Some places begin as destinations. You arrive for a few days, maybe a week, take in the scenery, eat at the local restaurants, and then return to wherever you normally live. You think of the place as a getaway – a day-trip or week-long trip destination where other people seem to have built their lives.
But every once in a while, something strange happens. A place that started as a temporary stop slowly begins to feel like somewhere you could actually live.
Tourist towns and vacation regions all over the world have this quiet dual identity. Visitors see one version of the place while residents see another.
In the summer, places like Buckhorn in the Kawarthas come alive with boats, cottages, busy patios, and long weekends by the lake. The roads fill with trucks and SUVs hauling boats and other summer paraphernalia. Restaurants buzz with people who have escaped the city for a few days.
But when the visitors leave, the place doesn’t disappear. People still live there.
They buy groceries and they plow their snow in the winter. They run businesses, send their kids to school, and walk the same streets and roads every day. The town shifts from Facebook-worthy scenery to daily life.
I had visited the Kawarthas many times over the years before I ever considered living here. Like most visitors, I experienced it the way tourists do – as a beautiful place to spend a weekend or a week.
The thought of actually building the next chapter of my life here never really crossed my mind. Until it did.
That moment – when a place stops feeling like a destination and starts feeling like a possibility – is subtle. It’s not a dramatic realization that you usually look for. It’s more like a thought that appears one day out of nowhere. “I could actually live here.” I sensed it when I walked into a chain hotel in the nearby city for a “checking out the area again” visit in the summer of 2023. It was when I walked into the hotel lobby that I thought, “I’m home.”
The actual town of Buckhorn doesn’t have any hotel or motel chains, and I’m kind of picky about where I stay. Maybe that “I’m home” is why I never got homesick for my previous city or why I haven’t been back since, even though it is only 250 kilometers away. It’s been said that it takes about two years after moving to realize a place is home and think, “I live here now.” Me? A few minutes.
Once that idea of “I could live here,” hits, you start seeing the place differently. Instead of noticing only the scenery, you begin imagining routines. Where would I buy groceries? Where would I go for a walk in the winter?
Who actually lives here year-round and what do they do? What would an ordinary Tuesday afternoon look like? The place becomes real in a different way. This happens in towns all over the world.
You see it in coastal communities in Nova Scotia. You see it in mountain towns like Banff. You see it in desert towns like Bisbee, Arizona. Places that started as mining towns, fishing villages, or tourism hubs slowly become home to people who never originally planned to stay.
Sometimes people move there intentionally and sometimes life nudges them in that direction. Many times, people simply arrive and never quite leave.
I experienced something similar earlier in my life when work took me to Kitchener in July of 1996. At the time, I assumed it would be temporary. Maybe 10 years maximum, I figured. Long enough to work, build some experience, and then move on to something else.
But life rarely unfolds the way we expect. I met my future ex-wife there. One year turned into five, five turned into ten, and before I knew it, nearly three decades had passed. I had built a life in a place I once assumed would only be a stop along the way.
That seems to be how many lives unfold. Very few people can look back and say everything happened exactly according to plan. More often than not, our lives are shaped by a series of small decisions, relationships, and circumstances that gradually anchor us in a particular place.
Tourist towns often illustrate this in the most interesting way.
Visitors arrive looking for scenery or relaxation. Some of them eventually realize they are also drawn to something less obvious – the pace of life, the rhythm of the seasons, the sense of community that tends to develop in smaller places.
A town that once felt like an escape begins to feel like a potential home. And over time, for some people, it becomes exactly that.
Places like Buckhorn or Bisbee have two lives: the one visitors experience for a few days, and the one residents live every day of the year. Both are real. But the second one – the everyday life behind the beautiful scenery – is where the deeper story of a place actually unfolds.
johnberkovich.com 