Nostalgia For Ontario

Every year around this time I think of our yearly family vacations in Ontario.  My Uncle Bill (my mother's brother), my Aunt Elsie, and cousin Linda would drive up from Cleveland and my mother, father, and I would drive up from Chicago and stay for two weeks at Torpitt Lodge, located on Ontario's Sparrow Lake, 150 miles or so north of Toronto.  And before I was born, they would drive up to a resort called Britannia on Ontario's Lake of Bays with my sister Susan and my uncle and aunt's daughter Judy.  I was told that Britannia was a much nicer resort, but evidently the son of the original owner inherited the place and raised prices to an unaffordable level.  It figures.  Susan getting the best, and me always getting the hand me downs.  But I digress. The photo on the left shows (from left to right) my father Nelson, mother Mary, Aunt Elsie, and Uncle Bill by the golf course.

My father and my uncle just loved to spend those two weeks playing golf at the resort's 9 hole course.  It was a brief break each year from jobs they were never crazy about.  At Torpitt we shared a cabin in the woods up a hill from the main lodge (seen in the photograph on the right, with my mother sitting on the right.  The cabin we stayed in was not exactly luxurious, but it was a fun place to stay.  The thing I remember most is walking back to that cabin at night in the cool Canadian air and that strong pine tree smell.  The most popular story about that cabin was the time my Uncle Bill fell asleep eating peanuts, his mouth wide open, and a chipmunk sitting on his chest with it's head starring into his mouth. Nothing like close encounters with nature.

And last but not least, on the left is a photograph of me (on the left) with a couple of my friends, taken at Torpitt back in 1961 when I was 8 years old. Either that year or the next, I got pretty sick in that cabin and had to be taken to the hospital in Orillia, Ontario.  That cabin and the surrounding area were evidently pretty moldy, and I  had a major asthma attack.  Needless to say, that was the last time we saw Torpitt Lodge. But on the bright side, my Uncle Bill and Aunt Elsie retired to a condo complex in Stuart, Florida, and my parents retired there too in 1976. The place had a 9 hole par 3 golf course, and so my father and my Uncle Bill were once again able to play golf together, this time not having to go back to work in two weeks.