There isn’t normally an issue this week. The long weekend earned one. Two fairs and a stampede run at once: the Perth Fair takes the fairgrounds from Thursday the 3rd through Monday, livestock and midway and the whole classic-fair canon; the Marmora Fair runs Saturday and Sunday on Victoria Street with horse draws and a demolition derby; and the Tweed Stampede & Agriculture Expo takes Friday to Sunday at Stoco Lake Lodge, rodeo and ten-plus performances with the lake behind the stage. Most of us go to the same one of those every year. This year, go to somebody else’s.
That’s the whole ask for the weekend. Pick one stop you’ve driven past for years and stop at it. If you want somewhere to start, the Sundance Artisan Show puts forty artists outdoors along the Fall River at Hwy 7 and County Road 36 in Maberly, pottery and woodwork and glass and painting, 10 to 4 Saturday and Sunday and 10 to 2 on Monday, free to get in and free to park, with a kitchen run by a local chef. In Actinolite, Murder for Two finishes its run at the Marble Arts Centre on Sunday the 6th, two performers covering thirteen roles in a converted marble church on Bridgewater Road. Saturday alone has heritage machinery running at O’Hara Mill outside Madoc from 11 to 2, the Norwood Market at 42 Victoria Street from 8 to noon, an end of summer barbecue at the Havelock Legion on Ottawa Street West from noon to 7, and 24K Comedy with Casey Corbin at Gold Rush Brewing in Madoc, doors at 7. Tickets ahead for that one, the room is small.
Before all of it, on Friday at six, a piper stands at the cenotaph in Veterans Memorial Park in Carleton Place and plays for half an hour for the names on the stone. The Pipes Are Calling has run every Friday evening since July and the 4th is the last one of the season. It costs nothing and it takes half an hour of a summer evening. If you are anywhere near Carleton Place at the end of the workday, go and stand there for it.
That’s the corridor at its best. Two hundred and seventy kilometres of lakes and Shield granite with good farmland at either end, and a long weekend where the halls, fairgrounds and church basements along it are all open at once because a few hundred volunteers decided they would be. We are proud of this road and of the country it runs through, and the way to say so is to show up in a town you don’t usually stop in and spend an afternoon there. The chip truck census, the beaches guide and the trails guide will all give you a reason. See you on the road.