I moved to Waterloo in 2007 to take a job at BlackBerry as a software engineer. I planned to stay a few years, save some money, and probably move on. Eighteen years later my daughter has grown up here, my career took the long way around, and my Saturdays still follow a rhythm I fell into in my first summer.
This is not a "top 10 things to do in Kitchener-Waterloo" list — you can find fifty of those already. It is just four places I keep coming back to, and what they taught me about how good Waterloo Region is at being a good place to live.
1. St. Jacobs Farmers' Market
For the first ten or eleven years my daughter was small enough that Saturday mornings had a fixed shape: get up early, drive out to St. Jacobs, park in the field, and split up the mission. She wanted the apple fritters. I wanted fresh raspberries and the sourdough loaf that used to sell out by ten. We had a deal that she could pick one thing that wasn't fruit — usually the fritter, sometimes a jar of local honey — and she'd try one new fruit in return. That is how I found out my kid likes gooseberries.
Everything about that market rewards showing up. The Mennonite baked-goods stalls at the north end. The knife sharpener who has been there for as long as I have been going. The corn husks in July. The maple syrup vendors who remember your face after two years. I have watched my daughter grow from a stroller passenger to a teenager who could navigate the whole market herself, and then to someone who is twenty and moves through it like a local because that is what she is.
Whenever people ask me what to see if they are visiting Kitchener-Waterloo for a weekend, this is the first thing I say. Not because it is the flashiest thing, but because it captures what Waterloo Region actually is — small towns and farmland twenty minutes from a research park, and none of that feels contrived.
2. Waterloo Park
For years, if I wanted to think, I would just walk into Waterloo Park. It is the plainest of my four places on this list and by far the one I have used the most. The Lions Lagoon still feels theatrical every time. The little zoo — always a mild controversy, always beloved — was where my daughter first learned to say the word "bison". The Silver Lake bandshell has hosted more free concerts than I can count.
The park is also a good barometer for how the city changes. The LRT went in during the mid-2010s and now stops right at the park's edge, which turned it from a place you drove to into a place people from Kitchener could hop over to in ten minutes. Uptown Waterloo built out on the north side. THEMUSEUM was already going strong in downtown Kitchener but eventually opened enough joint programming with the region to make the park a proper cultural anchor, not just green space.
If someone new moves to Waterloo and asks me one thing to do their first weekend, I still send them to Waterloo Park with no other agenda. You can spend three hours there and figure the rest out from what you overhear.
3. The Gaslight District in Cambridge
Cambridge is a twenty-minute drive south of Waterloo and for years it was not really on my map for weekends. That started to change when the Gaslight District opened along the Grand River in Galt, turning the old Tiger Brand factory site into a mixed-use quarter with restaurants, a courtyard for outdoor concerts, and — crucially for me — a good bookshop and a very good burger place.
I bring visitors here now because it is the clearest sign that Waterloo Region is more than Waterloo. Cambridge has been quietly getting more interesting for a decade, and the Gaslight District is the front door.
The courtyard is where the district shows off. Through the summer it cycles through outdoor movie nights, live-music weekends, and pop-up markets — I usually check the Cambridge events page on a Friday just to see what is on. And when the ribfest comes to town, we make a point of going; smoke from the ribbers hangs over the whole quarter and the courtyard turns into a proper street party.
I mention Gaslight not because it is the best thing in Cambridge — Galt's downtown is beautiful, the Mill Race Festival every August is worth an afternoon, and the Cambridge Highland Games are a genuine surprise every year — but because it is the easiest introduction. Park once, walk everywhere, eat, listen to whatever band is playing in the courtyard, and it is an evening. When my daughter was old enough to want to plan her own outings, this is where she would take her friends. That is a good sign for a place.
4. Stratford Festival
Once a year, sometimes twice, we drive out to Stratford. It is a fifty-minute trip through gently rolling farmland and by the time you park by the Avon River you feel like you have gone further than that. The Stratford Festival is one of North America's largest classical theatre festivals and it lives in four beautiful theatres in a town of thirty-two thousand people, which is a wonderfully absurd fact that stops feeling absurd once you have been.
I am not going to write a theatre review. I will say instead that if you have a good day at Stratford — a lunch by the river, a swan count, a matinee, an early dinner, and a drive back at sunset — you have one of the best days in Ontario. My daughter came with us for the first time when she was eleven, hated it and slept through most of the play, then asked to come back at fourteen and understood immediately why we kept going. That is the pattern with Stratford. You take people who do not get it, and eventually they do.
Why I built NearbyToday
I am writing this on a Saturday morning. I will probably head to St. Jacobs in an hour. And the reason NearbyToday exists is that all four of the places I have written about here — the market, the park, the Gaslight District, Stratford — publish their events on completely different calendars, in completely different formats, that I used to check by hand every Saturday morning to figure out my day.
I built the site the way I did because I wanted a single place that pulled from all of them — plus the city calendars, Explore Waterloo Region, THEMUSEUM, the libraries, Ontario Parks, and every tourism board and university event feed I could get my hands on. The site is free, it is mine, and it exists because eighteen years of Saturdays have taught me that Waterloo Region rewards paying attention.
If any of the four places above are new to you, take that as a starting point. Browse the Waterloo events page or the Cambridge events page to see what is on this week. And if you have somewhere you keep going back to that is not already on NearbyToday — tell me. I am always adding sources based on what actual residents use.
— Abdullah, Waterloo, ON