A travel blogazine featuring kitsch, curios + Canadiana
Whether it is a labyrinth on the back of a cereal box or a good crossword inside your newspaper, puzzles can be a fun—albeit, sometimes frustrating—hobby. One puzzle that has caused both amusement and frustration, and, in my case, anger, is the Bean Puzzle Tombstone.
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I once hosted a fantastically embarrassing poetry event at a bar in Uxbridge, Ontario. Even though—by the providence of being in the same MFA cohort—I’d secured an incredible poet to read, no one came except my mother. It was a Sunday afternoon and the venue didn’t even have patrons at the time. A woman wandered in off the street and in a promising show of support after surveying the sad scene, vowed to return with more people. I can’t remember if she ever did. I was so anxious that parts of the afternoon are a blur.
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An Ontario family visits the Uxbridge Trail systems this fall.
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In Uxbridge, Ontario, one family and their community have been doing their part to help boost the bison population. BY: HOLLAYGHADERY “You can make a small fortune farming if you start with a big one.” Thunder Ridge Bison Company owner, Brian Arnold, smiles as he offers this quip. I’ve just asked him if bison farming…
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Indigenous chefs and artisans are teaching the public their crafts in video tutorials and other online spaces. Each year in Ottawa the Summer Solstice Indigenous Festival is held in June to celebrate the traditions of First Nations, Inuit and Métis cultures of Canada. Typically, over several days, pow-wows, craft work shops, cooking shows and concerts…
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When others were feeling the squeeze of the Great Depression, Foster had the means and opportunity to see a dream come to life. On a concession road just outside Uxbridge, Ontario, the Thomas Foster Memorial has risen over farmers’ fields and relative obscurity for over eight decades to become a source of unexpected wonder for…
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Her home was her sanctuary; a place she could abandon the amiable, passive masks she wore. When I was 11 years old, I read Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery, and much like millions of other young girls, I found a kindred spirit in the precocious redhead. It wasn’t until I was 37…
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A history of fallout shelters – top secrets, amateur bus bunkers, criminal bids and escape rooms. When the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in 1949, the tension could be felt throughout Canada. Since our northern airspace was considered the most convenient route for the Soviet Union to attack the United States, many defensive…
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Popular tourist attraction, Niagara Falls, was the subject of the oldest surviving photograph taken of Canada. It could be the image of a postcard. The 1840 daguerreotype taken by British industrial chemist Hugh Lee Pattinson on a trip to Niagara Falls is the oldest known photograph of Canada. However, in 1840, Canada did not yet…
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Finding hawk parallax at Ontario’s Falconry Centre. Every week or so during the summer months, I drive my nine-year-old son Joseph to a woodlot an hour away, near a conservation trail in Newcastle, Ontario. There, Sam Trentadue, his falconry mentor and the force behind the Ontario Falconry Centre (OFC), shows him how to offer a…
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