Travel tends to sharpen taste. It introduces new ideas, uncovers unforeseen obsessions, and offers the occasional epiphany – nudging your sense of beauty and your grasp of craftsmanship in new directions. For Ryan LeClair, founder of Makoto Watch Company out of London, Ontario, it was travel – and specifically a trip to Japan – that transformed his infatuation with watch collecting into his initiation of a brand built on craft, restraint, and everyday practicality.
Almost nothing we carry defines us more clearly than the books in our bags: tactile objects filled with ideas and stories – testimonies to time well spent. They tag along with us, mark our days, and shape the rhythm of how we move through the world. In Uptown Waterloo, three long-standing independent bookstores – Carry-On Comics & Books (46 years young), Words Worth Books (42 years), and Old Goat Books (25 years) – offer distinct ways to build this bracket of everyday carry: a nostalgia-driven comic haven built for the thrill of discovery, a curated literary hub grounded in conversation, and a densely-packed used bookstore where the search is part of the reward. Together, these enduring fixtures map a reading life – charting not just what we read, but how we come to find it.
In my line of work – as writer, photographer, editor, regional explorer – EDC isn't a trend. It's infrastructure. Most days I'm in motion: tracing backroads toward a brewhouse, mapping my way to an artist's studio, or sliding into the corner of a coffee shop where I turn field notes into final copy and RAW files into photographs that will pop on paper. My office is wherever I set my bag down. My tools make it possible.
I’m sitting in the sprawling loft that is Charlotte McKeough’s Hespeler studio – an industrial backdrop to the minimalist fabrics and pastel-coloured equipment that fill the space – studying a photo in an old issue of House & Garden. It’s a scene of Marc Jacobs’ Paris apartment: his beloved Dalmatian sitting next to a mod red chaise longue, and Charlotte’s flagship Brave Brown Bag perched atop the chaise.
As the frothy bubbles of an oat milk cappuccino touch my lips, I sit in the sunlight at brch social taking pleasure in knowing how much can be done in under twelve months.
On a recent afternoon, just outside downtown Guelph in the Royal City’s mature – majestic, even – Exhibition Park neighbourhood, TOQUE’s Chris Tiessen and I sat down to a sumptuous lunch at Park Grocery, the newest project of The Neighbourhood Group (whose other restaurants include The Wooly, Borealis and Miijidaa).
Bakeries smell good. It’s a universal truth. Walking in to the smell of warm bread isa soul cleansing experience that everyone should have on at least a weekly basis. And when you open the door to Polestar Hearth,a sourdough bakery in Guelph, this sensory phenomenon is heightened to such a degree that you might never want to leave. In the words of my girlfriend, Sidey, whom I brought to Polestar for the first time the other week, ‘it smells so good you could die in here.’
DAWN OWEN, CURATOR OF GUELPH CIVIC MUSEUM, RECENTLY NOTED THAT ‘IT’S NOT AN OVERSTATEMENT TO SAY BEER BUILT THIS TOWN.’ INDEED, EVEN A CURSORY GLANCE AT GUELPH’S CURRENT BEER LANDSCAPE ONLY SEEMS TO STRENGTHEN DAWN’S SUGGESTION. WELLINGTON BREWERY. SLEEMAN BREWERIES. ROYAL CITY BREWING CO. FIXED GEAR BREWING CO. THE RECENTLY-DECEASED STONEHAMMER BREWING. (RIP STONEHAMMER.) NOT TO MENTION GUELPH’S GREAT BARS AND PUBS WITH BEER LISTS THAT CAN MAKE EVEN THE STODGIEST HOP HEAD WEAK AT THE KNEES.
Travel tends to sharpen taste. It introduces new ideas, uncovers unforeseen obsessions, and offers the occasional epiphany – nudging your sense of beauty and your grasp of craftsmanship in new directions. For Ryan LeClair, founder of Makoto Watch Company out of London, Ontario, it was travel – and specifically a trip to Japan – that transformed his infatuation with watch collecting into his initiation of a brand built on craft, restraint, and everyday practicality.
Almost nothing we carry defines us more clearly than the books in our bags: tactile objects filled with ideas and stories – testimonies to time well spent. They tag along with us, mark our days, and shape the rhythm of how we move through the world. In Uptown Waterloo, three long-standing independent bookstores – Carry-On Comics & Books (46 years young), Words Worth Books (42 years), and Old Goat Books (25 years) – offer distinct ways to build this bracket of everyday carry: a nostalgia-driven comic haven built for the thrill of discovery, a curated literary hub grounded in conversation, and a densely-packed used bookstore where the search is part of the reward. Together, these enduring fixtures map a reading life – charting not just what we read, but how we come to find it.
In my line of work – as writer, photographer, editor, regional explorer – EDC isn't a trend. It's infrastructure. Most days I'm in motion: tracing backroads toward a brewhouse, mapping my way to an artist's studio, or sliding into the corner of a coffee shop where I turn field notes into final copy and RAW files into photographs that will pop on paper. My office is wherever I set my bag down. My tools make it possible.
Stratford – and, by extension, Perth County – lends itself to takeaway. A coffee to carry, a sandwich in hand, something sweet tucked alongside – then out into the streets for window shopping, into the theatres for a performance, or down to the riverbank for a nosh.
