Chefprefers BLOG

A cottage is the only place where Canadians voluntarily pay a fortune to live like they’re in another civilisation.

For eleven months of the year, life is alarms, traffic, snow, construction, work, bills, and then pretending there aren’t tired.

Then that summer week arrives, and suddenly your greatest responsibility is deciding whether to sit on the porch at home,  or sit on a dock or a canoe at the lake cottage. The pull towards the cottage always has them become deeply committed to staring at water.

Although, the drive to the cottage is always the same. You leave the city convinced everyone else has had the exact same idea. Four hours later, after surviving highway traffic, petrol station lineups, and someone towing a boat at the speed of the continental drift, you arrive feeling like you’ve completed an expedition worthy of a documentary.

At the cottage, people have different ideas.

The first idea is to do absolutely nothing. They sit on the dock with a coffee, watch loons, and somehow spend three straight hours discussing whether that cloud looks like a moose. They become so relaxed that standing up feels ambitious.

Or the other idea treats the weekend like a triathlon. They’re fishing at dawn, paddling by breakfast, swimming by lunch, collecting wood they didn’t need, and insisting everyone join a game of Speed demon with the intensity of the Stanley Cup Final. 

After being canoe camping for a week, my wife and I spent a week at a rented cottage on a Canadian lake known as Green Lake, and somehow we adopted both ideas. We paddled, swam, hiked, roasted s’mores, enjoyed the peaceful sunsets, and spent an unreasonable amount doing things we had done five minutes ago.

The best part was that nobody cared what time it was. There were no work stuff like meetings, deadlines, or emails marked “urgent.” Just a lake, a cabin, a campfire, and the comforting knowledge that tomorrow’s schedule was already full of absolutely nothing.

So we parked ourselves on the dock and becomes one with the furniture. We read half a novel, listen to the same songs from 80s, stare at the lake for long stretches as if expecting it to reveal the meaning of life, and consider flipping ourselves over to burn the other side. By sunset we were roasting marshmallows, singing songs we could barely remember, and insisting the stars are brighter than anywhere else on Earth.

To follow the day by day of our adventure, see Jen’s Facebook post.