Don's Farm in Mayo Quebec
August 5 2014

• i detoured from my intended route which was to head south from niagara-on-the-lake directly to virginia's crooked road when i got a reply to my email to don givogue at the last minute OK'ing a visit to his farm in mayo quebec - don is one of a small number of friends i've kept in touch with since leaving ottawa in 1972
  
  
• don and i were buddies in engineering at carleton university in the mid 60's - raised a lot of hell, drank a lot of beer, avoided schoolwork, typical college hijinks of the era - i dropped out of engineering (twice) but don went on to graduate and over the years make a great success of himself - he comes from a working class french-canadian background in cornwall ontario
  
  
• of all my lifelong friends don has been the most industrious, by far - he created a hifi speaker company in the 70's and sold it to a large public company for a lot of money a decade ago - also in the 70's he bought a 100 acre farm in mayo quebec for $5000 (i mistakenly said it was $10,000 on the video) and turned it into a working farm, this as a side project to the speaker business - the man is a marvel - he damned a creek to create a lake on the property (the fog in the early morning picture), created a fish hatchery on neighbor helen's farm, farms the land for oats and hay, rebuilt and expanded the farmhouse into a modern dwelling, and built a large building on the property to employ a couple of dozen local residents who ran the administrative side of the speaker company
  
  
• more recently he bought an excavator to properly drain some of the fields in order to put in more crops - none of the farming generates any income of course, its just a hobby for don - as i said, all of this as a sideline to running a full-time business - he recently got talked into starting a second speaker business
  
  
• don also owns a lovely home backing onto the rideau river in ottawa, built a house on eleuthra in the bahamas, and bought property on a nearby lake where he is building a cottage, pretty much single-handed, a multi-year project he says - he put in a private road to the cottage which is surrounded by crown land hence has the lake to himself - and he flies the family down to the bahamas and back every year in the high-tech cessna he owns - all very impressive, but the best part, he is just an unassuming salt-of-the-earth guy, you'll see it in the videos - don and his lovely wife loretta raised two sons
  
  
• i had hoped to play music with helen, don's 90 year old spinster neighbor - she plays guitar and sings in a quavering falsetto - its been 10 years or so since i played with her, i think the last time was when sharon and i visited - helen's brother norman played fiddle in a similar rustic style - he's been gone some 15 years - i was'nt playing fiddle at the time but used to accompany him on guitar when i'd visit - he was a real character and a great story-teller - many fine memories of music and merriment (and whisky) when norman was around
  
  
• don and i have kept in touch for one reason only - i visit him every time i go to ottawa - his farm is one of my favorite places on earth - when my parents were alive i had more incentive to go to ottawa and visited the farm every year or two - since my parents died my visits to ottawa have been infrequent, 2003 with sharon, 2011 with lynda & greg
  
  
• of course we've both changed a lot in 50 years and i suppose our friendship has'nt progressed much beyond two crazy engineering students looking for trouble - but i truly love the guy and he seems to tolerate me well enough