Weekend Getaways
The Saturday Huddle is a weekly column that features opinion, analysis and reflections on Huddle stories, podcasts and business news in the region. Mark Leger is the editor of Huddle.
My wife Janet and I worked full-time when we lived in Ghana for eight months in 2007, but we still wanted to make sure we explored the country while we were there. We took one extended vacation, but also many weekend trips within a few hours of the capital city Accra to take full advantage of our time there.
It was often very hot in the city, so we travelled to a beach town an hour away called Kokrobite, popular with tourists but locals as well. Janet walked the beach one morning and fell into conversation with a teenager who gave her the lay of the land. He wanted to become a refrigerator and air conditioner repairman and boxer too. He was also keen on the tourism potential of his hometown. “It will be great for development,” he said sweeping his arms across the area. “Tourists will buy more from our village.”
A few hours west of Accra, we visited El Mina, the site of the largest slave castle in West Africa, which is open to the public as a memorial and to educate tourists and locals about the tragic and shameful legacy of the global slave trade. El Mina is still a major coastal fishing town with a national park to the north where we did a canopy walk high above the ground in the trees through a rainforest (a feeling of vertigo always returns with the memory).
The hill towns, like the ocean beaches, were a great way to escape the heat and get in the kind of vigorous hikes we still enjoy back in the Maritimes. We traveled into the hills several hours north of Accra one weekend and walked from one village to another and hiked to a waterfall. The main town, Amedzofe, was very intimate and friendly. The “town tree” was the first thing I noticed when I stepped off the bus. There was a group of men gathered under the tree, so I wandered over to say hello and escape the heat.
I re-read these stories – and many more like them – that my wife and I published on a blog at the time after my latest conversation with Mylène Theriault and Jason Gallant, who recently completed a three-month “Love for Local” tour of New Brunswick. The “Electric Summer Social Tour” was designed to promote businesses and organizations in 104 communities across the province, with Mylène and Jason travelling in an electric car from place-to-place filing pictures and written posts to social media platforms.
Podcast: On The Road With The N.B. Electric Summer Social Tour
Over the course of the three months, I checked in with them on the road as part of a series of four Huddle “Home Office” podcasts. You can listen to the first three on platforms like Apple and Spotify; the fourth and final one will be available early next week.
I’ve written about the tour in this space before. I bring it up again because of the conversation I had with them earlier this week for the fourth podcast and how it made me think of my time in Ghana.
In our chats over the summer and early fall, Mylène always got so excited about meeting people and exploring new places, and she would always say she expected this journey of discovery would continue long after the tour ended.
“If you want to do a weekend trip all year round, there’s always going to be something to do. There’s no need to go super far. I can’t wait to get on the road again to explore more. Even though we did [this tour], there is still so much more to see,” said Mylène in our latest conversation.
The way she described exploring the province on an ongoing basis reminded me of my approach to travelling to places near Accra.
“This is going to sound like a crazy analogy, but it reminds of our time in Ghana,” I said in response to Mylène’s comment. “We were working jobs the whole time. Ghana is not small geographically, but you can get to a lot of places, kind of like New Brunswick, where you could leave on a Friday afternoon to go somewhere and come back Sunday and that’s how we lived for eight months.”
“The reason I mention that is we are able to explore New Brunswick in the way you’re talking about it…you guys could probably write a great guidebook about the kinds of places you can visit two hours from your hometown.”
That guidebook already exists in their social media posts and has inspired at least one couple from Quebec to visit here and retrace Mylène’s and Jason’s steps in the northern part of the province.
Their approach to the tour and their ongoing love for exploring New Brunswick made me think of Ghana because of that sense of urgency. We knew we had eight months, so we packed it all in with a frenzy of weekend trips, just as Mylène and Jason did in New Brunswick over the course of three months.
I need to develop that sense of urgency for exploring my own backyard too, something we could all do in support of the communities and businesses in this region. In Don’t Drive Through, Fredericton singer-songwriter David Myles could just as easily be pleading with locals, not just outsiders, to appreciate the communities worth visiting in this province.
It’s Small Business Week, so it’s an appropriate time to reflect on this message. Many of the government support programs for businesses and employees are also expiring this week. Though more programs will be introduced to help the hardest-hit sectors like tourism and hospitality, they will need our support with a long winter ahead.
The tourism season is coming to an end but that needn’t apply to us. I’m reminded of a wintertime weekend trip our family and friends took several years ago to a rural community in central New Brunswick. It had cozy cabins, a central lodge with a fireplace and great food, and acres of woodlands for walking, snow-shoeing, and cross-country skiing.
We didn’t even know it was there until we started poking around for getaways close to home. Discovering more of these opportunities for weekend winter trips looks like a job for Mylène and Jason; an “Electric Winter Social Tour” may be in order. Or maybe we can crowdsource some ideas ourselves.
Suggestions for weekend getaways? E-mail: [email protected].