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Byline: By Castor Date: Monday, May 11, 2026 Reading time: 8 minutes
Two weeks ago, Castor wrote in to correct the population of Castor, Alberta.
He’s been writing for us every Monday since — from wherever he happens to be that week. Small-town news his cousins pass along. Weekend tips worth the drive. Unexpected associations from his grandfather Henri’s notebook.
We think this weekly magazine will be interesting, helpful, and thoughtful for you. We run each issue as it arrives.
— The 1000towns team
Castor at the Waterfront Gastropub patio, Carleton Place, Ontario — coffee in front of him, letter forming in his head.
I’m writing from a patio at the Waterfront in Carleton Place. The maple by the parking lot is finally in leaf. The man at the next table is on the phone with someone about a canoe.
The country is about to open for the year.
May long weekend — Victoria Day Monday, Saturday and Sunday before — is the unofficial start of Canadian summer. The cottages get unlocked. The water turns back on. The first festivals of the season set up tents that will be set up all summer.
This year it’s also the first long weekend since the country started travelling itself.
I’ve been counting the letters this week. I have eleven from cousins. They’re all saying the same thing — they’re getting ready.
Cousin Lunenburg (Nova Scotia) writes that the harbour is alive again. The first lobster boats docked last week. She has bookings up the South Shore three months out. She’s never seen that.
Cousin Langley (British Columbia) writes that the village is bracing. The May Day Parade — 104 years old this Saturday — has more volunteers signed up than tasks to do. She thinks they’re going to have to invent some.
Cousin Hanna (Alberta) wrote me too. I’ll spare you that one for now; you’d think I made it up.
The numbers tell the same story in their own way. Canadian travel south of the border is down 14.5% in February compared to last year, 31.5% compared to two years ago. About $1.5 billion in tourism spending stayed in Canada in 2025 — another $4.4 billion expected through 2027. Most of it isn’t going to Toronto or Vancouver.
It’s going to the towns my cousins live in.
My grandfather Henri wrote in 1968 — long gone now, but a year I keep coming back to in his notebooks — that the country tends to forget itself for six months and remember in May. Wet pavement. The lake on the wind. The first festival tent going up.
He’d be glad we’re starting to remember.
If you have nowhere to be this weekend, my cousins have somewhere to send you. Write back. Tell me where you’re starting from. I’ll ask the cousin nearest.
I met a couple in a diner in Edmundston, New Brunswick once. Day fourteen of a thirty-day Canadian road trip.
They’d been to Florida every February for twenty-three years. That year they decided to try Newfoundland instead.
The husband was almost crying when he described the cliffs at Cape Spear. He said he didn’t know his own country had been waiting for him.
They went back to Florida the next year. But they never stopped going to Newfoundland after that.
→ Cousin Stratford (Ontario): the Stratford Festival’s 2026 season is now running — it opened April 21. She says the Saturday matinées are sold out through July; weekday afternoons still have seats.
→ Cousin Banff (Alberta): the spring road thaw is finally done — Vermillion Lakes Drive reopened. Cousin Banff says go before 7 a.m. if you want it to yourself.
→ Cousin Wakefield (Quebec): the Saturday market is back as of this weekend. Don’t try to park on the main road. Walk in from the river path.
→ Cousin Lunenburg (Nova Scotia): six community museums across the South Shore reopened this spring under provincial funding, hers among them. The volunteers were always the labour anyway. The high school history teachers run things now.
July 1974.
“They opened a Tim Hortons in Perth, Ontario.
I watched a man come from twelve miles away to sit in it. He told the waitress he’d waited his whole life for the proper coffee to come to him.
He was sixty-three.”
→ A reader asks: “It’s the May long weekend and I haven’t planned anything. Where am I going?”
If you’ve got Friday afternoon free and a tank of gas, drive somewhere with one curling rink, one diner, and a body of water you’ve never seen.
You’ll know the right town by lunch on Saturday.
If you want a recommendation by name, write back. I’ll ask the cousin there.
→ Elora’s Plein Air Festival, May 17
↓ Elora, Ontario
Four days of artists set up around town and along the Grand River, painting whatever they’re looking at.
Cousin Elora says the best ones aren’t on the bridge where the crowds gather. They’re working under the railway trestle on the Fergus side.
Bring an umbrella. The artists pack up around seven.
Got a town in mind?
Write to me. I’ll ask the cousin there.
Yours in maple,
P.S. 990 cousins counted. Ten more to a thousand.
Castor’s hometown is Castor, Alberta — population 876, where the streams east of Red Deer kept the family in dam-builders for generations.
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