January travels
Sketches and photos from a long-ago trip.
Welcome to The Drawing Book in 2025! For new readers, this is where I post pages from my old comics sketchbook series. I’ve been trying to do this kind of chronologically, and right now we just happen to have reached January 2000, when I made a few sketches about a trip I took with a friend of mine.
Back then, I was a flight attendant with Air Canada, and employees had the opportunity to take low-cost trips with travel companions. It was all on standby, so you had to be pretty flexible. In order to get a better chance of getting a seat, it was a good idea to pick a destination that wasn’t likely to be too popular. Like Newfoundland in January, for example!
Here’s my friend having breakfast in bed at our B & B.
I took a look online to see if Waterford Manor was still around. There’s a web page about it, but it looks like it was demolished in 2018. Too bad - it was so lovely!
Photo from “Heritage Newfoundland & Labrador” site.
On the next page of the drawing book, a poem about my bed (I guess I was tired, after all the travels just getting to Newfoundland!)…
I feel like I have to explain that last part. Well, on an earlier trip to St. John’s (recorded here in the drawing book), a friend and I took a taxi from the airport, and soon befriended the taxi driver, a Russian immigrant called Robert. On this January trip, I thought it would be fun to see Robert again, but we didn’t know how to find him (no cell phones!). We asked another taxi driver if Robert was around, and that gentleman replied, “Oh yes, Robert the Russian Rocket!” (That’s what I tried to write in an attempt at a Cyrillic alphabet, above.)
We found Robert, and went with him to a blues bar called the Fat Cat - which might still be around… it seems to have a Facebook page. Oh, and those three songs listed above are Bob Dylan songs, of course!
But then, it was on to Halifax and the Lord Nelson Hotel. I knew about the Lord Nelson because it was the crew hotel where I stayed when I had layovers in Halifax. What a cool building (here’s a photo from the hotel’s website).
I think I found a picture online, of that same view of the hotel bar (although the name seems to have changed):
In Halifax, my friend and I read our Tarot cards, to see what the year 2000 held in store for us. Her reading ended up in the drawing book (with card interpretations written in Tolkien’s Elvish script just to keep things secret. But if you can actually read it, that’s ok - there are no secrets, it just says a bit about what each card is supposed to mean.)
If I remember right, the next part of our trip took us to Toronto, and that’s where we split up. My friend planned to make a few more stops on her way back westward to her home in BC, but I headed home to Calgary because I had to get on another airplane, and go to work!
It feels like our travel conditions were quite luxurious! But it was January 2000, when there were still two major airlines in Canada: Air Canada and Canadian Airlines. On many routes, there was more supply than demand, which made for lots of empty seats! This changed a lot when the two airlines merged, later that same year.
Even though my friend and I spent a few days seeing the sights on this trip, I didn’t do much drawing. Sorry this newsletter was a little short on comics. But, I did find some photographs I took in and around St. John’s. I think these are actually from different trip, but I think I’ll put them in here anyway. What a beautiful place!
Happy travels, wherever you’re going! And stay warm. It’s January!