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travel / travel magazine / summer 2007
Notebook
Island utopias
Our family once rented an island for
a summer vacation with my wife's two
sisters and brother and their families. The
island rose from the centre of a small lake
45 minutes north of Ottawa and was shaded
with towering pines and maples. At the
crown of the property, which was about the
size of a soccer field, three small cottages
circled a firepit and summer kitchen. The
kids and their cousins ran wild, fishing,
swimming, planning forts and conspiring
in the woods. The adults kept food on the
tables and caught up on one another's lives,
relaxing and content that the children were
always within hailing and wailing distance.
One of us supervised when any of the kids
were in the water.
It was a memorable two-week holiday,
and I thought about it often as we developed
the stories on great Canadian island
vacations for this, our second, issue of
Canadian Geographic Travel.
Islands are worlds unto themselves, and
what sets them apart is what is most appealing
about them. They are societies in microcosm,
setting their own rules and pace of
life and deciding how much or how little
they wish to interact with the outside world.
For example, the Finnish utopians who
settled Malcolm Island, just off the British
Columbia coast, shared a unique vision of the
life they wanted to lead, the community they
wished to construct. Writer Tom Hawthorn
searches for the remnants of that vision.
At the other end of the country, Alec Ross
visits Grand Manan Island, famous for its
fishing villages, whale-watching tours and
lighthouse. We also profile Anticosti
Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Pelee
Island at Canada's mostly southerly point
and polar trekker Richard Weber's Arctic
Watch Wilderness Lodge on Somerset Island
in the High Arctic. Cinda Chavich tastes the
culinary treats on Île d'Orléans in Quebec.
And farther afield, Cleo Paskal tells us how
she married a Viking on the Faroe Islands.
By Rick Boychuk
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