What is Daytripping?
A brief company history written by the publisher.

To put it in the most boring possible way, Daytripping is a travel guide. To be a bit more specific, it’s a free, bi-monthly paper that promotes a great number of the most unique towns, events and shops in Southern Ontario. It’s not your typical magazine because it’s printed on newsprint. It’s not a newspaper because there is no news - lots of stories, no news. Are you still reading this?

To be a bit more confusing still, Daytripping doesn’t have a reporter. Our readers are our writers, which makes for an interesting read.  Most of them are from southern Ontario, but a few are from as far away as British Columbia and Nova Scotia.

Daytripping has moved to 2684 Lakeshore Rd. in Bright's Grove, Ontario. Daytripping began in a gift shop in Petrolia, "Canada's Victorian Oil Town," in 1995. Daytripping could be described as a dream come true, even though I couldn’t have imagined its enormous success when first starting out. To understand how it came to be, and what makes it so special, please read on.

John Redden is a friend and former customer who owned "Under the Maple Tree," an elegant gift shop in Petrolia. He had mentioned an idea for a paper to me several times over the course of two years but I never thought much about it until he actually showed me an example of what he meant. The paper he dug out of his basement was torn, faded and bent - but the pages inside covered almost every unique antique and craft shop for miles around. Almost all of it was advertising and it covered a large area of the U.S. There were no articles, but he had kept it for almost two years - for the ads! You have to understand that to an advertising salesman, this was amazing. So John Redden is officially credited with the idea for Daytripping, but our paper turned out to be considerably different than the example I saw that day.

Needing shops to advertise, I began by asking Jane Teskey who owned a local folk art shop. By the time I approached Jane I was working on a craft and antique paper that would cover all of Lambton County but she set me straight and encouraged me to cover all of Southwestern Ontario. There was now the better part of four Canadian counties to visit and it was time to hit the road.

When I arrived in towns like Ridgetown, Blenheim and Kingsville for the first time, I didn’t know a soul. Surprisingly, I walked into the best shops I could find and was not only well received, but encouraged. Many of the people I met sent me to other shops that they felt would be a good fit for this new paper. Some of the customers that took a chance on me then are still in Daytripping today... and they still get the best deals. The strange thing is that I wasn’t even sure that there would be a second issue, and I had no idea that it would be three times as large as the first. Seven years later, Daytripping covers an area from Windsor to Niagara Falls and is prominently displayed in most every unique shop along the way.

Within one week after the release of our first issue in March of 1995, I had fielded more calls from people asking to advertise than I had received in the previous year. The response forced me to put a number of other projects aside in order to concentrate on Daytripping and while I was still trying to figure out if "Daytripping" was a good enough name, the most amazing thing happened. One of my customers had backed out of the first issue and the half page space was filled with an eleventh hour recipe column... featuring the only four recipes I knew. At the bottom of that article we asked any readers to send in their recipes, stories, etc. and they actually did! Sue MacKellar and Mr. & Mrs. Chapman were our first contributors.

While the shops, stops, towns and events are the reason for producing this paper, the contributors changed our initial idea into something worthy of the unique shops we promote. Our readers had the opportunity to help build this paper and by meeting the challenge, they have made "The Daytripper" their own. Most of our readers realize that Daytripping is a very special paper, but it is due to the contributions from many writers and artists. Speaking of artists, our front covers have presented the works of Barbara Perrin, Elsie Thoonen, Laura Berry, Shelley McVittie, Trisha Romance, Tammy Laye and Catherine Simpson, just to name a few.

In the early years, we would have created the ads and then tried to find enough stories, photos and tid-bits to fill the pages, but due to the input from our readers, we now have a small library packed with very good articles, poems, recipes and more to choose from. More than anything else, I love to say "Our Readers are Our Writers." People that had never before written to a paper, now have faithful readers who pick up Daytripping to read their work. Unless you’re a local, you’ve probably never heard of Maxine Miner, Eileen Edwards or Kenneth Lapointe. They’re not famous…yet! The tales we’re told are truly inspiring and Daytripping has become a part of the fabric of southern Ontario.

Daytripping is a surprisingly small business to be calling itself the "Biggest Little Paper in Canada." There are six of us in all now: Laurie Dunlop and myself both came from an advertising background; Carrie Ann Timm had never worked as an editor, graphic designer, or webmaster before coming on board after college in early 1997; Carla Lepore started with us in 2004 as a graphic designer fresh out of college and has now learned the many aspects of publishing a magazine. Rhonda Long successfully began trying her hand at sales with us in 2005.  Our newest and very welcome addition, Connie McFadden, comes to us with years of experience in publishing. We have a great team, and as a result, the job of producing the paper has become easier over the years, even though the paper has grown immensely.

Daytripping itself is fun...both as a job and as something to do on your day off. Most people don’t have time for all the extended holidays they would like to take, but there is so much to do in your own backyard that daytrips can become the best getaways of all. Many of our readers keep a copy of Daytripping in their car. It’s a fact that 72% of the tourism in southwestern Ontario comes from within Ontario. It is people travelling from Brantford to Port Dover for the day, or Londoners getting out of the city and driving off to Tillsonburg or Grand Bend. They’re looking for a new road to go down, a new shop to explore and an easy, affordable adventure.

So, Daytripping is a travel guide designed to promote unique businesses in southern Ontario. It’s ours, but it’s also yours. Anyone that has written to us or even read Daytripping has helped to build it from the ground up. It is theirs!

Hopefully, our website will encourage you to visit Southern Ontario and give you an idea of the best shops and towns to visit. However, once you’re here you’ll want to find a copy of Daytripping at an Ontario Travel Centre or at one of the shops listed on our Destinations page.

Thanks for reading!