Canada Rocks!
Years ago I kidnapped my daughter, Rebecca from school (she was in grade seven) and took her on a mini adventure. She got in the car and I put the folded paper map on her lap and said tell me where to go. (Because paper maps are fun to look at - like a treasure map, and cell phones did not have a GPS back in 2006, nor did my car.)
She looked at me with those beautiful Disney-shaped blue eyes and asked, “Anywhere?”
“Within the province,” I replied.
She opened the map onto her lap and pointed to a small town called Elderado. “Here,” she said, grinning. “Let’s go to Elderado! It sounds Mexican.”
You have to undersatnd that her favouite movie at the time was The Three Amigos with Dustin Hoffman, Chevy Chase and Steve Martin. She was always quoting them and we often broke into song while doing dishes…my little buttercup, has the sweetest smile…
So off we went to find this small town, somewhere off of highway 62, north of Belleville, Ontario, while quoting lines from the Three Amigos.
You may be thinking, What kind of mother kidnaps her daughter from school in the middle of the day and takes her to an unknown town in the middle of nowhere?
Well, me. I did. And I had good reason to. You see, our family had recently gone through a difficult - no - horendous time with Cancer. Rebecca’s step-dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor and had undergone radiation and chemo and we were sitting around waiting to see if worked. It was stressful, actually, it permiated our lives with a dark hovering cloud of muck.
And there was no way to escape it, except to push it to the background for a few short hours while we went on the hunt for Eldorado.
There was a note on the map highlighting Eldorado as the town where Ontario’s first gold rush took place in 1866. Rebecca was sure we would find something incredible there.
“Maybe a giant gold nugget” she imagined. “Or a mine that we can explore,” I added.
It was hard to imagine anything other than farmland by the looks of the landscape.
Then we saw the blue sign that said, Eldorado.
“So this is it,” I said as we drove into the…let’s call it a pitstop, because a town would infer that there was a presense of buildings and people. In fact, there was only one building, plastered with signs that said Gas, Propane, Post Office, Groceries and Hardware etc. A one stop shop for the 50 people who lived in Eldorado.
We decided to go into the store for a treat - and to explore this interesting place we’d never been to. It was like stepping back in time - old dusty shelves covered in old dusty things. I half expected an old man to come out from behind the counter and offer us a dusty old pick to dig for gold with. Instead a young man who looked bored, before he saw us, jumped up like he’d never seen girls before. But he didn’t speak - he just stared at us. We asked him if there was anything in town to see - like a gold mine, or something like that.
He shook his head and mumbled, “uh-uh.” I asked him a few more questions but he clearly wasn’t willing to be a tour guide. So we bought a drink and a snack and headed back on the road.
“Where to now?” I asked my daughter.
“I really wanted to see a mine.”
“There is a mine up here somewhere, but I can’t remember how to get there. I thnk its in Madoc, or Marmora. Let’s just drive and see if we come up on it.”
And that’s what we did. We drove north and didn’t see a thing except farmland and a few horses and cows. Until this incredible statue of an Inukshuk caught our eye. It was in front of a farmhouse on the front yard. I pulled over to the side of the road and we got out. This thing was HUGE! We had never seen an Inukshuk this big before - it must have been 20 feet tall.
I grabbed my camera and snapped a few pictures of Rebecca in front of it to show it’s size. She played along and tried to give it a high-five - she had to jump as high as she could to do so. What an awesome shot!
We enjoyed our getaway that day, spending time travelling around for no reason other than to be together and have some fun. The memories still linger in our hearts today and our little adventure became something we did as often as we could.
As for the Inukshuk, I had to learn more about them and discovered that they are found all across Canada where the Inuit people travelled, hunted and lived. Inukshuk means “like a human” and often one ‘arm’ will be longer than the other to indicate direction. They were built as a community to literally point people in the direction of their village or to mark where the caribou were or they may have buried food or tools for hunting near it.
There are over 100 inuksuit (plural) on Baffin Island in Nunavat, Canada. If you want to learn more about how awesome and resilient the Inuit peoples are, you can read about them here.
https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/inuksuk-inukshuk
