A Great Trip Doesn’t Have to Mean Travelling Far

8/8/2020

Rosemary Ganley
The Peterborough Examiner
July 16, 2020

Like you, from March to July, I went nowhere. From room to room, maybe. Around the block. Occasionally a bike ride through Jackson Park. The ultimate adventure was a ride to the trestle bridge near Omemee. That took two days‘ recovery time.

I touched no one. I couldn’t see my granddaughters in Newmarket. I went to church via Zoom. Every sock was mended, every drawer organized; the thrill of breadmaking gone. I was frankly going stir crazy by July 5.

Every day at 4 p.m., socially starved, I headed to the deck of one friend or another, taking turns, hoping for a glass of wine, until they were tired of me.

Then it came to me in a flash of light: I could perhaps drive two hours to a cabin the woods, carrying my copy of Thoreau’s “Walden,” to an encampment of four well-spaced and roomy cabins operated by a dear and longtime friend, Jennifer Rowell Dailloux and her spouse, Jacques.

It is called Wolf Den Nature Retreat and Lodge, situated along the Oxtongue River, just nine kilometres west of the entrance to Algonquin Park. Jen and Jacques have had these cabins and a larger lodge across the highway for about six years. It is a Garden of Eden for their four-year-old, Tom, who in the winter goes to the public school in Dwight.

There is a great story in this family. When Jennifer Rowell was 16, a bright student at Adam Scott Collegiate, she came forward to volunteer with a youth team going to Kingston, Jamaica with Jamaican Self Help. She shone at the work, with the right attitude, lots of pluck and curiosity, an immense talent for friendship and a solid analysis of conditions on the ground in poor communities.

Jen came again twice more as a youth team leader, including once with her mother, Elaine Orgill, who is a gifted early childhood educator. Elaine went on to serve as president of JSH for five years.

It was no surprise to us that Jen went on to international studies at university and began to work for CARE U.K. In the next 17 years, she did development work among women in Peru, Chad, India and Afghanistan.
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