Doug Lubinski was in his early 20s when he came to Drumheller in about 1981 to work for Don Ostergard seeding.
After living in the area for a couple of years, he would see a certain girl driving around town in her mother’s white Cadillac. He was determined to meet her somehow, someday.
“I would see her because I used to work at the Curling Club and she worked at the dealership, and she was driving around all the time,” he recalls.
He hatched a plan. One day he went to the florists and grabbed a couple of roses, and hoped to meet up with her on the street, stop her, and ask her to dinner. It was a romantic plan, the only hitch was making sure he caught her eye.
“I drove around town the whole day, and she was nowhere to be seen. The roses were beginning to wilt already, so I was going by the post office and thought if there’s someone there I’ll just give them the roses,” he recalls.
The plan looked like a failure, and he ended up making another girl’s day with the gift of flowers.
“I pulled away from the stop sign and there she goes right past,” he says.
Undeterred, he goes to the florist the next day and begins his quest again. This time he sees her coming down the street in the Cadillac, but she has a guy with her. Despite this, he took his shot.
“I stopped her, gave her the roses and asked her out for dinner and she accepted,” he said.
The guy? Turned out to be her cousin.
There began the courtship of Doug and Barb. This was the 1980’s and while her mom took a shine to Doug, her dad was a little less impressed with the long-haired bearded fellow dating his daughter. He quickly won him over and Barb and Doug were engaged two years later and moved in together.
He recalls when making arrangements for the wedding with the pastor, and earlier that year he had been hired on with PanCanadian. This meant shaving his beard and trimming his locks. He arranged to meet the pastor, who came to his in-laws to meet. They stood around for a bit when the pastor said ‘as soon as Douglas gets here we’ll get started, not recognizing the cleanly shaven groom to be.
The couple was married at the Dalum Church in 1988. At the wedding, the pastor told a story about the importance of forgiveness, and how Doug had forgiven him for not recognizing him.
“We couldn’t take a honeymoon because I had just gotten this job. We had planned an East Coast motorcycle trip. I had bought a Honda Apencade touring bike,” he remembers.
While they couldn’t make it to the East Coast, he did manage to get a four-day weekend and they took a motorcycle trip through the pass and to Kalispell, Whitefish, and home.
Over the last 33 years, there have been more road trips than you can count on both hands. They also have two grown children.
When asked what the secret to 33 years is, he replies, “Never argue, talk it out. In all the time we have been together, I don’t believe there was once where we raised our voices to each other.”

Last love can start in many different places and for Scott and Michelle Gamble it started as a friendship.
Scott, the Pastor at Grace Lutheran Church, and Michelle were attending Concordia University in Edmonton in 2004. Michelle was a year ahead of Scott, and he was “young and naive.”
“She in her worldly wisdom came in and wooed me…maybe I am exaggerating,” he laughed.
They actually met through his sister, as they were both studying in a math class together. They began hanging out in the same circle of friends.
“She went on a ski trip with me and my family before we were dating, so she got to know my parents, and she saw me run into a tree,” he recalls.
Eventually, the two went on a mission trip together to Indigenous communities in coastal B.C. in 2005.
One evening during this they went for a midnight swim and then stayed up watching movies.
“I awkwardly fumbled out some incoherent ‘do you want to be my girlfriend?’” he recalls. “She mumbled some other incoherent reply, and I stumbled back in the wee morning hours to my dorm bed. The rest was history.”
The couple became inseparable during their college experience, and the year that Scott graduated, they were married on June 21, 2008. They had a lakeside wedding in Penticton.
Michelle went on to do an after degree in education. Interestingly enough, their daughter was born four years later and took that date.
“It has been 13 years of happy bliss.”
He says being friends before can help forge a strong relationship.
“We hung out before with a solid group of a dozen other people and it was really the bedrock of our relationship. We were at Christian University, but it wasn’t like a bible school, so faith was really at the heart of how we know each other, that deep central values. We were still able to hang out as friends and grow and develop that well into a healthy relationship,” he said.
When asked what the secret was, he offered advice he had heard from somewhere else, with the caveat that he is not sure if Michelle would agree.
“Remember that your spouse is not your enemy.”