owner of the chalet renting his place out for the summer and not being able to get the tenants out in the fall. Apparently he paid some nearby construction workers in cases of beer to help with eviction.

One summer weekend we were up at the chalet with a bunch of other people we knew and ended up spending the day at a beach on Alta Lake. Somebody had a wind surfer board and I asked if I could use it and was given the OK. I had done some sailing when I was younger but didn’t have much of a clue about how to use a wind surfing board. I ended up at the other end of the lake. I ditched the board and started on the long walk back to the beach. The easiest path was across the new golf course. I was carrying the life vest in my hand when I was approached by a marshal in a golf cart. “Excuse me sir, but are you playing golf?” he said to me with what sounded like a German accent. I thought the life vest might have been a clue. “Would you please leave immediately!” was the next thing he said. When I got back to the beach I found out that a search party had gone looking for me. I can’t recall who recovered the board.

My ex and a couple of pals.

My ex-wife and I skied up at Whistler about 2 or 3 times a year back then. She knew some people who had a lot of cash who were what one might call “the fast crowd”. One guy gave all his friends elaborate looking daggers one Christmas that were used to cut the ends off of champagne bottles. We often hit the disco at night. At the time there was an older guy who dressed himself up in a silver lame suit complete with a cape. He would toss out silver foil wrapped candies to people on the dance floor. Why I have no idea.

We once went to a wedding of a couple of my ex’s friends in Whistler. The wedding was catered by two European guys, Ted and Jan who owned a delicatessen in Whistler. I had met these two guys a few years before when I sold them a cash register for a lunch restaurant they were opening on Howe Street in Vancouver called The Scanwich. It never dawned on me that they were both gay. A number of years later Ted Nebbeling became the mayor of Whistler and went on to be an MLA.

We visited another couple my ex knew that had a chalet a few times. The only reason I am mentioning this is that I left a cigarette burn on their furniture not once but twice. The first time was while holding their baby and my cigarette fell off of the ashtray burning the dining room table. The second time I burned the living room coffee table after getting too stoned in the hot tub.

The last time I skied in my life was in 1987 at Whistler when I was 40 years old. I’m not sure if I quit because I didn’t want to press my luck and break something. I think it was also about the whole production, the long drive to the ski hills, getting the gear out of the car, putting the boots on, trekking hundreds of yards across parking lots to get to the chairlifts with skis over my shoulder, the long ride on the chairlift, the white-out at the top of the hill. Who knows?

Our twins were born in 1989 and even if I wanted to, buggering off to Whistler was out of the question. I’m kind of glad they didn’t get hooked on skiing at a young age because of the costs. My son did get into snowboarding in his mid-teens.

When the kids were about 3 and 4 years of age we took them up to Whistler a number of times in the summer. We stayed at the Lake Placid Lodge a few times. We went for a walk after breakfast one day and I told my ex that I would go and get the car that was parked some distance away. As I was walking back to the car I looked over my shoulder to see where they were and saw a black bear heading straight towards them. The thought crossed my mind that I might have to defend them. Fortunately it was a garbage bear and it past by them as if they weren’t there.

My ex and I split up when the kids were about 5 and over the next several years Whistler was where I would sometimes take them on summer weekends. We usually stayed at the Holiday Inn. We went to The Old Spaghetti Factory one night never to make that mistake again. The kids rang the bell at the top of the rock wall climbing thing and we often rode our bikes around the golf course. To be honest, I prefer Whistler in the summertime.

 

I have a friend who owns a condo in Whistler and I was invited up a few times. I had helped him out along with a sales rep who worked for me on doing some basement work on his house in Vancouver and as a reward he offered his condo gratis for a weekend. The sales rep brought his girlfriend. We got pretty drunk at Buffalo Bill’s one night and I took the liberty of telling my sales rep that he could do better than the girl he was with. I don’t think it went over well. I think New Orleans Is Sinking was playing when I told him.

 

Buffalo Bills became the place I would always end up in in the 1990s. The odd 40-50 year old gal could be found there unlike places like Tommy Africa’s. One winter weekend I brought my kids up to the condo. A deal was made that the guys could go out for the night and my pal’s wife would watch the kids. The next morning I remember taking my kids to a virtual reality kind of place that was very noisy and having about the worst hangover ever. I guess it was the price that had to be paid.

The last time I got really drunk in my life was at Whistler. My friend and I were up by without family and I ordered a round of shooters at Buffalo Bill’s. Nobody seemed into it and I ended up drinking most of them myself. That was 15 years ago and I haven’t been drunk since. On another night I kind of lost track of my friend and only found out that he had been tossed out of Buffalo Bill’s the following morning.

I hadn’t been up to Whistler for about 10 years until a brief visit early last winter in the middle of the week. My friend was doing a few touch ups to his condo and invited us up. Linda had never been to Whistler before. She went off and took a gondola ride on her lonesome. I took a pass on joining her. It was nice to see the snow but for me personally ski towns are now all about the memories of actually skiing and the nightlife. I’m a little too old now for both.

 

Thinking back about spending time in ski resort areas I have mixed thoughts. There is no doubt that the mountains wherever ski hills are located are spectacular. The amenities are always first class. I have always had some admiration for those that seriously enjoy skiing, the folks that just love powder. The way they have formed long friendships with others who are like minded.

Most who work at ski resorts are only in town for a year or two. Kind of like a pit stop in life before they have to get more serious and find a real job. A few decide to stay on permanently and become a part of the community. For many who are just there for a season or two they will never forget the memories of those perfect days and hazy nights.

Having said that, there is to me at least, always a kind of plastic artificialness about ski resorts. There seems to be a lot of posing. It is a place where rich people like to spend time and there are plenty of places that cater to them. If you want to buy some $10,000.00 sculptures or some expensive jewelry or spend a few hundred bucks on dinner or rent a suite for the night for a thousand bucks you won’t have trouble finding these things in most major ski resort towns like Whistler, Banff or Aspen. If you let it, you can become a bit overwhelmed by it all. Different strokes for different folks I guess.

I used to be a bit mystified about how really wealthy people could own property in a place like Banff considering that the town is in a national park. I also remember a number of years ago that almost every store in Banff had Japanese signs in the window when the Japanese economy was humming away and as soon as things went in the dumper for them the signs came down.

Today in Whistler it seems like more than half of the workers in town are Australian. Canadians dream of sandy beaches and bright sunshine in the winter and Australians dream of snow-capped mountains and cold weather I guess. Who knows?

If you don’t already know, Whistler has the longest ski runs in North America. Whistler is also rated at the top as far as ski resorts go. What you might not know is that it is a great place to spend time in the summer. The town has some really great golf courses and whether you are spending time there as a couple or as a family there are a lot of things to do and see.

If you are thinking of visiting Whistler I heartily recommend a condo that my friends Laura and Rory rent out year round at reasonable rates. The place sleeps 7 and is close to everything.

www.yourwhistlerhome.directvacations.com

 

 

As a matter of fact,….if you are looking for an affordable place to stay in Vancouver, minutes away from downtown, Laura and Rory rent out a very comfortable basement suite. They also rent out a gorgeous waterfront chalet on Lake Okananagan complete with a boat dock.

Tell them Colin sent you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mayan Riviera-All Inclusive

For many Canadians a trip to Mexico in the winter is like a pilgrimage to the holy land where god is this big bright yellow thing that shines in the sky. Some claim to have a deep faith in all that is bright and any talk of anything that smacks of ridicule of this far off land or its people should be written off as ignorance or the inability to adapt.

A number of years ago when I was single and in my fifties I would occasionally get into conversations on the net about Mexico and inevitably I would be told that to truly understand Mexico one had to stay away from big resorts and find more out of the way places where the locals were more natural (whatever that means) and hadn’t been influenced as much by the Yankee dollar.

My usual response to the above was that if one is really interested in rather simple people there are some blue haired old ladies and farmers in rural Saskatchewan that they could be introduced to. Try taking local transportation in Mexico and you will find that the locals don’t offer up the same smiles that they do when they are trying to extract some cash from you by selling you something or hopefully expecting a tip.

One thing that has always irked me when travelling is condescending tourists. We are all people and some of us have been luckier than others as to where we were born and raised. There is nothing cute about being poor and having to work 6 days a week at some lousy job that is leading nowhere.

I have been to Mexico over a dozen times. Linda has been there 6 times in the last 6 years and I have been 5 times in the same period. (The other year we went to the Dominican Republic.) We always stay at resorts because we like to lie around the swimming pool. Linda always has a book on the go and I am more inclined to have my headphones on while watching the passing parade. The rooms are always very nice and the food and booze is included.

We try not to over complicate things. We aren’t archeologists. We aren’t writing a book on socioeconomics. More than anything else we are in Mexico to break up the long days of winter on Vancouver Island where we live that offer us very little sunshine or bright colours.

This year we chose a resort that is part of the Bahia Principe chain. The resort is located on Mayan Riviera about an hour and a half south of Cancun by car. It is actually 3 resorts and as a guest you have access to all of the amenities provided by each resort, Coba where we stayed, Akumal and Tulum.



Walk to lobby and dining room.



Coba lobby.
 

After getting off the plane in Cancun, we found ourselves in an extended van along with two other couples from BC being driven to our destination and we arrived at about 7 p.m. in the evening. The first thing we noticed was the giant thatched roof above the reception area. It was about 4 stories high and quite impressive. We were offered a couple of margaritas while we were signing in. We were told that a lock for our room safe would be 5 bucks a day.

Coba main lobby entrance.

Lobby ceiling.

 

We found our room and within a few minutes our luggage arrived. We slipped into out tropical duds and made our way to the buffet dining room. We were told that there was a Mexican show that night that cost something like 15 bucks and took a pass. It was one of those been there, done that, kind of things.

Our Room.

One of the things I learned a long time ago about travelling to Mexico is to roll with the punches. It isn’t Canada. The warm weather and usually sunny skies far and away make up for any minor inconveniences.

For most of the first two days at the resort the skies were cloudy and there were some showers. We spent a bit of time at the pool in those two days and took a ride over to the beach. The resorts have a capacity of something like 6,000 people altogether (maybe more). There are close to 2,600 rooms.

On our 2^nd night we saw an excellent group of musicians that included a singer who was kind of an Amy Winehouse clone. An older duffer was out on the dance floor with his younger girlfriend and a stubby French Canadian guy with a cowboy hat couldn’t help himself and joined them as a threesome. The old duffer seemed to put up with it good naturedly. Later when the couple was seated the French Canadian guy asked the woman to dance with him alone. He kind of looked like he was pushing the envelope and not long after the couple departed. The singer said the band would be back the next night but they were MIA when we went back the next evening.

On the 3^rd night we spent part of the evening in a quiet lounge at another of the resorts. A Latin singer and organist were the entertainment and they were quite good. They did tunes like The Girl From Ipanema. We ran into some people from Vancouver Island at the lounge.

I know that there are many who like the music that is played at Mexican resorts but I am not one of them. It starts about 12 noon around the bigger pools and runs until about 11 p.m. near to the main lobby. Mostly it is a kind of driving beat with shades of disco and 1990s techno pop. Mindless crap mostly suited towards twenty somethings. In between the music the Mexican DJ is often screaming. We are told that we are simply not hip if we don’t turn up that night at some disco or other. Sometimes we would be exhorted to join in a game of “bolleyball” at the pool.

Most resorts have an “adult” or “quiet” pool where you can get away from the noise and quietly read a book without distraction if you care to. Not at this place. For starters the “adult” or “quiet” pool had an ice cream machine. From time to time a parent could be heard screaming at their kid(s) from across the pool. It may just be me but I am not fussy about seeing babies in diapers in swimming pools. I don’t care how much chlorine is in the water.

By 8 a.m. pretty well all of the lounging chairs around the pools had been reserved for the day with a book or beach towel placed upon them denoting that they were not available. After that the best you could hope for is to stretch out on the grass or try to marry up a pair of single chairs if you can find them and drag one of them over to the other. There are signs all over the place saying you can't reserve a chair but nobody pays any attention.

One of the pools in early morning.

Other than walking, the way to get from one place to another in a resort as big as this is to take a “train” which is basically like a larger golf cart pulling trailers with bench seats. The is a big sign on the trailers warning drunks of the dos and don’ts and absolving the resort of any responsibility should an accident occur.

Train?

Hotel Guests

People come from all over the world to the Mayan Riviera. There are a lot of Europeans and lots of Russians. The men seem partial to wearing speedos. Although the resort is on the Caribbean Sea, Canadians and Americans, who are the majority of the guests, come from both eastern and western regions of those countries. If you are into people watching this is the place to be.

The first thing you would probably notice is that many of the guests are really, really fat. (I am carrying some extra pounds myself.) I am talking about extra fat. It is as if every huge person from back home somehow managed to scrape up the cash for a trip south in the dead of winter to air the old body out.

The resort is family oriented which means there are kids of all ages around. At night in the lobby you can see the glow coming off of lap top screens and hand held devises, many of them being used by teenagers and kids even younger. Also by a number of adults. You don’t see a lot of family vacation bonding going on.

Most tourists are pretty friendly and capable of a short conversation which always includes the question “Where are you from?” A few are a waste of time trying to talk to perhaps because they are just anal or maybe distrustful in sea of humans.

You can kind of break the hotel guests down into groups. There are the Mexican cowboy hat types who can’t get enough of the watered down booze and who often like to party. There are the young fashionistas who are up date in the latest trends. Young gals in their twenties with short skirts ready for the disco and guys with leg tattoos and yellow sun glasses perched on their foreheads. There are the “first timers” who are totally blown away with Mexico and are of varying ages. You see people who have come down to attend a wedding on the beach. There are a few mothers who have had their young daughters hair dyed blonde and made into corn rows and you might be kind of tempted to tell the mothers that their kids just aren’t that special. Most people staying at the resort are over 60 years of age. If not Mexico now when?

Many French Canadians love the tropics. They tend to be cliquey and remain within their comfort zone. It is like they have transported their Quebec culture with them. Often if you try to engage them in conversation you find that they have little curiosity about English speaking people and make you struggle with the little French you know instead of speaking English which a lot of them know. Not the most sophisticated travellers I have met.

Most American tourists are fine. Occasionally you run into one who thinks the world revolves around the US.

The best conversation we had with a fellow tourist was with a gal in her late 20s from Toronto. Somehow I missed out on the fact that she was topless when we first parked ourselves next to her. Linda told me later. She told us that she had a black boyfriend from Nigeria and sure enough he turned up about a ½ hour into our chat. The gal was telling us that she was hoping to buy a condo back home and that she needed some more cash for the down payment. I suggested that her boyfriend might kick in and he rolled his eyes. It was kind of funny.

 

The tourists who really amaze me are the old gaffers. Some are hobbling. Between all of the noise and the extremely hot sun, and probably being on medication, somehow they manage to make it back to the plane home without having to be rushed to a hospital. Some of them look like they are just happy to be anywhere at this point in life.

Mexican Resort Food

The giant buffet in the giant dining room is hardly an advertisement for world hunger. Plates are stacked three times a day often with only half the food eaten. Bacon, which is deepfried is clearly the breakfast favourite. Mexicans have made an art form out of destroying the taste of food. A little bit of cilantro goes a long way if you know what I mean. Meat is usually doctored with some kind of spices and is often tough to chew. Seafood is a lost cause. Shrimp are mushy and overcooked. You need a chainsaw to cut through what is inside shellfish.

I found that I had to take 2 tours through the buffet area before putting something on my plate. Fresh fruit is always a good idea to keep the system flowing. It is hard to totally destroy pasta. Peanut butter on toast works. Some of the deserts were OK and they had really good ice cream. I never went near a hamburger or hot dog.

It is a bit of an adventure going to the buffet. Some butt in line if they see some food that has possibilities. Many are oblivious to others around them and it is surprising that there aren’t more broken plates on the floor.

The resort staff in the dining room are desperate for tips and you can tell that they are more than a bit disingenuous with their smiles. Often they tend to run around in a panic instead of logically going about their duties. Ask for a spoon and you might get it 10 minutes later. Ask for a drink and it could arrive within minutes.

Part of the deal at the resort is that you could choose 3 so called “ala carte” restaurants to have dinner at. We only chose one, a Japanese place called The Mikado. (I never was much of a Gilbert & Sullivan fan….never mind if you don’t get the connection.) We were led into a room that had seats that surrounded a grill. Our fellow diners were all French Canadians, a group of three couples and a small child with an ipod, and an older couple who sat beside us that were from Quebec who never mumbled a word during dinner. The worldly French Canadians stuck with spoons and forks and knives. I’m not sure if they took the chopsticks home as souvenirs.

Mexican/Japanese cook.

We tried to engage the French Canadians in a bit of conversation even mentioning that I was born in Montreal but that went nowhere and they resumed chatting to one another in French. I have pretty well given up on French Canadians. The sashimi was surprisingly OK as was the soup. The chef turned up and did his act of spinning the cooking utensils around in the air. Nothing that appeared that dangerous but a decent act just the same. Some rice and fresh vegetables were spread out on the grill followed by pieces of fish, chicken, and beef.  The latter out were portioned into chunks which made them look like stew meat. Did I mention that not a soul who worked in the place was Japanese? I passed on the prawns knowing that they were just going to be recooked. I also took a pass on the “mystery” fish. The chicken and beef were kind of passable by Mexican standards. I am glad that we didn’t bother with the other 2 ala carte restaurant meals.

Smoking.

You can’t smoke in the resort rooms, in the lobby, or the dining room, or on transportation. Other than that the resort is kind of a smoker’s paradise and I smoke. It kind of felt like the old days when you could smoke on a plane or walk around puffing on a butt in a supermarket.

I haven’t seen so many smokers in one place in years. You would see people coming out of the dining room with a smoke and a lighter in one hand ready to puff away. I saw an old guy smoking while he pushed his wife in a wheelchair.

Back in Canada you would probably be verbally assaulted if you displayed your smoking habit so openly. At the Bahia Principe any dislike for smokers was camouflaged. Not a place for brave anti-smokers to voice their opinions.

Fending off the hucksters.

There were two entrances to the dining room at Coba. One had a number of steps that led directly into the dining room and the other was an entrance way off of the main lobby. The latter had a number of time share and condo sales booths that you had to pass in the corridor. You were free game if you chose this route. The standard plan is to keep walking and ignore the hucksters. I got a few chuckles from them one day when I asked them if they would be interested in buying a condo in Victoria, BC.

A couple of good looking young Mexican gals patrolled the edge of the lobby. They weren’t your typical looking dining room staff. A few “kills” on selling condos and they could make a damned good living. Neither gal made eye contact with one another. I think the deal was that they couldn’t harass the guests but if someone engaged them at all…..that’s another story.

One morning, we were sitting out in the sun having a coffee (and a smoke) when we were approached by a dignified looking middle aged Mexican gent. He started to go into a pitch about some “privileged club” and Linda cut him off and told him we were in the middle of a conversation. Having spent most of my life in sales I, apparently, am more amused by sales BS than Linda. The guy asked us if we were Americans and when we told him he weren’t he went into a 5 point rant about rotten Americans including some court stuff. My guess is he had an ex-wife in the US who had sued his pants off.

Noise

If you like noise and lots of it, this is the resort to go to. Turn on the TV and almost every Mexican commercial involves screaming or loud voices. The announcers all sound like they were trained to do American tractor pull events. Make the voice deep and drag the word out slowly. “Waaaaaaaarner Brothers”.

All Mexican all-inclusives have a pool DJ and you can pretty well count on hearing “Oooha Ooh” at least 10 times a day. That sound ranks right up there with “In the hole” on golf broadcasts on US TV. I’m not big on guns but…

Directly across from our room was a fenced off area where they were building a kid’s water park. The fence was covered by some green fabric so it was hard to see what was going on. Every morning at 7:30 p.m. the chainsaws, circular saws, and hammers would get going. It went on all day. Aside from the DJ yelling at the activity pool from about 12:00 a.m. to about 4 p.m. there was also some dancing or entertainment going on near the reception area from about 7:00 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. 5 year old kids dancing in the dark with strobe lights is not cute and probably the last place a single person wants to be.

The resort management, in their wisdom or lack of same, made a decision at some point that nobody would care if construction on the new water park went on to 10:30 at night possibly figuring that nobody would care when noise was already coming from the nightly deal near the reception area.

One morning at about 7:00 a.m., I could hear a kid crying and screaming from one of the complexes nearby. It wasn’t exactly the sound of morning birds whistling and chirping.

And then there was the one of the coffee cups in our room that had a chip in it. It was there for 7 days which made me wonder if they used one of our used towels to clean it.

All in all I don’t think the management could give a rat’s ass about any discomfort they put their customers through. It seems to be all about the money and moving the herds in and out.

When I got back to BC I read some of the reviews on the resort. One person wrote about finding mold in their room at the sister club across the highway by the golf course. Another wrote about stepping on a spider and all the little baby spiders running around the room.

Upside.

The water at the beach is crystal clear and schools of fish swim by. There are a number of pretty looking birds (orange, yellow, red) that make their homes at the resort. It is quite common to see long tailed critters that look a bit like racoons. You see iguanas everywhere and the occasional gecko. One morning we saw a creature that looked like it was part of the pig family. The grounds are well manicured and you can tell that you are right next to the jungle.

Beach

 

Ring tailed varmints.

Gecko.

Iguanas.

 

Tulum.

I had been to the Mayan ruins at Tulum about 15 years ago when I stayed in Cancun. Back then you could climb the steps of the pyramid but not anymore. Our hotel liaison person didn’t recommend Tulum as a place to see and suggested other ruins possibly because of a kick back. The going rate from the resort to Tulum and back was 75 bucks a head. Linda and I have never been adverse to taking public transportation in Mexico (it kind of gives you a local feel) and our trip to Tulum ended up costing us a total of 24 bucks for both of us including the entrance fee and transportation.

Tulum.

Tulum

Linda.

Tulum

Tulum.

 

Summary.

Did I have a good time? Yes I did. As I said earlier I always roll with the punches when in Mexico. I will be 66 in a few months and spending a week in Mexico and people watching along with the natural and unnatural beauty of the area is enough to break up months of grey skies in the winter on Vancouver Island. I’ve always liked an adventure.

Would I go again? Definitely not! Next year we’re going to Maui where things are a lot more peaceful.

Adios.