TTTF – History

During the winters when snowmobiling was my passion, I had published The Adventures of a Solo Snowmobiler in a snowmobiling magazine. One evening during a family dinner, I was boasting about now being a published author.

“It was a good story,” my wife said, “but why not write one that would have more appeal to women?”

“Something romantic, I suppose!” I replied, sarcastically. “How about a romance on snowmobiles?”

“Sure, why not?” she answered. “You can do it.

That conversation led to several days of work, which resulted in the English version. I submitted it to the magazine that had published my first story, but I guess it wasn’t their typical kind of story. And the same for a “romance” magazine.

Many years later, after I had taken some French language classes and translated several of my short memoirs into French, I got ambitious and took a stab at translating my “snowmobile romance” into French. After several weeks of effort, I showed the result to Abou Konté, my French tutor. That led to six months of revisions and rewrites. During this process, Abou also suggested several changes to the basic story, so the English version was improved at the same time.

During my years of snowmobiling, I always had a camera with me to record views of the wilderness and lakes. At that time, it was a film camera as affordable digital cameras were not available. I scanned those pictures into my computer for use in The Trail To Forever but I still didn’t have enough for the whole book. So, one snowy weekend Lois and I drove North into snow country and attempted to follow the route taken in the story. We couldn’t drive the car on the trails, but we visited key sites. One site was the Voyager Inn on Crane Lake, where we stayed the night, had supper in its rustic restaurant, and played Bingo with the locals. Great fun! And that is why there is a picture of people in a bar in this blog post.