Return to Index
Click on thumbnail to enlarge photo
Back in the days of runic glyphs, icefields and primal instincts, (late December, 1972), a pair of "damn the torpedoes" undergraduate students from the UVODC thought it would be a good idea to purchase a geriatric 1954 Canada Brill Car bus and camperize it. They created an organism called “The Bus Club”, really just a subset or faction of the Outdoors Club, and filled it with thirty four festive-minded fellow alumni, many from the UVODC. They planned to roll the entire moveable feast to the Yucatan Peninsula, where they hoped to leave Canadian footprints at the base of a Mayan pyramid in Chichen Itza. At least that was the advertised goal. The real reason these two nineteen- year-olds (lets call them Bob and Ted) organized the trip? They thought it would be a great way to meet girls.
As it turned out, the odyssey wasn't the endless party Bob and Ted had envisioned. In fact, the entire life-cycle of the adventure was barely 1/15th of an odyssey, according to the Table of Government Weights and Measures. A fifteenth of the way into its pilgrimage, the bus developed a bad case of castanets under the engine hatch and rolled to a stop on the shoulder of Interstate 5, where it settled into a gentle state of autism until the world's largest tow vehicle used a fireman’s hold on the front axle and hauled it sixty miles north to Eugene, Oregon.
Recently a cache of Mortifee Munshaw Kodachrome slides were discovered, each in a dismally ruinous condition. Almost all of them suffered from Picasso-like discolorations, epic under and over exposure, light bleeding, and more scratches than a poison oak fan club. But skillful triage and a primal endurance session with Photoshop resulted in several of them being resuscitated. Images from the ill-fated Bus Trip include an interior of the bus during a rare interlude of relaxation, the unburdening of the bus after the breakdown on I5, a resolute keep-on-truckin’ pose offered by the more good-natured members of the club, the conscription of plastic trash bags as impromptu rainwear, Jeannie Stoner and Laura Hargrave unfurling their thumbs in Flagstaff, AZ, Jeannie Stoner and Bob (or Ted) atop a lomita in Puerto Penasco, Sonora, Mexico, and Laura Hargrave decamping a scrum of seagulls. A handful of other slides were rescued, some from a vaguely recollected Halloween Party at Moose Lodge, others from a UVODC trip to Strathcona Park.
