I had been working up in the Yukon for a few years on a survey crew. I started coming "outside" (down south) to escape the harsh winters. I found work in Vancouver repairing stereo equipment. 

My second winter in Vancouver, I was tasked with building a stereo speaker demonstration unit where the customer could press buttons to switch between different speaker pairs to listen. I built this and installed in their flagship store on Dunsmuir St., downtown.  

Now around the corner on Howe St. was a health store coffee shop and I went to check it out at lunch time and I was quite taken with the waitress there and asked her out. Of course it was Lena :-) We hit it off pretty well.

Eventually I was called back to work up in the Yukon and the work stretched into the winter. During this time we corresponded by mail and in one letter I half jokingly suggested she come up there, never thinking she might actually do that. To my great surprise I get a call from some of my friends in Whitehorse announcing her arrival and wondering what to do next. One of them graciously offered to put her up for a few days & the next weekend I came down for a joyful reunion and found her a room in a communal house with friends. 

She went to work in the local supermarket while I went back up to work surveying the route for the new Dempster Highway up to Inuvik NWT. When it got too cold they shut the job down and I rejoined her in Whitehorse.

But not for long... I got a call to go to a job in Fort Nelson fixing the summer crew's screwups on rerouting a twisty section of the Alaska Highway which needed to get done before spring construction season.

So I went and did that and came back to Whitehorse, bought a little Austin Mini SW and we packed up to drive down the highway back to Vancouver, camping along the way. A highlight was camping at the Liard hot springs where we saw a large moose feeding on the lush greenery that grows there year round . A low was having to stop  at the side of the road at Boston Bar in the Fraser Canyon to perform engine repairs so we could continue our journey. We finally made it to Vancouver without further incident. 

We were looking around for a place when a friend told me about a house available on Pender Island in the Southern Gulf Islands, so off we went. The house was good, rent cheap and tons of garden space for Lena. Thus we came to the next chapter in our life together.