So as teenagers we became a little bit renegade. We got the family car. We were known in the county! So I got sent away to private school.

Private school was fun. I loved it. My sister was going away to university and the cousin that was her same age was going away to nursing school. So I and Beverly, my brother and my cousin were left at home. They thought it would be a good idea if we cut out and saw something new because we were from a very small place. It was time to go.

We went to a small city about two hours away called Saint Thomas. Of course we went to an all girls school. It was like a castle; it was a big old neat place. I had so much fun there. I learned so many ways to be bad there!

If my parents had only known what they were doing. I think that’s where I got my first taste of wanting to travel because I was going to school with girls from Bogotá, Colombia, a couple of girls from France, plus girls from cities like Ottawa and Toronto. So for my cousin and me it was a really new perspective.

My cousin and I attended the school for grades eleven and twelve. It was fun. I was in Latin class. I joined the drama club. In the private school we had our own worst that we had to look after. I would muck the stables, and we got riding lessons. A don’t think we ever played polo; we played field hockey and that was bad enough. Boy, is that a rough game!

I was sent to the school but I also wanted to go there. Like most other things with my life I didn’t have many rules here. I was never really told things to do. Beverly’s parents decided that she must go because she had a long-term serious boyfriend and her parents decided that she needed to get some perspective.

My parents must have gotten together with her parents and they said: “don’t leave tail home alone when all the other three girls are going.”

Tobacco farmers are pretty affluent. In those days they made a lot of money in the game of farming. My dad used to drive Cadillacs and Buicks and every two years he would be traded in for a new one. I was pretty lucky to be able to hang out in the cars with the big wings and tails. We were stylin’.

And, we lived near a beach town because we were so close to the lake. There were lots of cottages and lots of tourists there in the summer. We had lots of summer flings with American guys who came across the border with their families. It was very fun!

You don’t think of the beach town on Lake Erie but there it is. It’s a long peninsula, and if you look at the map it hangs down from the north and it hangs down right into the middle of Lake Erie, probably about 25 miles long. It was just like the little Venice beach, California, in the summer. This was in the late fifties and early sixties.

Then I went to nursing school. My mother had decided that I was going to be a nurse. All of my sisters and brothers and me are public servants, and she guided us in that direction. In my case she insisted that I be a nurse. That seemed fine to me.

When I got to private school I joined the journalist yearbook thing and I started writing. I really thought that after I graduated I would like to be a journalist. I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. Already travel was getting into the scene.

I applied to a number of universities without my mother knowing it. Ithaca, New York was one where I got accepted. So I had a struggle with my mother: go to nursing school or be a journalist?

I just gave in and went to nursing school. I enjoyed it but I really think I would have been a good foreign correspondent.

I applied to two nursing schools and my mother went with me for the interviews. After the interviews she said: “which one do you like?”

There was no discussion. They wouldn’t fund me if I chose anything else. So I went to a nursing school just north of Toronto called Kitchener Waterloo.

Kitchener Waterloo is in a really interesting area. It’s full of Germans and German descendants. In fact, it used to be called Berlin. There are lots of Mennonite communities around there; it was just an interesting place to go to school.

I love to nursing school. We had to live in residences. Each time I went along to these different places I formed a new group of friends that became really like an extended family. But nursing school was hard. Ask anyone. You faint, you throw up.

In those days it was a three-year course and in our third year if they used to use of us really as staff nurses. The called us nurse-interns, but we went to the wards just like all the other nurses. It was fun, it was good, it was real.

It was a nice enough town as well. It was an overwhelming like Toronto or other big cities. It was easy.
There were two universities in town and one of them was an engineering school, so there was a good social life there.

The year I graduated unfortunately, my mother passed away. I graduated in June and she passed away in September.

That was hard on me; I was only 21. I stayed in Kitchener to work but I only worked for six months. Then off I went to travel!

Actually I didn’t even wait six months. I save my money and my father had given me a nice Christmas present of, I think, $1,000.00.

Off I went to Europe. That’s it! That’s where it all began! I was gone almost a year, December through September of that year.

I just reveled with friends. We weren’t working but at one point we ran out of money and had two more off to London where I got a job at the London zoo.

Actually as a commonwealth citizen I could have gotten a job as a nurse but they didn’t pay very much. The wages were awful. I used to say to them: “how can you pay so little?”

Then in a pub I met someone who said: “oh, go to the London zoo. They pay more than nursing.”

So I went over to the zoo with my boyfriend. He had come over as well. We were living in our Volkswagen camper and they allowed us to live in the area Next to the bathrooms and dining areas. We got all our meals there and it paid perhaps 3 pounds a week more than they paid nurses. I worked there for six weeks; maybe two months.

I worked until the grand Prix because then we had to hurry down to Monte Carlo to see that. Sorry, gotta go.

We camped on the beach outside of Monte Carlo. On that trip we started in Lisbon, traveled up through Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland. I really liked Holland a lot; it’s a very interesting country. We went through France. And we made this circle a couple of times because Europe is so small. For example, we went from London to Monte Carlo in sixteen hours of nonstop driving.

I enjoyed Spain a lot. We used to go to those mountain towns and just camp by the Rivers. They were nice, stony Rivers, and we would walk into town with our empty jug. The wine cellar would just dip into the barrel and fill it up with vino rojo (red wine). We would get a piece of cheese Anda depot follows out of the barrel with a slice of fresh bread of the day and we lived on that for a long, long time.