🚀 go-pugleaf

"Nomad" <doesntwork@hotmail.com> wrote in message 
news:QXzrg.24$pW3.20@newsfe19.lga...
> "Arved Sandstrom" <asandstrom@accesswave.ca> wrote in message 
> news:8klrg.99411$I61.52340@clgrps13...
>> <here@home.org> wrote in message 
>> news:qr8ra2li2f9amkuci5gs6iverb5kr3mpui@4ax.com...
>>> On Thu, 06 Jul 2006 21:57:04 GMT, "Arved Sandstrom"
>>> <asandstrom@accesswave.ca> wrote:
>> [ SNIP ]
>>>>After 10 years in Cold Lake I'd be overjoyed with any other posting.
>>>
>>> Try Gagetown. small hangar, friendly people and a great area.
>>
>> You're probably talking to the wrong person. :-) I like hiking, camping, 
>> scuba diving, rock climbing, mountain biking, fishing, hunting and in all 
>> ways being subjected to the outdoors. Me personally you could stick in 
>> CFS End of the Earth, and I'd find a way to enjoy it. I never said that I 
>> disliked Gagetown, I just said that it can be a hellhole. I like 
>> hellholes.
>>
>> You're quite right about Gagetown - it's not a bad place to be. 
>> Fredericton is not far away, and that's a nice little city. It's no major 
>> drive at all to get to Saint John or Moncton, little more to access 
>> Halifax or Quebec - after all, when I was in 1 Fd Regt RCA(M) we 
>> routinely drove up from Halifax - and back - to shoot at Gagetown on 
>> weekends.
>>
>> A lot of posters make a big deal about how isolated a base or station is. 
>> Where they see a blasted waste, I see opportunity. I was being ironic 
>> about Cold Lake - me myself and I would be very happy with that location. 
>> I'll bet the fishing and hunting there is not that bad.
>
> Man...you should have taken my place in Masset !

What timeframe were you there? I confess to now only having become aware of 
CFS Masset, having Googled it - it appears that it is now a remotely 
operated site, with perhaps 30 odd personnel still assigned to it. Evidently 
at one point there were several hundred people there.

I personally would have liked it. :-) It doesn't seem to be much different 
(apart from the fact that it did/does SIGINT) to a number of little DND 
outposts here in Nova Scotia - many of which have to do with some aspect of 
comms, or did. In practical terms, once you're more than an hour away from 
the big city (Metro Halifax :-)) you're pretty much restricted to going 
there on weekends only, and hence have to make do with your local 
surroundings. I don't doubt that plenty of folks who were (or in some cases 
still are) stationed at Cornwallis, Greenwood, Debert, Shelburne, Mill Cove, 
Barrington, Sydney, an antenna farm out Windsor way that I don't know the 
name of, or this comm dome parked near the old highway running through the 
Cobequids, probably thought or still think that they are working in the 
nether regions of nowhere.

It all comes down to mindset. I spent 6 years posted at Camp Lejeune, and 
from a "glass half empty" perspective that base was pretty grim -a fifteen 
minute drive just to reach the front gate, a fairly dismal military town 
sprawled outside, and nothing major anywhere particularly close. From a 
"glass half full" perspective it was great - fantastic beaches within half 
an hour, fine fishing in all directions, and it didn't take but an hour or 
two (or four) to get to Myrtle Beach or some great small college towns. 
Given that one year our July 4th long weekend destination was upperstate New 
York, anything within a half day's drive was certainly fair game.

AHS