Merry Christmas from Wilno Station Inn

Thanks to all our friends and customers for your patronage in the past year and hope to see you all again in spring.

Tom and Joanne and our staff in 2007: Josh Hayes, Robin Vornweg, Krista Gansterer,Lotte Vornweg, Vanessa Killeen, Lois Losole, Ritzuko Honda and Pete, Provider of fine Pork Products, Christine of La Finca for fresh vegetables, MJ Rice at Riceland Farm for local beef and everyone who brought us goodies from their gardens.

And after a great year we are looking forward to our gala New Years Eve dinner featuring Robert Yeretch.

Then, its time to start closing things down...and anticipating our Jan 15 departure for our favorite Spanish village, Nerja on the Costa del Sol.

And Halinka decided that Santa should dance.

Old friends..Marie (Chippior) Finnerty and Robert Yeretch team up for a tune. Marie's grandmother used to own the house at 13 Sczypior street which is now part of our bed and breakfast....and Robert is the youngest brother of Diane Whitehead who used to own the Wilno General Store...above which, Tom and I lived for five years in our early days in Wilno. And Robert's niece, the dynamic and cheerful Cindy (Lou Who) worked with us in the early days of Wilno Station...No strangers here.

and the next night....another party with another group of dancers...

A lively party, as you can see.

Turkey after turkey...and finally this gigantic creature for a Barry's Bay business staff party...and besides this guy, they had ribs and salmon and still had room for chocolate mousse. It was a great evening with Robert Yeretch entertaining and we moved the tables for dancing and dance they did!!!

and snow....

And more snow.

And then there was snow.

And at the end of November, our annual Poetry in the Cafe afternoon ends with Barney McCaffrey reading "A Wilno Hills Christmas". A goodly crowd attended and we thought also of our poets and writers...Barry Goldie, Peter Ritchie and Lee Lafont who weren't here this year, as they are off in Russia building log houses and hopefully drinking lots of vodka and writing morose verse in the true angst-ridden Russian fashion.

Another "Philosopher's Cafe" hosted by Stan with Honest Frankie and Rev. Ken and Barney as special musical guests. We debated war and peace....an issue of interest in this area as we are so close to CFB Petawawa and we have friends, neighbours and relatives in Afghanistan.

Hunting season, once again in the Ottawa Valley. There were so many deer this year....everyone will have lots of venison in their freezers. The boys on the farm are making venison sausage and burger and we'll be invited out to dinner parties where the speciality of the host is "MVMVML" otherwise known as Madawaska Valley Moose and Venison Meatloaf." Right on, Barry!!

Gwenn and her friends enjoy lunch and some music in the cafe. It's become an annual event!! The singalong is fun!!

We hosted a birthday celebration for some of the Wilno girls....a good party and everyone had fun.

Mr Reiche at the abbatoir said Lulu was the fattest pig he had seen in thirty years. No wonder...she dined all summer on gourmet left overs from our cafe...everything from organic salad to chocolate cheesecake. And we usually threw in a bit of leftover beer for a treat on Friday night. It was a good life and she is now equally appreciated in her incarnation as delicious sausages.

preparing sausage for winter

Neighbour Pete's adventure in pig-raising turned out well and we had a day of sausage making in the kitchen. We borrowed the Zomers family sausage machine and Tom made chorizo and bratwurst and smoked some of them....delicious. We rendered the lard for pies and Pete ended the week with a grand pig roast in the snow at the Jacksons. It was minus 20 that day...but the piggy was delicious.

Wild Women in Wilno

And with the completion of our new wilderness gallery, we were pleased to host the Wild Women in Wilno exhibition featuring wilderness art by Joyce Burkholder, Linda Sorensen and Kathy Haycock.

These creative painters paddle, hike and snowshoe into the Ontario wilderness with brushes and easels and return with amazing images.

One of the highlights of our music series was a fabulous performance by alt-roots artist Cara Luft accompanied by Hugh MacMillan from Spirit of the West. Cara is touring with her new CD "The Light Fantastic".

Cara is a founding member of the Juno award winning group The Wailin Jenny's and is now doing her own thang....see her if she's in your town!!!!

We celebrated Tom's birthday with a great performance by Cris Cuddy and Dennis Delorme. Here's artist Linda Sorensen and Terry and Patrice Walsh enjoying the music....and Tom of course, wearing his usual black cap!

Dennis Delorme and Cris Cuddy

Our booklaunch for artist Horst Guillhauman was well attended by area notables such as the Reeve of Madawaska Township, John Hildebrand. Guillhauman's beautiful limited edition book documents his fifty year career as an artist and showcases his artistic career with vivid full page reproductions of his paintings and sketches.

And here we are transformed into an elegant environment for an afternoon wedding luncheon.

One of the most enjoyable things about our business is the constant variety of events and people.

This summer we had Vittles and Fiddles, a wedding, various lunches, lots of music, a couple of art openings and the usual outdoorsy gatherings of campers and canoeists and cottagers.

An annual event is the Great Sneezy Waters and Zeke Mazerak performance in the cafe. Here, Wilno's own Rev Ken Ramsden joins in with his fiddle.

The dramatic paintings are part of the Wild Women in Wilno show which is here in our cafe and the new lower gallery until Oct 8.

And outside, we replaced our old fading sign with a bright and shiny new one with a more modern script and style.

And we have plans for next year which include expanding our dining area into the sunroom overlooking the hills and moving our bar (actually building a new and longer bar) into the main room so we can save ourselves a lot of steps back and forth to the beer and wine fridge in the rear kitchen.

In between cooking, Tom is renovating the downstairs so we can open our new gallery for the Wild Women in Wilno show on Sept 1. We decided to use steel on the ceiling which gives the place a very distinctive look. We call it "agra-chic". The original idea came from the shop at Dad's farm, where they covered the walls of the old granary with steel to make a new workshop area.

Tom's sister sent us a clipping from some Seattle magazine which touts this as a very dynamic urban look....and Margaret and Ben have done their own house with this sort of steel on the back wall.

A funny song full of doggerel and wit...our server Krista is holding up the lyrics so Ian can refresh his memory...the beautiful canvases by Linda Sorensen on the walls of our Red Canoe Cafe are a fitting backdrop for most of Ian's music.

By Sept 1, we hope to have a new gallery open on the lower level. Tom has been plastering and painting in between kitchen time. We always swear there will be no major building projects on the go during the summer but rarely seem to be able to stick to it.

And one of the highlights of our year is always a visit and performance by Canadian songwriter Ian Tamblyn. This year, he was on his way back from a Voyageur canoe trip on Lake Superior. We've been listening a lot to his new CD called Superior- Spirit and Light...and so it was lovely to hear some of the songs performed live. I think the reason Ian's shows always have such dynamic intensity is because he is always involved in some new creative or travel project.

And in a rare foray into the world outside the inn, we managed to take part of an evening off on the long weekend in August no less, to attend the candlit lakefront reception for my niece Diana's wedding. Here is the lovely bride.

In the midst of all the summer busyness, I still manage to squeeze in our writers group meeting...we call ourselves the WWW which is the women writers in Wilno...here is Sandra showing us the mock up for the cover of her new novel...Mistress of the Sun. Jenifer also brought us the first draft of "Death and the Virgin" a mystery set in Mexico. This is Jenifer's third novel and Sandra's fourth. Me...I just rewrite the menus and keep this blog and hopefully will be able to pick up where I left off when we retire.

A quiet Wilno sunset over the hills. The red-roofed building houses our two suites. Hard to believe you are just on the edge of the village because all you see on three sides is the forested Wilno hills. You're a three minute walk from Heritage Park and the rest of the village.

Lovely hot summer weather in late July and early August made for lots of outdoor dining. The patio is an especially popular spot on Tuesday evenings when it seems that everyone for miles around heads to Wilno for Blues Night at the Wilno Tavern. Of course, they can't all fit in there for dinner so we have lots of diners here all getting revved up for an evening of dancing at the tavern. We ourselves are happy to close at ten and go home and lie abed listening to the music through the open windows...

Here's Laura and Tom working away in the kitchen at dinner time. Laura is the third of the Burchat sisters to work here...starting way back at the beginning in the late nineties with Leah, then Lynn and even brother Mark mowed lawns for us one year....but now Laura is off to college and there's no more little Burchats at home to follow in her footsteps.

And then there's Kirby, Yates and Mazurek whose lively bluegrass entertained us on two occassions this summer. Fiddlin Zeke has a deceptively rustic appearance which does nothing to disguise the fact that he is an accomplished classical musician....and also a bit of a clown when give the opportunity!! He'll be back again in September with Sneezy Waters. In the meantime, these three guys are having fun as a trio with all sorts of great old tunes.

We kicked off our third year of "Vittles and Fiddles" with old favorites, Glen Reid and "Rev" KenRamsden. Glen is a wonderful songwriter whose Heritage River CD is always on our cafe music rotation. "Rev" Ken is now a Wilno local and can be found fiddlin all around the area. Behind the musicians, you can see the gorgeous canvas by Linda Sorensen which was sold and shipped to Fort McMurray just after we took this photo.

Our entertainment season kicked off with Ana Miura who was touring with Dave Golden. She has ties to this area as her parents met in Combermere and she still visits friends at their cottage in Kashuby. The Ottawa Citizen calls her "one of the ten young rising stars in Canada." We believe them!

Here's neighbour Pete helping with the installation. It's a classic mid-June day in the Ottawa Valley with wispy clouds, a cool breeze and lots of mosquitos! We have lots of inn bookings already for the summer and its been steadily busy with shoppers and art buyers. So much work to do at this time of year...my gardening is not going well, as we have had too much cold, too much heat and then too much rain for my poor seedlings to really acclimatize.

Part of our new look this spring is a real red canoe atop the lovely old hand-hewn beams that John Foreman gave us. The new sign will be more visible to motorists coming down the hill and will reflect our increasingly Canadian sensibility in art, food and music...

So here we are once again, back from our rejuvenating holiday in Andalucia Spain. We arrived back in early April and were greeted by two major snowstorms. It had been our plan to reopen for Easter weekend but a combination of jet lag, cold weather and post-holiday inertia combined to delay our opening until the last week of April.

Here's Pete and Ritsuko all dressed in their finest kimonos on their way back from a social occassion. They dropped in to say hello on New Year's Eve day...Ritsuko helped out with serving on the New Year's Eve gala with Robert Yeretch and Pete kept company with Zigmund and Tomasz and various other local folk in for dinner and the music. After it was over, we all went over to the old General Store for a party and stayed out until almost three a.m.!!!It was a great evening and on New Years Day we made breakfast for our inn guests and then closed up for the season. Happy New Year and see you at Easter!!!