It’s ironic that I make my living from the tourism business, since to the best of my knowledge my own hometown has never once attracted a single tourist (at least not one who visited intentionally).

I grew up in Ivy, Ontario, a single crossroads hamlet of 60 people an hour’s drive North of Toronto.  It’s farming country.  The kind of place where you celebrate your twelfth birthday by cycling all the way around the block for the first time (it takes the better part of an hour at that age).

Ivy doesn’t make the news much.  I remember a fender-bender at the crossroads once, but no reporter arrived to document the coffee and cake handed out while motorists waited for the police to arrive.  A minor scandal erupted when a rake went missing from the ballpark, but that soon blew over and again, no expose in the local press.

Ivy used to have its own weekly social column in the Barrie Examiner, documenting who had whom over for coffee and whose turn it was to host the Ivy Women’s Institute Meeting, but this early precursor to MySpace fell victim to being too far ahead of its time.   Similarly, our local version of Twitter ceased to exist when Bell Telephone replaced our shared “party line” with private lines in the late 70s and it became much harder to know what the residents of Ivy were doing.

As a result, Ivy’s remained almost completely undiscovered among the traveling set.  And yet Ivy has much to commend itself to tourists.  

We have sports (on Friday evenings in the Summer, the Ivy Leafs take to the baseball diamond and there’s a swingset in the park).   We have culinary experiences (ok, making that plural is a bit of a stretch but I remember the ballpark concession stand serving up a pretty decent hot dog – hours: 6pm-8pm Fridays only).  We have a Hotel (and you’re more than welcome to take a picture, though it hasn’t operated as a Hotel since the late 1930’s).  We have historical sites (I’m told the Essa Township telephone exchange was once housed in Mrs. Reid’s house). We have festivals and events (stop by on Robbie Burns Day for our four-man parade, but come early as the route is short and they need to drive to Orangeville in time for the big parade).  We have modern conveniences as well (up until just a few years ago, our streetlight (yes, only one) was turned on by hand each night but we’ve modernized and the light is fully automated now – be sure to consult a sunrise/sunset table if you want to see the thing in action).  Toward the end of Summer Ivy features a unique form of farmer’s market (mostly consisting of boxes at the ends of driveways labeled “free cucumbers” or “free tomatoes” depending on which the resident has planted too much of that year).  And we have our local celebrities (a former NHL referee used to live here and a handful of future NHL stars passed through our minor baseball program – we play hockey in Thornton as we have no rink of our own except when the Tiffin Conservation Area pond freezes over).

Despite all that, Ivy remains too lonely to make Lonely Planet.  I’d like to think that Web 2.0 might finally put Ivy on the map, what with our early experiments with MySpace and Twitter, but you can only get dial-up in Ivy so I’m not holding out too much hope.

But here’s the most perplexing part: through a fluke of geography, Ivy offers the most spectacular views of any place I’ve ever seen in Ontario.  When you turn off highway 27 and head toward Ivy, the sky opens up in front of you and you feel as though you’re truly entering God’s own country.  Rounding a corner, Ivy rises up above you on a small crest.  If this were Scotland, a minor castle would not be at all out of place.  And once you arrive in Ivy, the land drops off to the West offering a panoramic view of the Blue Mountains from Collingwood in the North to well South of Orangeville – a span of more than 80 miles.  From my mother’s porch, the sunsets are breathtaking.  My father used to watch the sun go down and more often than not comment “that just put another ten bucks on the price of the house.”  My parents found their home by going for a Sunday drive and talking to a local farmer who soon became our neighbor.

But maybe that’s why Ivy has no tourists.  It’s too beautiful a place to just visit.





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