Hidden Treasures

Monday morning arrived bright and sunny but cold. I got up and puttered downstairs to make coffee. I stood at the kitchen window while the fragrant brew dripped into the pot and filled the room with the most delicious aroma. MMMMM, good. Could hardly wait for my first cup laced with double cream. Just then, AC came through the kitchen door and asked me where I wanted to go for lunch! What? Lunch? Did I miss something? Maybe I am not awake yet, and possibly I overslept, but I thought for sure this was just breakfast.

"This is your birthday week" AC announced "and I thought you might be missing the endless breakfasts and lunches you enjoyed during this week with your friends in Sarnia. I can't give you that, but I can give you a week filled with little surprises. So, to start the week of in fine style I want to take you out to lunch. Now, where would you like to go?"

Oh joy, I thought. This is going to be a fun week.

Lunchtime found us at The Leather Works. It has lots of atmosphere, good food and a table with a view of the water. Great combination. While munching on a mushroom-swiss burger we looked through a tour book of the area and decided to take one of the historic tours listed there. One place listed on the tour that seemed interesting to me was Wheeler's Pancake House and Maple Sugar Museum. It was a bit further down the rather bumpy spring roads than we wanted to go, but sounded intriguing so we headed in that direction anyway.

The back roads were indeed rough after the crazy winter of freezing and thawing we just had, and they seemed to get worse with each passing kilometre, but the sun was shining and it was early, so we set a slow pace and kept on course. Before long we came to a sign telling us to "turn here for Wheeler's". Yikes, it was just a dirt road and in much worse shape than the road we just left. It was then that AC looked at me and I could hear the words without him saying a thing "Well my dear, this is another fine mess you have gotten us into!" I just smiled back at him and said "think of it as an adventure". We both laughed and continued on down the winding road wondering what we would find at the end of it.

We eventually turned around a bend in the road and I fully expected to find a shack with a dilapidated sign hanging off the roof saying Wheelers. Thankfully, that wasn't the case at all. Granted, the first thing that greeted us was a rather muddy empty parking lot, but it was flanked by two large well kept buildings and assorted other small rustic sheds and barns. What a pleasant surprise. AC had posted pictures and a link on his blog. Here

Nothing looked open, but it was a nice place. We parked in front of the museum and ventured up to the door. Surprise, surprise, it was open. It was an absolutely beautiful log building with marvellous displays of maple syrup bottles, moulds, spouts, buckets, saws, drills, old fashioned snow-shoes and all sorts of other interesting things. Not a soul in sight though. AC and I wandered around to each display taking many pictures along the way, thoroughly enjoying our surroundings.

We then ventured outside and made tracks for the restaurant. If the museum was open, maybe the restaurant would be too, and it was. Three staff members were inside, but no patrons. This was another beautifully crafted wooden building with a huge stone fireplace in the centre of the room, ringed with large windows looking out onto snowy fields and maple woods. Delightful!

The owner's daughter greeted us at the door and spent a lot of time answering questions about maple sugaring. She let us taste different kinds of maple syrup - light, medium, and dark, and then explained how the weather affected the sap flow, how they tapped the trees now versus then, showed us the collection area and explained how 14,000 lines ran into this one room. No more collecting sap from buckets hooked on trees. When the sap is running freely, it would be gushing into this one collection area. An amazing process. When we were there, the sap wasn't flowing at all though. Much too cold for that yet. Warm days and below freezing nights are what is needed to really get things moving.

After our tour, we had a cup of coffee in the dining room and looked at a menu for future visits. They make their pancakes from scratch and also make their own Maple sausages to go with them. Yum! We had already eaten lunch so didn't sample any of the delicious fare listed on the menu, but are planning a trip back real soon to do just that.

So, our little adventure turned out to be quite a serendipitous one and in spite of the bumpy roads, we found a jewel of a place at the end of it. The reward at the end more than made up for the pot holes and bumps we had to put up with along the way.

Hope you have a bright day and find little jewels of pleasure tucked away in all sorts of unexpected places like we did on Monday. Don't let the bumps in the road discourage you and make you turn back. You never know what is just around the next bend in the road so keep on moving forward.