ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER PLACE

OK, so if have a Time Machine. No, not a Victorian Rod Taylor "pick a year and pretend you're god" kind of device but a wayback machine. Usually this takes the form of my faulty memory. Or sometimes, it's just a video tape

This time, the tape in question is a VHS tape. Yes, Virginia, once upon a time there were these big bulky composite video tapes you put into a machine called a VCR and there were even cameras, basically the size of a Buick, that recorded on to these tapes. Of course, if you're too young to know what a VHS tape is, you'll have no clue who Virginia was either. Relax, it's not important, it's just the pre-MTV past, how significant could it be?

At any rate, I fished this particular tape out of obscurity or more correctly, out of the bottom of one the big Tupperware tubs where I store old tapes. Collette and I had been discussing the first trip we ever took together, to Quebec, back in 1992 and she was mentioning how she had lost all the photo's she took there. I did remember hauling my old Hitachi full sized VHS camcorder there, I knew I shot video, but I had never done anything with it ...

So I went all Charles Bronson in The Great Escape and started to dig. "All my life I have fear of small places, so I dig, Danny, I dig!" Charles Bronson found freedom from the Nazi's, I found a tape labelled Quebec, 1992. OK, well he's Charlie B, I'm just Vic, you have to put all victories in perspective.

So there it was in all its composite, fuzzy, desaturated glory, the video record of a trip that we still look upon with a lot of fondness. As I mentioned it was the first trip we took together and it was a total success. We did the whole thing by train, first to Quebec City, then to Montreal. Collette was already with the school board so of course we did the journey during her March Break. The day we left Toronto, the biggest blizzard of the season was rolling in. Her co-workers, who were all heading to Florida by car thought we were nuts. Well the storm wasn't big enough to stop the trains. The week we spent traipsing about Quebec, most of them spent stuck in hotels in Ohio, still trying to get south

The video I've cut isn't very long, I concentrated on a few high lights: The Old City in Quebec City, a trip to the fort there we found ourselves stranded on a mountain of snow and Collette displayed her northern girl ingenuity when dealing with an icy slope

The highlight of our trip to Montreal was a visit to the Biodome, an indoor zoo, divided into various climatic zones; rain forest, antarctic, Canada, etc. Not only does each zone feature the indigenous species, it also replicated the climate. Note the foggy lens in the shots of the rain forest.

We really loved Quebec City in particular. We both love to walk around and explore and its a place tailor made for that. And there's a restaurant every four feet and every deppaneur sells beer and wine .. gosh, why don't we live there?

So here's the video, finally edited after all this time .. see what happens when I don't have a deadline

Music is a song by Beau Dommage, one of my favorite bands from when I lived in Quebec.

Quebec City 1992 from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.