Summer of my youth Part 3

I don't have any pictures handy of the things I'm posting about, so you will have to deal with my crudely drawn sketches as the visual for my posts. Part 3 is going to tell of the annual Cadieux summer vacation, and almost every year we went in the 69' Dodge Fargo van(pictured above). This is the mother of all vans and was atleast 30 feet long.... in my memory(it was so long that it had a roof vent at the back like a camper....No joke), and had more windows than our house, which is why we affectionately called it "The greenhouse on wheels".

It had 3 rows of bench seats in the back which was more than enough to seat us all; so dad one night before we left to Ontario decided to build a bed in the back the night before we left.....With only one problem, he lent out his table saw and had nothing to cut the wood to make the bed with, so he did what will surely go down in Big E folklore......He built it with a chain saw(I shat you not). All we saw and heard was sawdust, the roar of a chain saw, and a few "dirty cottonpickn' gonches" but there she was; a perfect bed for the back of the van.....That's a real man!

Then there was the heat. We named it "The green house on wheels" for a reason, the only windows that opened were the two front ones. That was irony if there ever was, 42 windows and only 2 open. This created the green house effect, so if the temperature was +32 outside she was+48 in the greenhouse. I distinctively remember farting on the first day of the road trip and 4 days later having that same fart come out of nowhere to haunt the family, there was just no escape from the TGOW. The thing was so long we lost my brother Tim for 2 days in the thing......o.k now I'm extreme talking but you get the point.

Summer of my youth Part 2

As I have been reflecting on my "summers of my youth" I couldn't help but remember the good ole "Love shack". The love shack was a old oilfield office Dad had brought home one summer with thoughts of making it a storage shed.......we had other plans. The picture above is a floor plan of the shack cira. 1991 or so (sorry for the floor plan, but I deal with blue prints everyday and its all I know) It was pretty simple, but really; we had simple needs. The walls pasted with Allisa Millano and Debbi Gibson Bop pin ups on the wall and a couple of beds and it was ready to go. It was about 50 feet from the house, so we ran a extension cord from the house that provided all the power we would need for 1. A light 2. The T.V 3. The Nintendo/Atari. Many hours we spent trying to conquer the likes of Pitfall and Space Invaders till Lloyd "Super Squirt" Helmky would come over with his coveted Nintendo. The only games I remember playing a lot were California Games and Double Dragon, and man did we play them a lot. Mom and Dad refused to let us call it the "love shack'', so in their presence we had alternate names but when it was just us it was always the love shack, baby. Come to think of it I can see why our folks didn't want us calling it the love shack seeing as it was only us guys ever in the thing, but none the less it will always be the "love shack". Even as I go home and see the old thing filled with all of Dads junk being used for the purpose it was brought home to be, I still remember late nights playing Nintendo, smoking cigarettes and having a good old time spending those summer nights in the "love shack''.