(Wakefield, Quebec, Canada)

We decided to take a road trip to the Gatineau region of Québec last weekend. There were multiple reasons, with more reasons appearing as the trip progressed!

Our first stop was the Nepean Lawn Bowls Club in suburban Ottawa, where I could do some early-season practicing on their artificial surface. And I could also finally try out my new bowls for the first time, as they had been patiently waiting since arriving from Australia three months ago. (I borrowed some bowls when I played in Switzerland in February). My club in Kingston has a natural grass surface and it won’t be available for at least another week.

I was excited to play outdoors again, so I stayed for a long time and worked up quite an appetite. Accordingly, our next stop was the nearby Dutch Groceries deli/shop. And what a coincidence: it was King’s Day (Koningsdag) in the Netherlands, so the shop was selling fresh treats such as bitterballen and poffertjes on the sidewalk outside the shop! Of course, we had to have some. With lots of Dutch-Canadians wearing orange, and some special promotions inside the shop, it was a very festive occasion. Among other things, I picked up some Cantenaar and Parrano cheeses, two specialized kinds of sambal (sambal manis and surinaamse sambal), and a whole lot of dropjes.

By dinnertime, we had crossed the Ottawa River into Québec and decided to try something that you can’t find in Kingston: a Swiss restaurant (although we have Amadeus, which is an excellent Austrian/Bavarian restaurant). Meule & Caquelon has an unassuming location in a Gatineau strip mall but it is a cozy place specializing in fondue and raclette. We had a modified raclette; we grilled our own food and then melted raclette cheese over it.

That night, we stayed in the rustic Québec village of Wakefield (see the covered bridge at the very top of this post). Wakefield is in the Gatineau River valley about 35 km north of Ottawa and, unlike other places near the nation’s capital, it has seen relatively little development. With almost no lighting on the side streets, it almost seemed like the village was in a previous century. While we chose this village because it was fairly close to Ottawa, Wakefield has some other special significance for me.

The Vorlage ski area was just a block away from our B&B. While Vorlage is quite small, with a vertical drop of just 140 metres (about 460 feet), it will always hold a special place in my heart. It was here, in early 1983, that I went downhill skiing for the very first time. My Grade 10 friends convinced me to go on a school-organized ski trip. They also convinced me to just follow them rather than take lessons. While it wasn’t elegant (I was skiing like a hockey player), the trial by fire gave me the skiing bug. Regular readers of this blog know how much skiing has meant to me and my travel plans ever since.

Anyway, Wakefield seems to be very quiet in the spring. This is probably because its outdoor activities attract more visitors in the summer and winter months. (In addition to Vorlage, the slightly larger Edelweiss ski area is also in Wakefield.) There was absolutely nobody else on the village’s picturesque covered bridge when I used it to cross the Gatineau River. On the way back, a couple of local children rode their bikes across but otherwise…silence.

I spent a few more hours practicing bowls in Nepean the next day, and then continued home to Kingston via the “scenic route”. To break up the drive a bit, we stopped in the historic town of Perth for a beverage and some gelato. The skies were very gray by this point, with some intermittent rain, so the gray stone buildings in the downtown area made everything feel very gray indeed. But a tart lemon gelato can help overcome that.

This was the first, but certainly not the last, road trip of 2024. Watch this space for all the details!