SWITZERLAND JOHN SWITZER
Winding roads, home-made sausages and great people!
delightfully real people – the kind who make life worthwhile. Back on the road, we still had
not had breakfast. And the witching hour, when they change the menus from breakfast to lunch, was fast approaching. So, in search of a bite to eat, we wandered down through Plevna and then to Ardoch, following the Ardoch Road back to Sharbot Lake. We were getting a mite peckish
It’s spring. The grass is still brown
and the trees haven’t budded yet, but you can feel it. You can smell it. You can even taste it. The world is about to burst into life. And then it snows, and we are back into winter’s clutches. Such is early spring in Eastern Ontario. But it felt like Spring on Sunday
morning when I met my buddy in Stittsville, grabbed a Timmies and drove west on Hwy 7. We played “catch up” (discussed family, friends, the economy, the usual) until we hit the Timmies in Carleton Place. Then we played “So what’s new?” (books, music, movies, hockey, etc.). We were too busy with our conversation to look for a likely turn off onto the back roads. And anyway, keeping in mind that springtime dirt roads can be mud roads (the kind the two wheel crowd don’t like) we were resolved to somehow stay on pavement. Instinctively we wandered off Hwy
7 onto Concession Road 12 to County Roads 12 and 15, heading for Lanark. This is a great stretch of road. We stopped to look for the pickerel run at
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Ferguson Falls and listened to the hum of winter tires on the pavement. And we inhaled the warm, fresh, new air. On the main drag of Lanark, we
craved another coffee and found a great spot with excellent homemade butter tarts − the holy grail of the back road set. It’s officially designated as the Lanark Landing Restaurant but we call it Lisa’s place. In Lanark we backtracked to Cty.
Rd. 12 and meandered down through MacDonald’s Corners to Elphin, then up to Snow Road Station and on to Ompah. In downtown Ompah we stopped at
the “If we don’t have it, ya don’t need it store”, also known as the Double S Sports and Marina owned by Rose and Denis. When you meet nice people like Rose and Denis who have a country store with deer heads and fish on the walls and a dog curled up in front of the wood stove, you know that you have found something special. Not only do they have lots of stuff on those crowded shelves. They’ll also give you great advice on where to go and what to see. Or you can just enjoy a chat with these
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and remembered that Sharbot Lake had that bakery on the highway with (more) great butter tarts. Which begs the question: why doesn’t Ontario have butter tart festivals? I mean, isn’t this delectable treat Ontario’s gift to the world? But the bakery was closed for
the winter, so we wandered into town and decided to give The Maples Restaurant a chance to assuage our hunger. It was our lucky day. We met genuinely nice people in the form of our hosts, Lorette and Phil, who were kind enough to give us some of their valuable time. They pointed out the many things to do in the area (like sitting on their patio in the summertime watching the sunset over the lake). They also suggested that we check out an all- natural cured meat shop called Seed to Sausage, located further down on Hwy 38. Seed to Sausage is a new
establishment (licensed last April) that is still struggling to get started but is already a “back-roader’s Mecca” for great food. They use locally-supplied ingredients that are made into the best homemade fresh and cured sausage, their own smoked bacon, hams, etc. This meat lover’s paradise deserves our
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patronage. Once again it seems that only the very best can be found in these small family-run businesses. Their products are fantastic and well worth the road trip. We didn’t get to meet Mike, “the passionate sausage maker”, but we did meet his wonderful parents, who, when asked how we could help get the word out, told us simply to say: “Ya just gotta come and try it.” So we loaded up with both cured
and fresh sausage and backtracked up Hwy 38 onto the Crow Lake Road. We munched our way down to Bolingbroke, across the Hanna Road to Hwy 6 into Perth, and then home to Ottawa. What a great trip this one was.
Not only did we find a great road that resembles a roller coaster ride, winding its way through terrific countryside. We also met wonderful people and found a sausage-lovers’ heaven that we knew we will visit again soon.
JOHNSON WELDING WORKS FABRICATING
• ALUMINUM •STAINLESS STEEL •STEEL
REPAIRS
70 beech st ottawa
www.johnsonweldingworks.com
613-233-6336 BOUNDER MAGAZINE 53
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Photos By BRUCE LORIMER
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