Me and the Farm Manager took a tour over to the Red Bay Lodge today, to check out the fish and chips.
From what I hear, and this is all hearsay, the joint was boarded up for a few years. It's one of those old-school summer resorts, a short walk from the shores of Lake Huron. Popular with a working class who couldn't afford their own cottage but wanted to take the family on a vacation. They had rooms in the main lodge and then cabins. There's places just like it all around the Great Lakes. Now that our betters have re-jigged the economy in such a way that working people can no longer afford vacations, these old-school lodges have been struggling.
So it was good news when a young couple decided to bring the place back to life, and I guess they were just getting on top of things when the virus struck. After a complete shut-down in the spring they were trying to nurse the business back from the dead, when they got their insurance renewal, which informed them that their annual insurance premium had gone from seventeen to fifty-four thousand dollars.
That seems grotesquely unfair to me. For that young couple struggling to get a business going, they're already up against a covid regimen that favours the big chains. Then their insurance company pulls this? You can bet the chains aren't paying anywhere near that kind of money for equivalent square footage.
You'd almost think there's a plot afoot to drive the last independents out of business. Oddly enough, billionaire Warren Buffet (no. 6 on the Forbes billionaire rankings) owns a gaggle of insurance companies, and his pal Bill Gates (no. 3) is rumoured to be the mastermind behind the lockdowns...
Which is why we figured it was the right thing to do to drive out to Red Bay.
As for the fish and chips, highly recommended!
