07.30.07
Dragonboating at St Catharines
So all two (that’s right, TWO. readership has doubled overnight!) of my readers already know I drove to St. Catharines on Sat for the dragonboat festival at Henley Island. Well, techinically I was in Port Dalhousie;
pronounced DA-LOOSE-EE, not DAL-HOUSE-EE. The first is in Ontario and the second is in New Brunswick and the locals will make sure you don’t forget that.
Now being 1hr 20 mins away from Toronto and 20 mins away from Niagara Falls, you would expect that this place would have a certain amount of ….ethnic diversity given Canada’s immigrant levels and TOs multiculturalism. Ah ha, expectation foiled! Being a bank team from TO, we had about a dozen yellow folk, four brown people and the rest of the team was rounded out by the whiteys. Except for one other team from TO, there were NO asians at this dragonboat festival. Almost all the participating teams and locals who graciously volunteered their time away from the local watering hole (some of them anyways, more on that later), were as stereotypically white as the deep south. I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve ever seen so much smoking and mustaches in the same place! We half expected to see Confederate flags hanging out of the back of the pickups there.
Getting back to the drinking part I mentioned earlier, another first for me was that I have never, ever seen anyone drink WHILE participating in a sporting event. First off, as you drive over the bridge, there is a very prominent sign that says ‘no alcohol allowed on henley island’. Fair enough, think I. Then first sign I see when I get out of the car is ‘beer tent this way’. *sigh*, that may explain why I saw my first every dragonboat t-bone crash. Only in Hicktown.