Hotel Belvedere– Kingston
            The Gananoque Inn – Ganaoque
            Athlone Inn – Gananoque

 By Arthur Milnes

It was the winter of 1988 and Kingston’s Hans Westenberg had a problem - a
big problem. Being the family doctor he is, Hans is used to dealing with
those serious things in life, so he wasn’t sweating as he hung up after
speaking with a very charged diplomat in Ottawa.

Through the windows of his office, he looked out over Kingston’s beautiful
 City Park and had his solution in seconds. Going for a stroll, he was soon
 standing in front of the structure, built in 1880, that was going to address                                  his problem: the Hotel Belvedere.
 
 Grinning like the Dutchman that he is, Hans soon went inside the historic hotel
 and it was there that he found his solution. He had decided to place his guests and
 their entourage at the Belvedere for three days, and he knew instinctively
 that he’d made the right choice.
 
 The guests he was charged with looking after wanted a place to unwind after
 a 14-hour flight from Holland. They wanted something nice, not pretentious,
 and above all else, they wanted to remain incognito.
 
 How he stayed calm I’ll never know. Hans, who is Honorary Vice Consul for
 the Netherlands in Canada, had just been asked to recommend a suitable
 hotel for some very special guests: The Queen of Holland and her Consort.
 
 Queen Beatrix and Prince Claus were scheduled to be the stars of an Official
 State Visit to Canada in May of that year.  A speech to Parliament was all written and ready, and they simply needed to unwind.
 
 “The Belvedere was perfect,” he says today, adding that he’ll always be
 grateful to hosts Donna Mallory and Ian Walsh. “I told them that it was a wedding
 anniversary, and that we were having friends over from Holland. I had to keep it a
 complete secret.”
 
 The Royals used the Belvedere as their home base for three days before being
 officially welcomed in Ottawa by the Prime Minister and the Governor
 General. Their secret never got out.

 Through various incarnations, the Belvedere has been a hotel since the 1920s; “the only
 reasonable place to stay between Montreal and Toronto,” a Vogue Magazine
 writer proclaimed in the 1940s.
 
 Royalty aside, it has seen its share of secrets. If you don’t believe me,
 listen to the words of Canada’s most mysterious Prime Minister, William Lyon
 Mackenzie King. “At 3:30, I went to the Belvedere and called on (hotel owner)
 Mrs. Fenwick,” King confided in his diary on October 20, 1925 while he was
 in Kingston for an election speech. “I had the most remarkable (session with
 a spiritualist) that I have ever had.”

 With his favourite medium at his side, Kingston’s Mrs. Bleaney, our Prime
 Minister was taken on an unforgettable journey to the other side writing
 page after page describing his visit to the hotel and his spiritual reading
 that day.
 
 As I walk up the steps of the Belvedere and enter
 its beautifully decorated common rooms, I am indeed transported back in
 time. On the terrace, where guests can be served their breakfast, it’s not
 hard to imagine life here in the 1920s. While Mackenzie King, Dutch Royalty
 and countless others have visited over the decades, I’d like to know the
 identity of the couple, who stayed regularly so many years ago, and who bathed in champagne, according to legend.  Or perhaps, who the couple was who starred in ‘Rendezvous’ trumpeted in the hotel’s literature that says the Belvedere was the site of at least one “affair of state.”
 
 With only twenty rooms, its feel is intimate, but as Hans Westenberg and his
 Royals discovered, far from pretentious.
 
 You see, this is what I love about life in Eastern Ontario. If you actually
 take the time to travel off Highway 401 and visit places like Kingston,
 Gananoque, Brockville and the whole Thousand Islands area, you’re guaranteed
 a “find” as my grandmother used to say, each and every time.
 
 With Mackenzie King’s visit to the Belvedere on my mind, I’m immediately
 drawn to the Gananogue Inn, ‘The Grand Old Lady’, when I visit Gananoque, a town of five thousand or so that is only minutes, but a world away, from Highway 401. It is also only twenty-five minutes from Kingston. I’d recommend you take Highway 2 and forsake Highway 401 forever!

With its commanding presence on the waterfront, you could say that in many ways the Inn is Gananoque. It began life in the 1870s as the Gananoque Carriage Works, but was an inn by 1896. With that much history, I’m sure that it has seen its fair share of Prime Ministers. Owner John Keilty chuckles when I ask him if any Right Honourable men, or women, have stayed there over the years.

“We had Jean Chretien, and countless security guards, a few years ago,” he says. “We created the Prime Minister’s Suite for him.”

“You make everything perfect for him and every other guest,” he adds when I ask how one prepares for a Prime Ministerial visit. “We’ve had everyone from Al Capone, to Anita Bryant, to Adrienne Clarkson. It’s the tranquillity of the water and the islands; that’s what attracts them here. You can travel the world, but you’ll be hard pressed to find anything that surpasses the Thousand Islands.”

Only recently, John says, two couples were up at the inn from the United States.  It was the forty-fourth summer that they have traveled to the Thousand Islands. “We’ve also had three generations come to the inn,” John says.

Born and bred in Gananoque, John has definite memories of the inn as a boy. What local doesn’t? I suspect that you are not really from the area if a member of your family, through the generations, hasn’t spent at least one night at the fifty-nine room inn, or held their wedding there.

As I go for a walk through the picturesque grounds, and then stare out over the St. Lawrence River on a crisp September afternoon, I realize just how right John is.

“It’s the lure of the river,” he later tells me when I ask what brought him home to this town after a successful career in Toronto. “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the river out of the boy.”

Nearby, I see the Athlone Inn and soon discover that owners, Miranda McMillan and her husband Jason, are also entrepreneurs drawn by the Thousand Islands from far off British Columbia to make a home, life and business in Gananoque. Their inn-mansion-home was built in 1877 and has also been a fixture of town life for generations.

Again, I find myself thinking of the Belvedere back in Kingston because the Athlone Inn is named after Lord Athlone who was Governor General of Canada during the Prime Ministership of my ‘friend’ Mackenzie King. In another interesting twist, it turns out that Athlone occupied Rideau Hall during the Second World War, and was the man who signed the order declaring an Ottawa hospital room Dutch soil so that a Dutch Royal could be born in her native land. The Royal Family had fled Holland to escape the Nazis.

So, I’ve come full circle during my little tour of my part of Ontario. Now do you see what happens if you take the time to leave highway 401 and do some exploring?

Since I began in the pages of Mackenzie King’s diary, perhaps I should end there. If you don’t think a day, weekend or lifetime in this area is something that you’re interested in experiencing, take it from a former Prime Minister.

“After luncheon, the party went by yacht as far as Kingston through the Thousand Islands,” he wrote on August 5, 1927. “It was a perfect day, a perfect sail, the setting exquisite, the passage smooth.”

Now, that’s my kind of day, and you’ll only find it here.