{"id":637,"date":"2011-08-10T20:48:56","date_gmt":"2011-08-11T03:48:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdhive.org\/glob\/?p=637"},"modified":"2012-05-24T23:01:16","modified_gmt":"2012-05-25T06:01:16","slug":"backing-up-a-bit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/?p=637","title":{"rendered":"Backing up a bit"},"content":{"rendered":"

I actually started (and, in a sense, finished) this road trip back in June, when I took a short vacation at Long Beach.\u00a0 Living in Vancouver doesn’t put me on the west coast proper, so I thought it would be more correct to film my timelapse movie starting and ending at Tofino.\u00a0 It also served as a road test for my new timelapse recording technique.<\/p>\n

But more importantly, Long Beach is where I began.\u00a0 In 1971, my parents were living with a small group of hippies in Schooner Cove, which is just south of Tofino.\u00a0 My parents had built themselves a tree house out of driftwood, and that’s where I was conceived.\u00a0 I went back to try and find my spawn point.<\/p>\n

Schooner Cove is still somewhat isloated.\u00a0 There is no road and no established trail going there anymore; you have to walk on the beach, and high tide cuts off access so you have to be careful about timing.<\/p>\n

There is no sign of former habitation; the houses that were there were removed, and everything else is overgrown.\u00a0 I believe I did locate the old trail head that led to my parents’ treehouse though – the house would have been a short walk in here, just to the left of the stream:<\/p>\n

\"d20110625_0162\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And here is the view of Schooner Cove looking south from this point:<\/p>\n

\"d20110625_0178-0179_pano_50pct\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Beautiful. \u00a0No sign of life. \u00a0Just the sound of the wind and the waves. \u00a0I could totally see camping out here.<\/p>\n

See that rock just left of center?\u00a0 My father crashed his Morris Minor there.\u00a0 He was driving home across the beach when a wave swamped the car, and he wasn’t able to extricate it.\u00a0 He had to abandon it, and the waves tore it apart.\u00a0 When I was young (12, I think) my mother brought me back here and there was still a lump of rust there that would have been the engine block.\u00a0 No sign of it this visit though – if anything remains, it was under five feet of sand.<\/p>\n

I love Long Beach, but my memories of it are recent – a few from that visit when I was 12, and most from visits in the last few years.\u00a0 My parents left the area before I was born – living on a boat north of Sechelt for a while, then around the time of my birth living in Vancouver. \u00a0I was born at St. Paul’s hospital downtown Vancouver, where by a sad coincidence my friend Erik Torstensson was treated just before he passed away a couple of years ago.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Coming back toward Vancouver, I passed through Coombs, home of the unjustifiably world-famous “place with the goats on the roof”.\u00a0 It’s just a tourist gift shop with that one gimmick, but I lived there for a while.\u00a0 I think it was related to the Long Beach visit when I was 12.\u00a0 A friend of the family had offered my mother a job staffing a booth at the tourist mall going up next to the goat place.\u00a0 Here’s what it looks like now:<\/p>\n

\"d20110626_0075-0079\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It wasn’t as well developed back then though – still early days, with just wood boardwalks on mud.\u00a0 Anyway, we lived in a camping trailer next to the goat place while this business tried to take flight, and I was bored out of my mind.\u00a0 Thankfully there was an arcade here at the time, and I spent much time playing Trojan<\/a> (still have the first-level music memorized), but money was extremely tight and I really had to beg for that occasional quarter.\u00a0 I was really glad I had brought a few of my favorite comics with me.<\/p>\n

After a month, things didn’t seem to be picking up and no money was coming in, so we bailed out.\u00a0 It kind of soured our relationship with that family for a while, but before we left we stayed with them for a a few days and I got to play with their Coleco Adam<\/a> (only time I ever got my paws on one) and that was also the first time I got to play the excellent Pitfall II<\/a> on the Atari VCS – spent many hours on that game.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And here’s the result of a little program I cooked up to correlate my GPS track with my iTunes recently played list, and mark up my travel maps with the music I was listening to at the time:<\/p>\n

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I actually started (and, in a sense, finished) this road trip back in June, when I took a short vacation at Long Beach.\u00a0 Living in Vancouver doesn’t put me on the west coast proper, so I thought it would be more correct to film my timelapse movie starting and ending at Tofino.\u00a0 It also served […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,20,7,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventure","category-history","category-photography","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=637"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2211,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions\/2211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}