It is currently March 19th, 2024, 3:11 am

All times are UTC - 5 hours




Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 11 posts ] 
Author Message
 Post subject: Complete mystery!
PostPosted: February 5th, 2021, 9:42 am 
Offline
User avatar

Joined: August 11th, 2002, 7:00 pm
Posts: 6128
Location: Sunny Wasaga Beach
Totally baffled---a few days ago I rec'd an envelope with a postcard inside. The envelope was sent from someone in Austria. Inside was a postcard with a pic of G bay and some notes re trip. It was addressed to someone in Nebraska, I think. The writing was hard to read. The postcard looked a bit old and faded. 
I am posting this here in the faint hope that someone here provided my address, although I don't know how they got it. 
Any clue? thx

_________________

Old canoeists never die---they just smell that way.



Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Complete mystery!
PostPosted: February 5th, 2021, 11:52 am 
Offline
User avatar

Joined: June 23rd, 2001, 7:00 pm
Posts: 3546
Location: Newmarket, Ontario Canada
I would count it as a blessing! Not only contact with the outside world, but not a bill!:):):)

_________________
"I've never met a river I didn't like. The challenges are what we remember, and the experiences will make great memories for when I can pick up my paddle no more". Me


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Complete mystery!
PostPosted: February 11th, 2021, 11:40 am 
Offline
User avatar

Joined: July 12th, 2016, 3:01 pm
Posts: 324
Maybe post a pic of the postcard?


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Complete mystery!
PostPosted: March 14th, 2021, 12:07 pm 
Offline

Joined: June 28th, 2001, 7:00 pm
Posts: 2900
Location: Freeland, Maryland USA
It wasn’t me, I swear, despite some history in that kind of thing.

Back in the ‘70’s I was reading Frank Herbert’s Dune on a months-long cross country trip. As it happened a friend’s parents were Herbert’s neighbors.

I got his address and sent him a series of anonymous picture postcards across the US, the nuttiest ones I could find. “Jackalopes”, the World’s Largest Ball of Twine, the famous Wall Drug in South Dakota, Hoover Dam, etc.

I never knew how he took that; weird fun or crazy stalker.

Back in the day, when friends did long cross-country trips, I would give them a bunch of stamped (8 cents at the time), self-addressed plain white postcards before they left, to mail back to me along the road.

I received some seriously crazy WTF written on the back, but at least from the postmark I knew where they had been, and could follow their travels.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Complete mystery!
PostPosted: March 15th, 2021, 9:56 pm 
Offline
User avatar

Joined: August 11th, 2002, 7:00 pm
Posts: 6128
Location: Sunny Wasaga Beach
Mike McCrea wrote:
the famous Wall Drug in South Dakota, Hoover Dam, etc.

s.


My main question is---did you get your free glass of water??
:D

_________________

Old canoeists never die---they just smell that way.



Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Complete mystery!
PostPosted: March 17th, 2021, 12:24 pm 
Offline

Joined: June 28th, 2001, 7:00 pm
Posts: 2900
Location: Freeland, Maryland USA
wotrock wrote:
My main question is---did you get your free glass of water??


After seeing a thousand miles of Wall Drug billboards - seriously, highway billboards listing mileage starting just west of Chicago in the 70’s - you bet your ass I had my free glass of water.

https://www.walldrug.com/about-us/wall-drug-signs

Even taking turns driving a ’67 VW bus across 1557 miles along the northern route, at a pedal-to-the-metal top speed of 60mph, we are all plumb thirsty by the time we hit South Dakota.

And very damn thirsty by the time we hit California. Which still had a legal drinking age of 21, vs recently-changed-to-18 from where we hailed

Can’t drink, but smoking weed in California was a pay-the-man small fine misdemeanor citation.

I ask you, what’s a young man to do?


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Complete mystery!
PostPosted: March 17th, 2021, 11:09 pm 
Offline
User avatar

Joined: April 21st, 2004, 10:52 am
Posts: 1180
Location: Near Ottawa ON
Edited to add - Geezzz, I really rambled on this time. Don't know why I got off on the mining riff, but there you go. Blame it on the cabernet. If you read the thread this far you get what you deserve.

Quote:
I ask you, what’s a young man to do?

Sitting here enjoying a glass of an excellent California Cabernet brings to mind my own similar pilgrimage to the Golden State.
The summer of '69. Copper Cliff Ontario hard-rock mine. Walked out of the gates after my shift down at 1800 ft. Three friends from back home hanging out outside the gate. "Going to Mexico, wanna come?".
Mexico or back to the mine? Not sure how things work in the mines now, with automation and all, but back then I was a Slusher. Shush is the rock broken down by blasting the bedrock to gravel and small boulder sizes. A slusher would sit at the end of a drift (tunnel) in front of a set of two counter-rotating drums wrapped in either end of a steel cable. The drums turned powered by air pressure controlled by levers. One end of the cable is tied to the front of a giant steel bucket, like on a front-end loader. The other end loops through pulleys on the ceiling to a pulley at the back of the drift and then the back of the bucket so it can be pulled backwards and forwards.
There are shafts leading up from the drift to chambers above. The previous shift would blast the rock off the walls and ceiling of the chamber and it would fall into my drift through the shaft. I would drag it forward, dropping it through a 4 ft by 6 ft hole in front of me into a train on the level below.
My first day I received about an hour's training, including how to blast apart boulders jammed in the shafts or too big for the train. First lay down a piece of burlap about a meter square. Pour on a couple of gallons of Amex (i.e. nitrogen fertilizer). Wrap a stick of dynamite in a fuse and bundle it in the burlap with the Amex, tying the corners together. (The dynamite was in thicker sticks than you commonly see in the movies and was colloquially called, ummm, a particular piece of a male horse's anatomy.).
Then attach a blasting cap and wire to the fuse. Place bundle on boulder with a few rocks on top to direct the blast at the boulder. Retreat around 2 corners if possible, Yell "FIRE" three times and push the plunger. Kaboom.
I was shown how to string two bundles together. What they didn't tell me was to not do more than 2 at one time. I was a new man, wanting to impress, clean out my drift and fill the train in record time. So I linked-up 8 charges. The shock wave lifted me off my feet. Then a blast of air, then I was blinded by dust and choking on the sharp distinctive smell of the explosives. I set off alarms on the surface 1800 feet above. My first day was going down hill which was ironic given that I was already at the bottom of a deep friggin' hole.
I hung in there for six months during which time a guy on the next level blew his foot off, a union rep signed into the Smelter and never signed out and may currently by part of a nickel-plated cutler set, the roof of the thankfully unoccupied lunch room caved in and sundry other mishaps occurred. Many more.
Like there was the guy who got way more than his share of the Neanderthal genes. His body was completely covered in thick black hair. Like, you couldn't see any skin. I saw him in the shower and it was like a friggin' bear standing there. Plus the sloped forehead, broad sloping shoulders, muscle-bound body. I'm telling you, picture a Neanderthal and that's him. He hated me. Maybe it was that time he was yelling at me and I made that series of crude gestures and he got so mad he was literally foaming at the mouth and I literally had to run for my life.
All that to say yeah, I was ready for a change and Mexico with my buddies sounded great.
"Be right with you!". I turned around, walked back into HR for my pay and squeezed into the little Datsun. A quick stop for my stuff at the boarding house where I lived, bunked in a bedroom with three other guys. We all worked shiftwork so it generally wasn't fully occupied at any one time, but still not that pleasant a place. I was happy to see it recede in our rear-view mirror, the end of a chapter.
So the four Amigos where off! I'll skip the whole Mexico part of the story on this family friendly forum and go to the return trip up the West Coast.
We were somewhere near Big Sur I think, but with beaches accessible to vehicles. We had met some young ladies who invited us to a party way back in the sand dunes behind the beach where we parked with a string of other vehicles. They had dune buggies with CB radios patrolling the perimeter to decoy away any incursions by "the man" (some were just back from 'Nam and talked that way). They ferried us back into the dunes, driving like maniacs, making a game out of scaring the crap out of us.
Anyway, it was a hell of a party. Maybe 100 people, bonfires, live music, food, wine and other consumables. It was peace, free love and all that. It was 1969. We arrived with nothing but most there were trying to be good hippies and insisted on sharing. So we did.
At some point we made it back to our little vehicle, squeezed in and immediately passed out. An indeterminant amount of time later we were awaken by pounding on the hood of the car and frantic shouting. We were no longer on a beach. We had been magically transported into the middle of the ocean and it was flooding into the car! Or course the "magic" was the tide and everybody but the stupid Canadians knew you had to get off the beach before it rolled in.
Anyway, the dune buggy patrol had spotted us and put out the word and there were all kinds of people splashing knee-deep in the water about us, eager to help and/or laugh at our stupidity. We basically carried the vehicle ashore.
I recall we slept in some unusual places on that trip including a surprisingly pleasant stay in the Ventura County jail. But that's another story and my Cabernet is about done.
Thanks for listening.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Complete mystery!
PostPosted: March 18th, 2021, 6:17 am 
Offline
User avatar

Joined: August 27th, 2002, 7:00 pm
Posts: 2739
Location: Geraldton, Ontario Can
Wow, Krusty, did you run into Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on your adventure?


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Complete mystery!
PostPosted: March 18th, 2021, 9:12 am 
Offline
User avatar

Joined: April 21st, 2004, 10:52 am
Posts: 1180
Location: Near Ottawa ON
Well, Hotel California was pretty much permeated by the warm smell of colitas well before the Eagles landed. And the electric kool-aid. But we never climbed fully aboard the magic school bus.
Although I rolled with it for a while I never really brought in to the drop-out counter-culture. I'm glad that, say, my dental surgeon didn't drop out. I couldn't rationalize why he'd trade his hard-earned didn't-drop-out skills for my tie-dyed soul candles or whatever. It kinda' boiled down to expecting someone else to do the hard work of looking after you while at the same time labelling them as morally inferior greedy capitalists. And I always preferred (the allusion of) looking after myself. Except when I have the man-flu.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Complete mystery!
PostPosted: March 18th, 2021, 12:14 pm 
Offline
User avatar

Joined: August 27th, 2002, 7:00 pm
Posts: 2739
Location: Geraldton, Ontario Can
Ha ha, well just in case you are interested, when Covid is over I'm gonna run the Electric Kool-aid acid test on Marshall lake, no school bus, but a big freighter canoe, and you're either on the canoe or off the canoe. No throat slitters allowed.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: Complete mystery!
PostPosted: March 19th, 2021, 2:13 pm 
Offline

Joined: June 28th, 2001, 7:00 pm
Posts: 2900
Location: Freeland, Maryland USA
Krusty, that was well told. You need to pick up another bottle of Cabernet for further reflections.

Krusty wrote:
Edited to add - Geezzz, I really rambled on this time. Blame it on the cabernet. If you read the thread this far you get what you deserve.


Edited to add – Blame it on the Loose Cannon IPA’s. And Krusty, and fond memories.

We did two long coast-to-coast cross country trips in the ’67 bus, one four weeks long, one six weeks (followed by a dozen+ trips in pick-up trucks with caps). I have no tales to match Krusty’s Big Sur experiences, or at least none suitable for a public forum, but I wouldn’t trade those bus travel days for anything. There were, and still are, peculiar delights to put-puttting along at 60 mph tops, navigating back roads with nothing but a State road map.

Those 1970’s VW bus trips were where I learned how to live dirt cheap on the road. No paid campsites, just hit National Forest or BLM lands, make every dirt road right hand turn until the road ends and camp there overnight (or longer). Ain’t nobody coming to look.

No restaurant meals (except the occasional “Lumberjack” or “Trailboss” Diner breakfast special. That immense pile of cheap calories will keep you going all damn day). Otherwise, yer getting hungry?, stop at a scenic pull off and cook something.

Not much interesting left to see east of the Mississippi? Keep driving non-stop. Never had a “paid” shower on those trips, just jump in the glacial runoff stream with a bottle of Dr. Bronnner’s and hope your nuts descend again eventually. I later discovered that, if you park outside a State Park gate and wander in through the woods with binoculars and a bird book, carrying soap, towel and clean clothes in a day pack, no one will ever be the wiser.

Not much comfort in that crude bus seat? Before my driving shifts I would line the seat and the door edge with foam sleeping pads. So much better, enough that one “I’m still good” driving shift stretched for 25 hours (Albuquerque to New Orleans; my companions both had girlfriends waiting for them in NO, and wanted to save their strength).

I replicated that same thing with glued on minicel pads where knees/legs touch the Tacoma door and console.

https://www.canoetripping.net/forums/fo ... ee-bumpers

It’s a little touch, but so much more comfortable on long drives, especially feet-off, splayed leg cruise control travels.

On long night stretches of straight deserted road, when my companions were both asleep in the back of the bus, I would occasionally shift over into the front passenger seat, with my left foot on the accelerator and left hand on the steering wheel, for a refreshing change of perspective. Felt weird at first, but I quickly got used to it, and was ready to drive in England, Ireland, India, or the colonies

I learned how to drive gently, don’t-want-to-wake-up the next shift driver with bus, driving as near an empty gas tank as possible before stopping to fill up.

Towards that non-stop end – and getting a little specific weird here - the plastic jug hospital urinals are the best thing ever, at least for a long-shift male driver. The angled throat and handle are seated driver-perfect, and the snap-on cap handy when there’s someone catching up from behind and it’s not time to slow down to 30mph and no splash/spray pour the contents out the window held arms length low

https://www.vitalitymedical.com/mckesso ... kEEALw_wcB

Clean urinal jugs are also fantastic for decanting keg tapped beer; with the first few taps, when it comes out 50% foam, the angled throat pours only liquid, no foam.

Or, you know, so I’ve been told. I haven’t been to a keg party in years, but still keep one in the tripping truck.

“Refreshing” is important on long night shift drives. I learned how to do pre-dawn ablutions while driving the bus. First, lay out everything from the toiletry kit on the dash. Next, wait for some straight, empty stretch of roadway, stick your head out the window and douse your head with some splashed canteen water. Back inside, Bronner’s lather up, back out the window for a 60 mph canteen splash rinse.

Hey look, there’s my toothbrush and tooth paste on the dash; that one is out the window patooie easier. A drop of Visine in each eye was only a little trickier. Comb my freshly washed hair and beard, maybe some Chapstick in the dry desert air and I was a new man, good for a few more hours.

I still do some of that out the window ablution on long-drive solo trips, and it is still awakening refreshing as hell.

That bus may have been a crude pile of tin that perched the driver like an Aztec sacrifice, with no collision protection, knees inches from the sheet metal hood. But it never once broke down.

A few memories. The bus had a working gas gauge. “Working” in that the needle moved, but so did the little dial behind it; the dial would jiggle between a quarter tank+ and under empty. I always drove the night shift, and ran out of gas so many times I made a sign reading “OUT OF GAS” for when I hopped out and started thumbing towards the nearest town.

I don’t remember ever walking more than a mile before someone stopped, and half of them were rancher/farmer pickup drivers with gas cans in the bed. It may have helped that even then I wore overalls, and so looked rural representable, and less hippie reprehensible.

We had planned a stop at Devils Tower on one trip, and dark of night drove around lost on Wyoming back roads without finding it, finally giving up and pulling into a parking lot to sleep ‘til dawn and try again in daylight. Dawn came, but much of the sky was obscured by a massive stone butte. We were parked a hundred yards away in the Devils Tower visitor lot.

Picked up a lot of hitchhikers; thumb out in the ‘70’s hitchhikers KNEW the bus was stopping, and we couldn’t bear to let them down.

Guy hitchhiking in Kansas; picked him up again the next day on a different road in Colorado. Picked up another guy in Kansas, this time when we were eastbound for home in Baltimore. He was holding a sign that read “Washington DC” and was delighted that we drove straight through. Picked up two lovely young ladies in Arizona holding a sign that read “Zion”. Being gallant gentlemen we drove to Zion. They were, uh, appreciative.

Hitchhikers everywhere; those were different times.

So many weird and oddball occurrences on those bus trips. A nicely (freshly) paved stretch of mountain road that just. . . .ended. No “ROAD ENDS” or “CONSTRUCTION AHEAD” signs, no barrier at the end, just no more freaking road. The brakes in the bus worked OK, especially once we ran off into the meadow.

There was one episode that the laws of physics do not seem to allow. We were driving a long, straight, level stretch along an empty desert road one night and came upon an accident, a car flipped on its roof. A single car accident, sitting perfectly in the travel lane.

There were long, locked-up-the-brakes skid marks on the asphalt. Which ended DIRECTLY below the car’s tires. Other than resting gently on its roof above the skid marks the car was completely undamaged, no dents, no busted side mirrors or broken windows. Completely intact, just upside down. And empty, with no one around.

It was a wee bit spooky, and still defies explanation. That flipped car encounter took place a few hours after we saw (what I insist) was a rocket launch; a fast rising trail of flame leaping into the night sky. One of my companions that trip still insists both things were alien related, but the only probing I remember was in Zion.

RHaslam wrote:
I'm gonna run the Electric Kool-aid acid test on Marshall lake, no school bus, but a big freighter canoe, and you're either on the canoe or off the canoe.


Rob, don’t forget to feed the hungry bee.


Top
 Profile  
 
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 11 posts ] 

All times are UTC - 5 hours


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 3 guests


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Search for:
Jump to:  
Powered by phpBB® Forum Software © phpBB Group