Glebe Collegiate Institute - Lux Glebana Yearbook (Ottawa, Ontario Canada)

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-1.--.--+Travelogues Edited by F. PARKER EUl'0p26l1 SUITIITICI' by Francis J. MacNamara T ALL started in Room 213. Wily old Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Richard Halliburton, and a host of other shadowy figures in literature and history were the instigators. Early spring was quickening the blood. Form IVG were hearing of the restlessness of Penelope's aged but vigorous spouse on Ithaca. A student came in to report on his reading of Halliburton's The Glorious Adventure . Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrowsg Those lines had sent Halliburton winging away, said the reporting Third Former. Push off-- I leaned out the window, sniffed the spring air and took a deep resolve. June 24 saw me on the deck of a cattle- boat in Montreal harbour. I have not seen Montreal since. For nine days I was a sea cowboy. Our gang of twenty included such diverse elements as a Harvard senior and a Hamilton steel puddler, a sick Maltese sailor and an Ottawa school teacher. We slept in springless bunks, ate coarse food and fed and watered eight hundred cattle. Some of us were very sick and when the sun came out and the magic hills of Donegal gleamed on the starboard bow, a cheer went up. . In the short scope of this article one can- not begin to compress events which would require a volume if they were treated ade- quately. A glance at the accompanying sketch map will illustrate the wide range of the summer's wanderings. Only some high- lights can be mentioned. England we toured on the excellent English bicycles. We saw the misty hills of the Lake Country and the sad slag-heaps of South Wales. We ate the best food of the summer in Scotland and loitered in Dum- LUX GLEBANA fries, flagrant with the memories of Robert Burns. In London my experiences varied from the dives of Limehouse and White- chapel to a sight of the King and Queen waving from the balcony of Buckingham Palace. In Ireland we witnessed the Orange cele- bration in Belfast on July 12, stood and mused on the silent battlefield of the Boyne, lingered in Drogheda, mindful of Cromwell's massacre, were hard put to escape from friendly, leisurely, eighteenth century Dublin and assisted at the unveiling of a tablet on the house where John McCormick was born in Athlone. I loitered too long in Ireland visiting Kilkee, the village on the wild west coast where my grandparents were born, and as a consequence had to cycle 112 miles in one day to catch the boat at Ross- lare. Living in the British Isles cost us little. We slept in the Youth Hostels for a shilling a night, and picnicked by the roadsidewhen weather permitted. All told, we ate, slept and travelled for less than a dollar a day. Youth Hostel accommodation ranged in grandeur from Hoddom Castle in Scotland, to a three-room, thatched cottage in Raholp, a hamlet in County Down. Leaving our faithful bikes behind, veterans of a thousand miles of cycling, we crossed the Channel and first trod the historic soil of France at Dieppe. Continental travel is dirt cheap and convenient and as the sands of our summer were running out, a faster than cycling pace was necessary. A fast French auto-rail rushed us to Paris at one hundred and thirty-two kilometres an hour, after we had sat in Rouen's ancient market place to reconstruct the martyrdom of St. Joan of Arc. Henry James said All good Americans go to Paris when they die . I am glad we did not have to wait that long. Seeing the dawn come up behind the flying buttresses of Notre Dame is an unforget- table sight. We paused at Clermont among the Puys of - Auvergne where the First Crusade was launched, and spent some in- credibly sunny days at Avignon where we danced sur la. pant , and at the old Roman towns of Arles and Nimes. Since the ' Page 39

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1. THE WALLS OF ROME. 4. SEA COWBOY CHILDRENS DAY, Bois DE BOULOGNE. 5. H BLACKROCK CASTLE, CORK. 3. MARKET DAY, GLENGARIFF, EIRE. 6. ATHENIAN TRANSPORT. 7. UNLOADING HAY AT BIRKENHEAD

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harbour and hills of 2,700 years old Marseilles claimed our attention more than Monte Carlo, Nice and Cannes, we sped through the Riveira by night. We emerged into daylight at Genoa, birthplace of Columbus, and revelled in a Mediterranean swim at 7.30 a.m. Finding the Week-end hot in Milan, we spent it in the Italian Alps and came down from our mountain retreat on Monday to loiter around Venice, Uthroned on her hundred isles . We literally Went under the Ap- penines to Florence, home of the Renaissance, and came at last to Eternal Rome. Here the new and vigorous rubs shoulders with the old and timeworn. Pompeii brought the ancient world closer to me than any text book had ever done, and to stand in Brindisi where Vergil died brought the Aeneid to vivid life. A comfortable little Greek steamer bore us across a placid Ionian Sea to Greece, touching at Corcyra where the Pelopon- nesian War began and passing within a stone's throw of Ithaca, the little rocky kingdom of Ulysses. Threading the great sword-cut of the Corinth Canal We dropped anchor in the Piraeus, the harbour of Them- istocles. With a quickening of the heart we saw it at last-the Parthenon on the Acropolis, against a clear blue sky, and we knew we were in Athens, the violet-crowned. A bumpy, hair-breadth bus-ride took us to Delphi on the slope of Mt. Parnassus and a five mile-an-hour train carried us to Nauplia from where we explored prehistoric Tiryns and Homeric Mycenae. We took our last look at Ancient Greece at Olympia and our last look at modern Greece at Patras at which latter point we boarded the Italian Liner, Vulcania. Aboard her we met some charming people and with them explored Palermo and Mon- reale in Sicily, the Arab quarter of Algiers half-English, half-Levantine Gibraltar, where we saw a sinking Spanish Republican cruiser, Lisbon stirring to new life under the enlightened Salazar, and the Azores, the Happy Isles of the ancients. . p 1 fqcvrnavmfa - -0----r----v---V-,.. . XX 'LCJMII R . AX X V lf A Mzf Jag. Aff, J 4' . ' -.- . N.-. ' ' ' I QQ I 4? I f Z4f7'UC l 065417 gang? 0. me Q I 'f . I-'YL x x :dia I K ' .Y f.. by ,. rw mfaf, I Wffmpmm l. s T0 ' KJW .- Il f 'I 'im 'VZ K Ml 4- 4 ---MN SEA ' S'-' ,,. ,, ,, 1' T kg, NN-fhsxs ,r,,.- 4---MMX Ill 1 I S 1- 1 ,H WMI 65105 I 55 f ! x mp ay- nzfwmwzo 'R- ' Page 1,0 GLUX GLEBANA