Two Sore Backs

Our good friend Doug Argue suggested we might enjoy a visit with his brother Ritchie, who lives west of Ottawa near the town of Pakenham.

Doug is a master of understatement, so we had been planning to go there as soon as he mentioned it, and it was great to meet Ritchie beforehand when he was visiting Vancouver while Doug’s wife Shirley was away visiting friends in England.

Ritchie lives on an 11 acre property, complete with a stream running through it, in the house that he built himself, with lumber that was milled from trees harvested from the property.

Sadly, Ritchie’s wife Margy has passed away, but he has the support of his three daughters Paige, Gillian and Grace and their families who live nearby, and his sister Joan and her husband Brent who are also in the area.

We met Joan and Brent at Wheelers Maple Products and where they treated us with a delicious pancake and maple syrup breakfast. Thanks guys!

After breakfast we toured the Maple heritage and chainsaw museums on site, plus we walked the grounds which are a working sugarwood. Amazing.

We had the great pleasure of meeting Ritchie’s daughters, their families and Gillian’s new boyfriend on Father’s Day. The sisters put on a really nice dinner, and the kids had a lot of fun. The property must be heaven for those kids.

Margy’s side of the family has roots in P.E.I., as we do – we will be meeting up with some of the descendants of my great grandfather Daniel later on in the trip. Margy had an amazing book called “The Atlas of PEI and the World”. Val was able to find the plot where the McGuire homestead was, near Morell, and the names of the family. What a find!

My grandfather Ernie left PEI and moved to Saskatchewan, which is where my mom and dad grew up and went to university before moving to the west coast.

Back to Ontario. Bee keeping is a hobby turned small business for Ritchie, and he was kind enough to give us a tour and demonstration. We learned a lot!

Quick edit because I forgot to mention a quick trip to Grace and Andrew’s place. They have a small Maple Syrup business and I was interested to see their new reverse osmosis machine. It removes a great deal of pure water from the maple sap before you boil it. It’s a big energy saver, and a big labour saver too since the heat source is wood.

They have a great spot with all the toys – excavators, ski-doos, quads, you name it. Young Lyle, his little brother Danny, and his older sister Sadie sure have it good.

Second edit, for our curling friends. I forgot that we visited the local curling club! Everyone from Marpole will recognize the start of the garage sale fundraiser in the second photo.

It’s hard to end this post. I’m still dizzy from everything we saw and learned, but here’s something: we were talking to Ritchie about our trip so far, how we had connected with so many interesting and kind people, and he said some simple words: “There are good people everywhere.” So true, especially here.