Memories.

I was Google-Earthing the other day and ended up being linked to this picture, which is the small airforce base of Moisie, in Quebec. It's where I grew up, and I was so surprised to see how small the base is. I remember it being rather large, large enough that I was lost more than once.

See the long long buildings at either end of a field? (you can see a square, which is actually the skating rink, to the right of the building in the bottom picture.) Those were the 2 schools, one was for Protestants and the other for Catholics...I kid you not. This was in about 1964.

When we first moved there, there were no PMQ's available so we had to live in the TQ (teachers quarters) in the Catholic school. You can see the tiny attatchment in the middle of the building, it was the sweetest little house, and one door opened right into the hallway of the school. My mom used to let me play in the hallways of the school, and I'd go into the classrooms and pretend I was a teacher. However, I was Protestant, so every morning I had to leave our home and walk through a crowd of Catholics and run across the field to the safety of the Protestant school, thinking as I ran, that I had played in "their" classrooms and "they" had to work there.

Eventually we got a PMQ that was right across the street from the Protestant school and I always felt a little sad that my time of actually living in an elementary school was over.

It was an adventure living there, you can see in the top picture that we were indeed at "the end of the road", it went no further. We were allowed to bring our clothes and I think a box each of personal effects, a few toys, books etc and that was it. My mom and I flew to Montreal and my Dad drove there (From Vancouver Island) so that we could at least bring a few more items that he packed in the car, although it was a Volkswagon so not a lot fit in it! He picked us up in Montreal and off we went, to this tiny little village in the middle of nowhere.

Everything else went into storage for 3 years and we lived on what we could buy at the Canex. There was no TV and all the radio was French and there was certainly no computers, DVD's, cell phones and that sort of thing. I think that's where I really developed my love of reading since there was nothing much else to do, especially in the winter, which lasted until June.

My dad was manning the DEW Line, the Distant Early Warning Line, that would let us know if the Russians were sending missiles and/or troops over. You can just make out the 2 radar domes in the top picture, on the upper left. We used to get to tour them once in awhile, or maybe my Dad just used to bring me there to let me see what was going on because I don't recall ever seeing anyone else in there.