3 days away...

In a few days I will be on the road again. I came relatively late to adventure travelling and backpacking. I think I was 30 when my late cousin, Leslie, and I started planning our western Europe three-month backpacking trip. I had just wound up a tumultuous 3 or 4 year gig at HMV, which was at the time, arguably the biggest and best record and CD chain in Canada. I was attending Concordia University as a mature student. I used to sing and was taking singing lessons with a wonderful man named Barry Thompson and things started getting a little more serious. I was a tenor and I remember Barry telling me at some point that while not in the league of a lead tenor, e.g. Pavarotti, I could, if I choose to, have a solid career singing opera. Our lessons were based on opera even though my love was rock and blues. I grew up hearing lots of jazz, classical and opera at home, some of my mom's favourites. I got my love of rock and blues I guess more from my dad, my sister and then of course, my circle of friends. But I knew that the best singers, technically-wise anyway, were opera singers. But eventually I told Barry that I just didn't feel opera the way I felt rock and blues and I ended up not going in the direction of opera. I have sometimes wondered though what my life would have been like had I gone down that path. As an aside, Barry was married to one of the finest Canadian opera singers, Huguette Tourangeau - https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/artic… who also taught singing.

Anyway, I decided that in addition to learning the techniques of the greats, I should learn music theory, so decided to go back to school. I had barely finished high school around a decade earlier. At first I didn't and got kicked out sometime during Secondary 5, the last year of high school in Quebec, for missing too many classes. I managed to get my high school diploma the next summer at the insistence of my parents. So armed with the most basic of scholastic accomplishments, none in the field of music, I auditioned for the music program. It was a long shot but I did have a pretty decent voice and apparently, Sheri (I can't remember her last name) thought I had enough vocal talent and I was accepted into the Concordia music program.

It was there that I heard about HMV as many of the students in the music program had taken part time jobs at the new, hot upstart. I applied and got a part time position working in the cassette department. My life took many twists and turns over the next few years including starting a serious relationship, a heavy rock band that was the toast of the town for a year or so, many promotions at HMV that finally necessitated me quitting university, and Shanghai Daze becoming the top heavy rock band in Montreal for a while. My personal life was a bit of a wreck as I couldn't stay away from the Bolivian marching powder and my girlfriend ended up finally ditching me, tired of my weekend disappearing acts. That was tough but tougher was that she had secretly started dating my boss at HMV. Fuck! OK, time to leave the city I grew up in and head west down the 401 to Toronto to join my siblings and father who had all, one by one, moved there over the last decade or so.

HMW was still growing so I was able to get an assistant manager position at the Yorkdale Mall HMV. I worked in a few more stores as assistant manager and eventually ended up managing my own HMV store in Kitchener-Waterloo. I was doing well but kept getting into disagreements with upper management at head office which eventually came to a head and I quit. It was then that Leslie and I decided to go Europe and have some fun for a few months. I remember so well, gathering travel brochures from a bunch of countries and having them all open and spread out on the floor of my apartment in Kitchener, and Leslie and I planning and plotting our big adventure (remember, this is pre-internet days!). Unfortunately, Leslie changed her mind and that was when I learned my first lesson of travelling, be prepared to go at it alone. I decided to go anyway and after travelling a bit in England with a friend of my sister's who was going to the UK to meet up with her boyfriend, I was now travelling alone in Scotland, and then on to many other countries in western Europe. Of course I loved it, and that, dear friends, at the ripe old backpacking age of 30, was the beginning of my adventure and backpacking travel days.Read more