Highway of Heroes

When I left the regular force in 2011 and moved back to Victoria I found that I was kind of longing and lacking to be a part of something so I really started getting heavily into volunteering. And then skip forward ahead I found myself here in Ontario and I first like for the Highway of Hero itself I first noticed that there was an organization that was looking to plant trees on the Highway of Heroes there. So I phoned them up and asked about what their plan was and what their mission was all about and I decided that I wanted to join them and I was with the Living Tribute Campaign with Mark Colin and I told him my story and I said look this is kind of near and dear to my heart because I wasn’t able to deploy in 2008 because I suffered an eye injury but what I would try to do was to still be a part of the team I participated, I was a primary pallbearer for our battalion so I participated and conducted in eight funerals for eight guys that I knew that died. So I told them what the highway meant to me and I joined on with that. So I still volunteer with those guys. After doing that I met up with my friend Collin again years down the road and he introduced me to his friend Kerri Tadeau and from there I told him what I was doing with the highway and she told me about one of her friends that was killed in Afghanistan and just off the top of my head I told her well if the highway means a lot to you just to let you know if you are ever interested you can adopt a section of the highway and you can clean it. And from there also they put up a sign of who cleans it or in memory so from there she adopted a portion of the highway where her friend Michelle Mendezes, who was killed in Afghanistan. She adopted a portion of the highway that was actually right by her hometown which is by the highway. And from there she loved it and she thought it was an amazing idea and it was a great initiative and then we were sitting down one day and she had this idea or we had this idea of like hey let’s adopt the whole highway and clean it. So we did that and it took some time
to go through all the red tape and the safety and a couple of months went by and had the green light and we found ourselves on the highway cleaning the highway. And it was adopted. All the primary overpass sections of the highway so where you would see repatriation of like, you know, firefighters or people on the overpasses waving or flying flags we decided to clean those on and off routes and the overpass so that they would be good to go the next time when somebody fell. So it took us three weeks to do it and it was about 300+ something kilometres and just shy of 400 garbage bags. And to this day it’s an ongoing thing. It happens twice a year.