Did John Graves Simcoe Have A Cottage?

Well - another August Long Weekend has come and gone (Simcoe Day, to be exact), and we've only got one left before the Fall becomes official, and tired minds looking to escape the tedium of their paper-pushing summer jobs can actually look forward to going back to school. Not content with being Reever BA, I'm pushing for the upgraded model. By this time next year, I could almost be Reever MA.

But this isn't about the Fall - not yet. This is about cottages, and the verb version of cottage - to go "cottaging." Anyone who has grown up in Southern Ontario, the land that John Graves Simcoe (pictured) took definitively from both the French and Aboriginals before them, will be familiar with the idea of the cottage, if not necessarily the expression "to go cottaging." My Simcoe Day question was whether the concept, if not the practice of cottaging, was a uniquely Canadian experience, if only to a certain degree.

To find out how things are done in other parts of the world, I contacted some far-flung friends.

My friend Alex, living in Munich, Germany, told me that her only experience with cottaging came, funnily enough, when she was briefly living outside of Toronto a number of years ago. In Germany, the equivalent would be camping, if not - more likely - hopping on a cheap RyanAir or AirBerlin flight to the South of France or Italy. Since people are only likely to own one home, the odds of owning a second home - i.e. a cottage - are pretty slim, and nowhere near cheaper than taking two or three week vacations to close-by European locations. I suppose if I was an hour-long flight from the French Riviera I might not care so much about my cottage either, unless it too was in the French Riviera!

Tennille, living in Queensland, Australia, also pointed to camping as the closest equivalent. While I think the Aussie's take camping much more seriously than the Germans, Tennille mentions that the odds of owning a cottage, as supposed to a tent and a car, are slim. Again - when you are only a few hours away from New Zealand, Fiji, and the Pacific Rim (to name a few exotic locales), having a three bedroom cottage on a lake is not necessarily so grand, even if you've got a canoe.

So what did I learn this Simcoe Day? Cottaging make sense for Southern Ontarians, and in this sense, I feel like it might be more unique to the Golden Horseshoe, and Canada in general, than other places in the world. It presents an opportunity for escape - along with thousands of other Torontonian's and GTA'ers seeking the same refuge from city or suburban life - that simply cannot be achieved by picnicking at the Lakeshore, though that's plenty nice too. My thought is that perhaps if we lived within three hours of all of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific Rim instead of being three hours away from Kingston, Buffalo, and Penatanguishine, we might not think cottages are such hot shit after all!

*Two Quick Facts About Simcoe: his father was a member of the Royal Navy who sailed under famous explorer James Cook and fought at the Battle of Louisbourg that softened up New France for British taking. Simcoe's daughter, Katherine, died in infancy here in Toronto and is buried in a cemetery park near Bathurst and Portland, south of King Street. *