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“I think it’s in the Constitution that you have to have a puzzle at the cottage,” jokes Brigitte Gall. She and her husband, photographer Michael Bainbridge, founded TheOccurrence, a toy and game company, in 2018 after watching their friends huddle around a puzzle of van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” on a freezing New Year’s Eve. “We looked at each other and had that little lightbulb moment,” recalls Brigitte. “We could make puzzles with Michael’s photography.”

They launched the company just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. (“We accidentally opened up a jigsaw puzzle business at exactly the right time,” says Michael.) By now they’ve made roughly 30,000 puzzles; TheOccurrence specializes in niche Canadiana imagery including scenes from Ontario cottage country. The Road Trip series—featuring road signs from areas including Haliburton and Lanark County—is a favourite of Brigitte and Michael’s. They spent days traveling around cottage country and photographing the signs. “It was really surprising, actually, to see how much the culture of a place was evident in the road signs,” says Michael “And it’s fun to capture that for each of the different places.”

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Brigitte is a long-time Haliburton cottager, and the couple moved to the area full-time in 2009. They support the community however they can, from manufacturing the puzzles in-house to using environmentally conscious materials such as 100 per cent recycled board and paper, and water-based inks for printing. Brigitte takes pride in the puzzles and the company. “We’re like the Ravensburger of the north.”

This article was originally published in the August 2022 issue of Cottage Life.

After Paul Turner’s friends on Bay Lake, Ont., Rob and Patti Tilley, built a wood-fired pizza oven nearly three years earlier, Paul’s teenaged son, Jack, suggested the family start a pop-up pizza joint.

“We all laughed at the thought of pizza delivery by speedboat,” says Paul. Until they stopped laughing and thought, Why not? And why not use the cash for a good cause? “A local public school had lost a grant that funded its breakfast program. It was an easy decision as to where we’d donate the money.”

So, last year, the Turner family of four, along with friends and neighbours on the lake, grouped together to pull off a one-night, lake-wide pizza party. They made and delivered 44 pizzas in four hours. And the service was excellent: “From oven to dock it was three minutes,” says Paul. “It was kind of amazing.”

The team was organized. The kids went dock-to-dock ahead of time handing out order forms; Paul’s wife, Jennifer, made a spreadsheet to track the orders; and “We kept things simple,” says Paul. “We only offered a choice of four toppings: cheese, pepperoni, green pepper, and pineapple. Because I like pineapple.”

Paul bought the dough and sauce and ordered the boxes online, but everything else was donated. Ultimately, Bay Lake Pizza raised $600 for the school.

Paul was surprised by how many people ordered pizza, but not by how many people offered to help. “That’s just the nature of our community.”

This story was originally published as part of the collection “Better Together,” featuring inspiring cottager community initiatives, in the June/July 2020 issue of Cottage Life magazine.

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