WIDE OPEN SPACES
Ever dream of leaving the city life behind for your own little patch of land in the country? Ride shotgun with us as we test four commutes, take a tour of some rural routes to find out if going back to the land is for you, and meet four Ottawa-area families who ditched the hustle and bustle of the city in favour of a quieter, simpler life away from the bright lights and traffic. Was it worth it? For these families, there’s no life like it
Is the country life for you? Laura Byrne Paquet suggests four rural towns — Almonte, Chelsea, Manotick, and Navan — for you to consider. But if the distance is a bridge too far, she's also found some urban neighbourhoods — Central Park, Crystal Beach, Heart’s Desire, and Rothwell Heights — that offer a rural flavour. And Amy Allen followed the compass to test drive some of the most common commutes into the city.
WIDE-OPEN SKIES, SLEEPY BACK ROADS, a rambling front porch: country life sometimes really is like a John Denver song.
Add a clutch of cackling hens and a big old harvest moon, and it’s all the frazzled urbanite can do not to empty his bank account and go rural.
More elbow room lured Lee-Anne and Tony Smith. The couple pulled up their Kanata stakes and resettled in a woody subdivision outside Richmond a decade ago.
“We knew we were going to be starting a family,” says LeeAnne, now a mother of two. “We wanted to have room for kids to play in the backyard. And to have a dog.”
Ivo Valentik moved from urban Carlington to six acres south of Metcalfe with his wife, Teri Loretto, and their young son Uly in 2014.