Life In Pleasantville
Food, Travel, Life
I don’t think I’m going to surprise anyone by stating that the world is feeling smaller. For the first time in modern history, instead of continued expansion of where we can go, we’re looking at a contraction. Our choices are being limited either by financial constraints or by threats to our physical safety. With oil …
There are small towns and then there is Merrickville. In 1998, Communities in Bloom named it Canada’s Most Beautiful Village, and the designation is not doing any heavy lifting on its behalf. It genuinely earns it. Victorian stone buildings lining streets that feel untouched by the last hundred years, a UNESCO World Heritage canal running …
Nobody was more surprised than me to discover how many things there are to do in Florenceville-Bristol, New Brunswick. If I’m going to be completely transparent with you, it was just a name on a sign I’d been blowing past on my way to Cape Breton for years. Turns out I was dead wrong to …
If you saw a piece of broken glass on the street, you’d step over it. Maybe kick it toward the curb. You certainly wouldn’t pick it up and carry it home. But tumble that same piece of glass in the ocean for fifty years and suddenly it’s a jewel. People will walk kilometres of beach …
Don’t go chasing waterfalls in Cape Breton until you’ve read this. As it turns out, TLC was on to something. Maybe you should stick to the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to, and good news, Cape Breton has those in spades. Because social media will have you believing that chasing waterfalls is easy, …
I’ve lived in Ottawa for over twenty years and I have taken every single visitor I’ve ever had to Parliament Hill. Every one. It’s the Eiffel Tower problem. Parisians have been rolling their eyes at tourists with selfie sticks in front of an iron tower since 1889, and Ottawans have been doing the same quiet …
I don’t get out much in Ottawa, but when Parks Canada invited me to experience high tea at Laurier House Ottawa, I made an exception. Not because there’s nothing to do close to home, there’s plenty, but because when I embarrass myself here I risk running into those people again. My dad jokes have a …
Can travel heal a broken heart? I spent the better part of a year trying to find out. Not deliberately. I didn’t book a series of trips as a therapeutic exercise or decide that movement was the answer to the disintegration of a 20 year marriage. It was more accidental than that. The trips were …
