☕️☕️☕️ out of 5
By Cathalynn Cindy Labonte-Smith
Walking into The Strait Coffee in Wilson Creek on the Sunshine Coast, you instantly feel like you’re in a cafe in the alpines, with classic wood tables, benches and chairs. In fact, you’re almost there as they’re located at the turn off to Dakota Ridge. At Dakota Ridge you can chain up and head into the pristine enchanted trails for snow-shoeing, cross-country skiing, sledding or snowmobiling. In the summer, you can mountain bike, dirt bike or 4X4, although there’s active logging so exercise extreme caution.
I’ve done a few snow-shoeing trips in the past and come back down for a hearty meal and a creamy hot chocolate at The Strait afterwards. However, today I’m meeting with my writing companions for lunch, then our second writing sesh of the day. Our first one being at Wheatberries in Gibsons at our usual Friday morning meet up.
I’m not wired in today, as I’m editing a paper copy of DH’s last chapter of his second book to be published by Apress this spring, Programming with 64-Bit Arm Assembly Language. DH informs me that the wifi is always flaky. Neither are there plug-ins available for my companions, that have aged laptops with special needs.
What The Strait does have is food, glorious food, to fuel our hard-working brains.
My soup and sandwich are as delicious and filling as they look in the picture above. We were lucky to arrive before the lunch rush, as the line is now long and the tables filled up. As is the case of most cafes with quality freshly made meals, the service is on slow time.
I give a quarter of my club sandwich over to DH, who can barely manage it after his macaroni and cheese. DH is an athletic active six foot three inch tall man with a high metabolism, who usually has no problem finishing up what I can’t eat.
If you lack inspiration, there’s a free library available within the cafe to choose something to read until the muse comes to you. (Ignore the garbage can in the shot and focus on the craftsman style stained glass.)
The greatest gift is the passion for reading.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Pro Tip
A page a day is all you need to write to make a big writing project into a manageable one. In about the length of time it takes to sip one cup of coffee or tea, you can draft one double-spaced page.
The coffee beans are roasted by them and is of the high quality you’d expect from an indie roaster. I enjoy their mellow Americanos. While business is brisk, I don’t find that they’re trying to push you out the door, that’s just not the Coaster way. Especially, with that twee library tucked in the corner. I think other cafes would do well to follow their example, instead of just offering local papers. It’s a 20 minute drive on the narrow twisty highway from my house, but always worth the trouble of the evergreen-lined drive.
4330 Sunshine Coast Highway, Sechelt https://www.straitcoffee.ca/
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