MeAnd’Er Across Canada: MeAnd’er-ing slowly to the Capital City of Ottawa

8,000km and 127.06 hours in the car together (but who’s counting!)

Day 41 & 42 - After leaving Roger’s childhood home in Toronto we drove west to visit our friend Barbara in St. George, township of Brant. Beautiful rolling hills and small towns, Roger managed to map out charging stations to give us great comfort to veer off wherever we wanted to do things such as pick up fresh butter tarts from a bakery on a country backroad that is only open Friday, Saturday and Sundays. Lucky us! Through Waterdown, Carlisle, Peters Corners and Hespeler.

People probably wonder about these weird travellers in a car marked Meand’er Across Canada pulling over to the side of the road to take pictures of their homes, and they are right, we are weird in that we stop and appreciate the individuals that make up our Canada.

St. George is tagged as “Canada’s friendliest town”, population 3,354, outside Brantford where Jean and Donna of Wawa Goose fame live, but they’re in Newfoundland right now so we’ll have to drop in on our way home.

We met Barbara in Bangladesh when we went to learn about the Amarok Society schools for women.

A bit of background here -

Amarok Society - In 2005, Dr. Tanyss and Gem Munro were invited to Bangladesh by an international organization to make improvements in the country’s education system, so they packed up their 4 children and moved from Vancouver, Canada to Dhaka, Bangladesh. Within the existing school system there it turned out the biggest threat to education in the developing world isn’t a deficient school system; it’s that even those deficient schools are out of reach for millions of children. So they helped by opening free schools to teach mothers to teach others. Each mother takes the responsibility to teach 5 children. Now they have people with an education in English and Bhangli and are able to get jobs in some of the offices in the clothing factories rather than in the factory itself, because they can read and write! Our Rotary Club in Mission sponsored one of the schools in Dhaka and Roger continues to support one of the mothers.

Please read more. https://www.amarok society.org

We had a very fond journey down memory lane with Barbara’s photos of Bangladesh and our trip with Gem, Bruce, Barbara, Nick, Carmella, Nikki, Angela, Jackie, Judy, Roger and me, all put together as an Amarok trip by Nick.

Back in Canada Barbara continues to care for people and to give a hand up to people moving here and helping them settle. Right now she is sharing her home with a young family from Kerela Province in India who have come to Canada, until they settle in their own apartment in Brantford. Anoop and Sivitha are well educated in India and have come to Canada with their young daughter Nashua, willing to work at one of the multiple, low entry jobs to start from scratch in a new country for a better life. That takes a lot of courage, and they are blessed to have found Barbara!

So here we are in St. George, over 8,000km into our journey, and Barbara is only the 3rd person that we know! Cal and Sharon back in Kelowna, Sylvia in Buena Vista, and now Barbara. That’s a lot of space between friends, but we are making new ones along the way.

The blog thing is interesting - Lori and Ray have done them on each trip and it seems so relaxed, but it’s not! I am writing to you about things we did last week - we’re talking St. George but we’re in Quebec City! For those who know me, I am always taking notes so I have a clip of scratch paper in by bag, which gets transposed when I sit with the map and pictures into a travel notebook (thanks Cyndi), and from there to here. So I get behind when we are visiting with people! I try not to get too stressed about it because this is a lot of fun, but my goodness has my memory ever had to work overtime!! Please excuse me if I repeat myself - it’s all part of the story, and we hope you are enjoying reading it as much as we are enjoying writing it.

Day 42 - Lunch in Paris! A quaint little town at the junction of the Grand and Nith Rivers with streets lined with cafes, boutiques and specialty shops - but most important - The Dog-Eared Cafe, a wonderful independent bookstore/cafe with cool things like “All books are created equal, but some books are more equal than others” - George Orwell, probably”. And cell phone etiquette reminder such as “We’ve worked hard to curate an ideal and relaxing environment for all to enjoy. Please do your part in being respectful of other patrons by keeping your calls, tik-toks, wedding fails, and other unwelcome emittances on silent.”

There was a fantastic photo exhibit of men called The Bro Show! by Sarah Evans.

Day 43 - Back into Aurora for lunch with Roger’s cousin Dilys , I don’t think they have seen each other for 20 years so they had lots to catch up on, then overnight in Newmarket to get ready for our trip to Ottawa. via Mount Albert, Uxbridge, 7A to Port Perry to visit Bill Minor at Books Galore, as recommended by the ladies in the post office in Mount Albert. Bill knew all about Billy Miner because people have told him there is something on the menu in a restaurant chain by that name! Who knew our very own train robber was a national dish!!

Also in Port Perry …

Sorry Bill, didn’t mean to put you in the same picture but I’m trying to keep this short!

There is a lot of Rotary presence in some of these towns : Rotary Charity Ride, Rotary Red Shoes Walk, Rotary Rail tracks to name a few.

Charging the car has been a breeze, sometimes we just find chargers without even planning to.

Hwy. 7 East toward to Peterborough through Omemee - Home of Neil Young!! Had a long chat with Lorna, a lady who stopped while I was taking this photo and she told me all about his family, which house they lived in down the road, the move to the farm, and also that Lady Eaton lived in town too (as in Eatons Department Store). I told her we should put her in the back of the car and she can show us around!

Further on down Hwy. 5 we stopped at the Trent-Severn Waterway Lock 21 in Peterborough, used mostly by recreational folks. There are 45 locks in this waterway system, 386km from Trenton to Port Severn, connecting Lake Ontario to Georgian Bay. Lock 21 is 19.8 metres, the highest hydraulic lock in the world. That’s a lot of work and a lot of water for letting paddlers and power boats through, but that seems to be what they do here. In BC we just leave people to fend for themselves in the rapids!! (right Lori?)

Also in the North York Region we passed the Sharon Temple, a National Historic Site constructed in 1825 by the Children of Peace - an Upper Canada Quaker Sect. The Children of Peace established a co-operative credit union and land sharing system, and also built the Province’s 1st Homeless Shelter. Ground breakers in my book for sure.

Day 44 & 45 - We made it! We’re in Tamworth, home of Angela and Roger. Angela is another friend we met back in 2014 in Bangladesh and she and Roger live on 300 acres in a very rural part of Ontario south of Kaladar on Hwy 7 and north of Napanee on Hwy. 401, in Stone Mills Township, Lennox and Addington Country, or for some, cottage country. Not what I pictured to be “cottage country” and I had been told by my Ontario friends that there is nothing else like it. I pictured more a number of homes focused on a lake, or mountain, but here it seems to be anywhere out of the city where you would come to get away. Needless to say with that much land you’re rural, and this is definitely their own piece of paradise.

Another Ontario surprise to me was our visit to a “sugarbush” - a forest of maple trees where the syrup is extracted. It is nothing like the drawings I have seen in social studies books - no taps, no buckets, and no row upon row of maple trees! It’s a forest with a mix of trees and underbrush, and if I didn’t now what i was looking at I probably would have driven right by - except that there is an umbilical cord of tubing connecting the trees to larger lines, gravity fed and collected in vats sitting there on the forest floor! Quite breathtaking actually, and very, very exciting for me!

Rural Ontario is quite exciting and lots of stuff happening, like the Tamworth Hotel built in 1840 and painstakingly being restored for the past 6 years by Kevin and Carol. If you are ever looking for the best b & b, this is the place!