Memories (Cartoon Craziness)

This is Cartoon Craziness Week 6! Again, thanks to the hosts for coming up with such a fun challenge! 🙂 The theme this week is memories of a childhood vacation.

My family took vacations in three places while I was growing up. Grandma’s in Florida, The Farmhouse near Quebec City and Balsam Lake in Ontario. I have great memories from all three places, so it was really hard to decide which was my favourite, but I think it was Balsam. I had fun with this one, so I’m blabbering on a bit. Just scroll down to see my cartoons if you’re not in the mood for my nostalgia 🙂

Every July for two weeks, my family would stay at a resort on Balsam Lake. Since we went around the same time every year, like a lot of other families at the resort, we made some good friends. There were four families, you can see the whole gang in the first cartoon.

Geoff Summers – self-proclaimed stud who freaked every time a fish swam by him.
Kat White – the oldest, a popular tomboy.
Me
Ty Summers – the sensitive, extremely goofy one.
Roxy Summers – the loveable ditz
My sister
Krissy Cassidy – the boy-crazy stalker girl. She was always getting into trouble.
Spencer Cassidy and Jay Summers – the little guys. They were so much younger, I just remember them crying and collecting bugs.

The years are all blended together in my memory now, so I can’t really remember when what happened, but there are a few memories that stand out.

The Fish Hall of Fame. The owner kept a bulletin board in his office full of pictures of people from the resort holding the huge fish they caught. You had to get a pretty big fish to get on the wall. Being kids at the time, all we ever caught was a sunfish or a net full of minnows. So we got some bristol board and the whole gang went to it with markers, scissors and glue and we created the biggest fish the resort had ever seen. The owner had a good laugh, took our picture and put it on his famous wall. The photo was there for many summers. I imagine he has taken it down to make room for new photos, but at least we can say we were on the hall of fame! This is the cartoon replica of the photo.

The Food. The corner store run by Mr. Pye sold 5 cent candies and made the best broccoli pizza. There was no tomato sauce on the pizza,  just cheese broccoli and some sort of sauce…I think garlic and olive oil were involved. It was excellent! Then there was the rainbow sherbert in town. It’s the only time I got two scoops of ice cream. I always had to give it to Kat to finish. Finally, there was the fluffy whip…..canned whipped cream. Ty used to down one bottle every night the year the movie The Night at the Roxbury came out. Gross!

The Shoe Tree. We drove out to a little town that had a movie theatre once every summer. The highway that took us there was surrounded by trees. We would always look out for the “shoe tree”. A random tree with shoes nailed to it. Everything was on there, from baby booties  to mens sandal, womens heels and rainboots! I don’t know the story behind it, but we looked for it every year. I think it had become three trees by the time we stopped going.

The Big Dock. There were several docks on the property. The Big Dock was the break wall used to stop the big waves from getting to the little kid’s swimming area. The dock went the length of the resort along the water. The best sunsets I’ve ever seen were from that dock. It was some time in the mid 90s. Just before The Macarena became popular. You remember that song and the dance that goes with it? I learned the dance that summer. At sunset on the last night before everyone left to go home, someone played the song from their boom box and nearly the entire resort lined up on this big dock and did The Macarena together. This is what I imagine the big dock looked like that night.