Gary Bond:
CLASS OF 1977
Frank Hurt Secondary SchoolClass of 1977
Surrey, BC
Gary's Story
Well in the thirty years that have passed since high school I have:
In 1980 Lyle Bolton and I went to Europe on open ended tickets. One of the high lites of my trip was the time when Lyle and I split up in England and we were to meet 3 weeks later in Greece where it was warm and and the living was easy. The day I left England and went to France was a day of dying. I caught a bus from Coventry very very early in the morning and my idea was to meet up with some fellow travelers and head over to France. Well I didn't meet anybody on the bus. When I got to London I had to wait around for the banks to open (this was long before ATM's) still no fellow travelers to meet up with. I'm now on the train to Dover and I'm starting to get scared, I don't like traveling by myself so now I'm pressing to find a travel mate, still no one. Well now I'm on the ferry going across the English channel and this thing is the size of one of our big Tswassen to Nanaimo ferry's but it's going up and down like a cork in a bathtub the English channel can be downright nasty sailing, still no one to travel with ( the floors were covered in vomit from all the sick people that day). Now I'm in Calais France it's late afternoon by now and the weather is cloudy and Grey. So here I am in France and it suddenly occurs to me that my one and only jacket has a Canadian flag on it and I don't know how to speak French, I don't think the French like that. Now I'm starting to cra...Expand for more
ck under the fear. I quickly get my Eur rail ticket validated and catch a train going to anywhere but France. Well this train is practically deserted so I had a compartment all to myself. Well the strain is too much and by myself in a compartment on a train to who knows where I finally break. I hang my head down and this 22 year old cries "Mommy" I literally called for my Mom I was sooo scared. After a few minutes of balling my eyes out a woman comes to my compartment and asks me if they have a food car on the train and I tell her as it is late in the afternoon that all the food cars are removed and are being cleaned and restocked for the next morning. It was such a relief to have even this little bit of companionship and sharing that it brought me out of my stupor. That night I ended up getting a few hours of sleep on a bench in the Basel Switzerland train station. I wake up in the surrounded by all these stiff Swiss doing the morning rush hour they are kinda looking at me like a bum or a homeless person. I was a changed man after that day and I was never afraid to travel alone or worry about where I would end up or where I would sleep, and there were time when I slept outside in the fields under a tree. Even when I came back to Canada seven months later there was still this part of me that had become a nomad just passing through this world. It was hard for me to settle down and do the normal thing of getting married and raising a family.
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