Granite Youth World Tour 1979 (Part 7 of 12)

We all had developed nicknames. I was “Bill Bass.” Another bass player was named Robert. He became “Bob Bass.” On what was a particularly long day of traveling, Robert was playing around with someone else’s guitar. He ended up playing the string bass part of the Brandenburg Concerto.
The next night we performed at the auditorium of a small community college. As our host family was taking Gil and I to the concert, we drove past an empty field. The man said, “You probably won’t believe this, and I think it’s top secret anyway, but in this empty field is an underground building that goes down fifteen stories. It houses all the communications for the Canadian Military.” Since we had entered Canada we included in our program, the song, O Canada! Of course my Grandmother was Canadian and she loved to hear that song when ever it was played. She must have passed her genes for liking “O Canada!” on to me because I loved it. Once I was in a downtown area of a Canadian city and I heard O Canada! Played on a bell-tower carillon. I could have cried, it was so beautiful.
We made our way to a town called Kamloops. It was a city very high up into Canada and the farthest north we would go. We stopped at an elementary school where we would have the concert later that night. Four of us got into the car of the family that would host us. In addition to Gil and I, there was Jeff Archuletta and Evan Bateman. It was a hot June, Friday afternoon. Sweat was dripping from our foreheads. The man said to us in a deadpan voice, “So, how do you like the frozen north land?” The next day we traveled through Banff National Park and the turquoise lakes with glacial silt were breathtaking. That night we stayed in some cabins at a youth camp. We had the opportunity to swim in the lake, but only one or two people actually did it because the water was cold. We ate dinner at the lodge and then returned to the cabins to change for the concert. The area was heavily forested and when Mr. Chatelin got up to lead the music, he found not his baton waiting on the music stand, but a small branch of a tree. He lead the first song with that branch just to show what a good sport he was.