Ever wonder what happens to really old VOC people? Well, once a year we tend to get together, on Remembrance Day weekend, and talk about what we have been doing for the past year or two, and how many kids and grand-kids we have, and, unfortunately, who’s dying at the moment. St Helen’s Church Annex gets rented for the occasion; they have dishes, cutlery, and food preparation facilities. We had about 40 participants, mostly former VOC members, with a small scattering of ACC. The personnel this year included at least two former VOC Presidents, three people from our Everest North Peak expedition, and a former Vancouver Chair of the ACC. The format goes like this: first an hour of meeting people who we haven’t seen, maybe for years, discussing how retirement is going, and plans for the coming year. Then an hour of excellent potluck dinner, an hour of highly compressed slide shows, an hour of dessert, and then more slide shows. We were entertained with the following fast slide shows:
– A climb of our very own Mt Alpha. (Jay)
– an 8-day trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway. (Ross and Trish)
– canoeing the Nahanni River. (Ross and Trish)
– an 8-day trip to the Gama valley, one of the new national parks in Tibet. (Ross and Trish)
– a trip to Madigascar, in search of, lemurs and other exotic biodiversity. (Ross and Trish)
– ski touring in Norway (Ross and Trish)
– Chilko Lake by canoe, with lots of grizzly bears. (Alice and Fred)
– trip to Japan to visit temples and the fish market. (Walter and Terry)
– A week in Venice, by kayak (Barry and Ursula).
– Climbing Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Americas. (Rob)
– Travels in Armenia and Georgia (Gillian)
It was great to see all these people from a bygone era, and to see that they were still active, doing things, having fun.
Would be great and really inspiring to be able to attend these slideshows, Roland! Maybe the VOC can be convinced to host a few of these in the bi-weekly slideshow?