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no one said it would be easy

time, I think it was doubted because of the lack of evidence. Roly’s sea-sick period morphed into tonsillitis and we really were on the homeward straight before he was sighted.

My six-week voyage from NZ to the UK five years earlier had been a young person’s delight, tropical skies, duty-free beers and non-stop partying. This voyage was the polar opposite and polar is quite apt because soon we were into such cold weather (-10C) that the ship’s rails and guy ropes were swollen with ice making them a full hand-span thick. The removal of this ice was a full-time job for the crew. Once Roly was on deck (not really on deck as that was way too cold) we filled in the hours with endless games of Battleships and quite a few games of table tennis, which wasn’t fully fair as I had been a regional representative player through the age-group years and up to A Reserve … when I retired and went to the UK. The other passengers were a much older lot but friendly enough. My recent research showed that Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy’s assassin, had travelled with his family from the USSR to the USA on an earlier branding of the Stefan Batory. Maybe we stayed in the same cabin.

After ten days or so, we sailed into the calm of the St Lawrence Seaway and for the first time, we observed Canadian life, even if distantly. We could see the distinctive orange school buses collecting kids, fully swaddled against the cold. Initially, these were almost lilliputian in scale, as the entry gulf is so wide but once into the 400-mile channel itself, the seaway narrowed somewhat and our views became more magnified. The snow-covered landscape captivated us but the cold would invariably send us back indoors pretty quickly. Montreal in early December was very cold and notable for the dented and derelict state of the taxi fleet. The roads were filled with brown-coloured, icy slush and driving a cab was probably like a spell on fairground dodgems. Maybe they repaired them every Spring.

As quickly as we could manage, the Greyhound Bus Station was located, and a bus to Terre Haute found and boarded. The distance between the two cities is about 1,000 miles or so, but we have no clear recollection of the exact route or how long it took … it seemed like a lifetime. Two options are listed currently, one taking 28 hours and the other 40 hours. Certainly, we rode through the day across endless prairies and through more than one night. By 1976 the Greyhound Bus service had lost its romance and attraction. The 99 days for $99 (1972) was no longer bringing in tourists and international travellers wanting to see the US from the ground. It