Cai Sepulis is co-owner of TOQUE Magazine, where she has spent over a decade creating illustrations, design, and stories celebrating food, culture, and community across Ontario.
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’ll take one of everything, apparently,’ I quip to my TOQUE Partner (and partner-in-crime) Chris with a chuckle – raising my heavy-laden shopping basket to eye level for emphasis. It’s overflowing with beautifully-designed and fantastically-colourful cans from Blood Brothers, Dominion City, Bellwoods, Left Field, and other Ontario craft breweries that you’d have a hard time locating at any common LCBO.
‘I still can’t believe that all this food is available at the Market,’ I exclaim to my TOQUE Partner, Chris, as I stare down atthe spread laid out in front of us. Samosas. Dolmas. Hummus. Cubanos. Cannolis. And more. Chris and I are seated in the back of the Mercedes Sprinter that my wife, Sonia, and I acquired and converted into a veritable mobile home at the beginning of COVID.
‘I had no idea all this was back here,’ my TOQUE Partner (and partner-in-crime) Chris Tiessen remarks in amazement as we make our way down the quaint garden path, round the side of the sweet century-old building, and catch our first glimpse of the restaurant’s impressive two-tiered backyard patio and expansive rear lawns.
I think ‘Canteen’ would be a great name,’ I suggest to Fixed Gear Brewing Co’s owner, Michael Oosterveld, as we lounge in the midday heat on the rock beach in front of his cottage located in the archipelago off Georgian Bay. It’s early August, and I’mhere – with TOQUE’s Chris Tiessen and my wife, Sonia – as part of an excursion across Ontario’s cottage country (published in TOQUE 11 as ‘Outbacking Across Ontario: A Four-Day Success Story’).
The simple pleasure of gliding across a quiet lake with nothing but one small vessel and self-power to get you from campsite to portage, from campsite to campsite, is a ritual so dear to me. Ever since I was a kid, my summers have always been full of backcountry canoe trips. I’d take these outings with my family - my mom, dad, two brothers, and me.
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.
