After long talks in our old Edwardian home in Eastern Ontario, we had come to an agreement that there were hopes and possibilities west on highway 401 to Lake Ontario. We had shared a local wine guru's first book, 'A Fool and Forty Acres' by Geoff Heindricks and were introduced to the newest wine growing designation - Quinte-Belleville area. I had been raised, for a time (as army brats are only raised for a short time from one posting to another) in Picton Heights at their military base, beginning school, and experiencing farm life growing up in the late fifties in the County. My parents had worked hard in the summers, my mother in local canneries so prevailant in local agricultural history, while my father picked tobacco in the large dry fields there. As an adventurous child of the '50's, I fished for smelts off Wellington's dock, cottaged at West Lake and of course spent many days at Sandbanks Provincial Park.
Forty years later, the County still boasts much of the same charm as the days in the late '50's. The lacy penninsula has a handful of small villages along its coast with names such as Cherry Valley, Bloomfield and Lake On the Mountain. Each of these communities have maintained a distinctive character, and are found within minutes of one another.
The architect and I were seized with a new ideas of finding a receptive community strongly active in the arts with jazz and classical music playing a role, a community with a sense of history not lost but still visible and vibrant in its downtown core, and a place to grow in our newly found interest - the building of a net zero home.
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