🏖️ Beach Weather 🗺️ A Beloved Mural Saved 🏅 Kingston's Olympic Week 🐢 160 Kilometres and Turtles 🗓️ Events & More | 🔦 August 10, 2026

The Cover

🏖️ On the Cover: The Best Kind of Hot

Local Spotlight

🔦 Several amazing local spotlight articles are coming up soon !

Kingston & Area Local News

🗳️ Nominations Close August 21 for Kingston’s Municipal Election

📱 A Kingston Gallery Owner Is Making the Art Come Off the Wall

🗺️ The Wolfe Island Ferry Mural Is Being Saved, and a Pink Sticky Note Said So First

Community Champions

🎒 More Than 1,800 Kids Got a Backpack Last Year, and the Drop-Off Closes August 14

🍕 Domino’s Is Now BGC South East’s Pizza Guy, and That Is Bigger Than It Sounds

🏛️ City Hall Has Free Exhibit Space, and It Wants Your Group’s Story

New Events In and Around Kingston

🗡️ FEATURED EVENT: The First Ironwood Fantasy Fair | The Spire | August 15

📚 FEATURED EVENT: Yann Martel and Iain Reid Are Nine Days Out | The Spire | August 19

🎼 FEATURED: Cataraqui Chamber Music Festival 2026 | The Spire | August 5 to 19

🪘 A Free Indigenous Cultural Workshop With Robert Spade | The Spire | August 11

🏅 Fifty Years Since the Olympics Came to Our Water | Portsmouth Olympic Harbour | August 11 to 15

🧸 The Teddy Bear Party Has a Pool This Year | BGC South East, 1300 Bath Road | August 15

🥾 The Frontenac Challenge Is Back, and This Year’s Theme Is Turtles | Frontenac Provincial Park | September 1 to October 31

Events Calendar

It’s gotten too long to include here in the summary! Click Events Calendar to see our list for the next few days.

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Our sponsor Kingston Pickleball Club has seven indoor courts on Gardiners Road, air conditioned and open seven days a week, so the heat, the rain and the humidex are somebody else's problem.

Never picked up a paddle? Eight certified coaches cover everything from Learn to Play through advanced instruction. The players voted the club Best of Kingston & Area for 2026, and the whole place has just come through a floor-to-ceiling renovation. More on that Thursday.

ICYMI: a handful of players with portable nets and a roll of tape built the club Kingston plays in now. Read the full spotlight on Kingston Spotlight.

We save this space for local businesses worth knowing. Drop us a line.

We are deep into the part of summer that disappears the moment you look away. So here is Gord Downie Pier on a hot afternoon, doing exactly what it was built to do. If the forecast holds, there is still plenty of this left, and not much of it. Go get in the water.

🔦 Several amazing local spotlight articles are coming up soon, including the comeback story of the Kingston WritersFest, and how Awesome Kingston helps fund valuable micro-projects that making our community better !

Ever read a council decision and thought you could do better? There is a form for that, and a clock on it. Kingston elects a mayor, district councillors and school board trustees on Monday, October 26, and anyone who wants a name on that ballot has until 2 p.m. on Friday, August 21 to file nomination papers with the City of Kingston. Candidates have to be Canadian citizens, at least 18, and living in Kingston or renting or owning property here. The City would rather you booked an appointment than turned up cold. Not running? Confirm you are on the voters’ list at RegisterToVoteON.ca before Wednesday, August 12, and there is more on the whole election at Get Involved Kingston.

Read the full story at: City of Kingston

David Dossett has spent the past few weeks pointing his phone at his own paintings and watching them move. The owner of Martello Alley and Martello on Brock has been testing Augify, a Canadian augmented reality platform that turns a flat thing, a canvas, a menu, a museum piece, into something a customer can scan and watch come to life. Snap, upload, share, no tech skills required, and the app is free. Dossett reckons it is a low-cost way for small businesses, museums and tourism organisations to hand people a memory instead of a receipt, and he is taking that pitch to the Canadian Museum Marketing Conference in Ottawa in October.

Read the full story at: The Kingston Whig-Standard

Somebody stuck a small pink note on the bottom right corner of the framed map hanging in the Wolfe Island ferry terminal: TO BE SALVAGED. The building is slated for demolition, and island cottager Margaret Dochoda had written an open letter to the Ministry of Transportation asking what would become of the artwork. An MTO spokesperson told Kingstonist the ministry plans to preserve the mural and relocate it to the new terminal. The piece is a print of a painting by Rachel Horne, whose family ran Horne’s Ferry across to Cape Vincent, drawn like an old chart with the island, its neighbours and their place names. Her son Bruce and fellow islander Billy Bolton hung it themselves, in an oak frame Bolton built, and it has been there since the terminal opened in 1990.

Read the full story at: Kingstonist

School starts sooner than any of us want to admit, and the basics run $200 to $300 a student once you add up a backpack, a lunch bag, binders and a calculator. United Way KFL&A’s Backpack Program got more than 1,800 kids and youth kitted out last year, working with schools and youth agencies across Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington. Donations go until Friday, August 14 at the United Way office, 417 Bagot Street, and at Cataraqui Centre’s Centre Court, 945 Gardiners Road. Backpacks, lunch bags, pens, pencils, rulers, math sets, markers and scientific calculators are what they need most, gender-neutral colours preferred, and money covers whatever does not come in. “We have teens who see the backpacks as a fresh start to their school year,” Shawn Quigley of Youth Diversion said in a release from United Way KFL&A.

Read the full story at: United Way KFL&A

Domino’s Pizza Kingston is now the exclusive pizza provider for BGC South East at the West End Club, the East End Club and The Bunker, which reads like a catering note until you get to the rest of it. The partnership covers food donations, event sponsorships, vouchers and fundraising, and it is anchored by the Pink Shirt Day campaign each February, when participating Kingston locations raise money for anti-bullying work and for BGC’s inclusion programs. Those reach more than 1,500 children through individual and group enhanced supports, with a team of over ten Enhanced Support Workers helping kids with disabilities take part year round. Jeff Weston, who owns all six Kingston stores, said in a release from BGC South East that “giving back to local youth means building a better future for all of us.” There is a pizza in it for readers, too: the first 100 families to buy Teddy Bear Party tickets get a voucher for a free large.

Read the full story at: Kingstonist

If your group has a story, a box of photographs and nobody in particular to tell it to, the City of Kingston is offering you a wall. Your Stories, Our Histories is into its third year of handing community groups free one-year exhibit spaces at City Hall, with room for written stories, photos, mementos and small objects. This year’s lineup shows the range: Joe’s Music Mill, Kingston’s role in the 1976 Olympic Games, the Limestone Beekeepers’ Guild, Kingston’s Drag community, and the Chinese Canadian Association of Kingston & District. Successful applicants work with City curators, install in spring 2027, and get their exhibit texts translated into French at no cost. Applications go through Get Involved Kingston and are reviewed on a rolling basis, so there is no deadline to miss. If the Olympic one caught your eye, keep reading: Kingston is marking that anniversary all week.

Read the full story at: City of Kingston

There is more happening around Kingston and area than most people ever hear about. The fundraiser that quietly hit its target. The volunteer nobody thought to thank in public. The shop on a side street that turns out to be somebody’s favourite place. We go looking for those every week and put them somewhere they can be found.

What happens next is not up to us. A story only travels as far as the people who pass it along, and that is the part we cannot do from here.

So here is the ask, and it is a small one. Think of one person who would like this, and send it their way. Not a list, not everybody you know. One.

Reading this because somebody sent it? Kingston Spotlight is free, and it lives at kingstonspotlight.ca.

Nine days from now, the same building hosting tomorrow’s workshop puts a Booker Prize winner on stage with a Kingston novelist. Ancient Myths, Modern Nightmares is the first event in KWF Presents, a new year-round series from Kingston WritersFest that brings authors to town when the timing works rather than only during festival week. Yann Martel, whose Life of Pi won the Booker and became an Oscar-winning film, will be in conversation with Iain Reid, the bestselling Kingston novelist behind I’m Thinking of Ending Things and Foe, both of which were also adapted for the screen. Martel’s Son of Nobody retells the Trojan War through the eyes of an ordinary soldier; Reid’s A New Kind of Clean, co-written with filmmaker Ellie Foumbi, follows an actress whose big break turns out to be anything but. Tickets are on sale through Showpass, and full details are on the Kingston WritersFest site.

A wizard hosts the mainstage. There are walk-up sword lessons, workshops, a marketplace of local makers, a witch handing out free potions, and a friendly meteor dragon named Gaasyendietha on loan from Blades of Glory. That is the daytime, and it is all ages. After dark the first Ironwood Fantasy Fair turns nineteen plus and becomes The Empty Throne, a catered ball at The Spire with a live band, a DJ and a plot. The organisers call it “a one-day immersive fantasy fair featuring performances, workshops, vendors, and a magical evening soiree”, which rather undersells the dragon. Tickets are here, and our spotlight has the story of how a Kingston sword school ended up building a fantasy world for a day.

This one lands the day after this issue does, so consider it a nudge. Robert Spade leads a free public Indigenous Cultural Workshop at The Spire on Tuesday, August 11, with Indigenous drumming, singing, dancing and storytelling. Spade is an Assistant Professor at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music and McGill’s Senior Indigenous Cultural Advisor, and he designed the Indigenous Cultural Corridor for the Cataraqui Chamber Music Festival, which is the run this workshop sits inside. The Corridor is free as well, the festival carries on through mid-August, and we wrote about how the two fit together a couple of weeks ago. Full schedule at harmonairemusique.ca.

Fifty years ago Kingston hosted the sailing events of the Montreal 1976 Olympic Games, and the city is giving that five days rather than an afternoon. It opens on Tuesday, August 11 with the replica 1976 torch coming back to town, carried alongside Canadian sailors who competed here and other Kingston Olympians. On Wednesday, August 12 the Portsmouth District Community Association and CORK host their free outdoor movie night at Portsmouth Olympic Harbour, and the film is Cool Runnings, which is about a bobsled team, at a sailing anniversary, in August. We respect the commitment. Kona Ice on site and free parking. Last year’s screening drew more than 120 people.

Thursday, August 13 brings a free Heritage Hour on the 1976 sailing events at Memorial Hall on the second floor of City Hall, no registration, everyone welcome, and some of the 1976 participants in the room. That is the same building carrying this year’s Olympic exhibit, which we mentioned further up. Saturday, August 15 closes with a free Community Exhibition at the Harbour’s Sailroom, where anyone who was there in 1976 can book a no-cost table for their photographs, memories and souvenirs, with family activities alongside and a discount on same-day Kingston Penitentiary tickets for visitors. In between, Friday belongs to the sailors: an Olympians’ Regatta and Sail Canada’s Celebration of Sailing, both of which run without a public gallery, so we are telling you they exist rather than telling you to turn up.

Read the full story at: Sail Canada

New this year: an indoor pool. Pack a swimsuit. The Tamarack Teddy Bear Party brings more than 1,500 children and their teddy bears to BGC South East’s west end location at 1300 Bath Road, Unit A-2, on Saturday, August 15, and it has been a Kingston tradition long enough that some of the bears are second generation. Tickets are $5, or $10 with pool access, sold by timeslot, so pick your slot on the ticket page. There is a KidsZone with bouncy castles, face painting and a jungle gym, a Tomlinson Touch A Truck with a grader, a cement truck and a digger to climb on, and live music from Nicci Rea and the SweetiePies. Guardians stay with their kids. And per the partnership further up, the first 100 families to buy get a voucher for a free large pizza.

I have done this one seventeen times and I am signing up again. Friends of Frontenac run their annual hiking challenge in Frontenac Provincial Park from September 1 to October 31, at three levels: the full Frontenac Challenge is all 11 loops and trails, roughly 160 kilometres of them; the Frontenac Trek is any six loops, leaving out Doe Lake and Arab Lake Gorge; and the Junior Challenge is any six for under 12s. Every loop carries one yellow and red sign with a clue to record in your Challenge Log, and this year the clues are turtles. Registration is open now at $5, free for members, and it goes to $20 after Thursday, October 15. Answers are due by 11:59 p.m. on Saturday, October 31.

FEATURED: The Ironwood Fantasy Fair | The Spire | August 15

FEATURED: KWF Presents: Yann Martel and Iain Reid | The Spire | August 19

FEATURED: Cataraqui Chamber Music Festival 2026 | The Spire | August 5 to 19

🪘 FREE Indigenous Cultural Workshop With Robert Spade | The Spire | August 11

🔥 Kingston 1976 Olympic Torch Parade | Kingston | August 11

🎬 Free Outdoor Movie Night: Cool Runnings | Portsmouth Olympic Harbour, 53 Yonge St | August 12

📜 Heritage Hour: Kingston and the 1976 Olympic Sailing Events | Memorial Hall, City Hall | August 13

🎒 United Way KFL&A Backpack Program | United Way office, 417 Bagot St & Cataraqui Centre | July 27 to August 14

🏥 Health Adventures Camp | Canadian Museum of Health Care, 32 George St | August 10 to 14

🚪 UHKF Door-to-Door Monthly Donor Campaign | Kingston neighbourhoods | August 10 to 15

⛵ Kingston 1976 Community Exhibition | Portsmouth Olympic Harbour, 53 Yonge St | August 15

🗡️ The Ironwood Fantasy Fair | The Spire | August 15 | 🔦 Read our story

🧸 Tamarack Teddy Bear Party | BGC South East, 1300 Bath Rd | August 15

🎪 TK Fringe 2026: 17 Unjuried Shows | Tett Centre, 370 King St W | August 6 to 16

🧭 Discover L&A County MEGA Geocaching Event | Museum of L&A, 97 Thomas St E, Napanee | August 12 to 16

🗳️ Vote: 2026 Election Sticker Design Contest | Get Involved Kingston | to August 17

🎻 Cataraqui Chamber Music Festival 2026 | The Spire | August 5 to 19

🏛️ Free Fridays at the Museum of Lennox & Addington | Museum of L&A, 97 Thomas St E, Napanee | Fridays to August 28

🐱 Groovy Cats Art Colouring Book Fundraiser for Napanee Kitten Rescue | Napanee | to September 8

Festivals, free weekly programs, museum seasons and every farmers’ market we know about, all in one place and updated with every issue. See the full Kingston Events Calendar, and bookmark it while you are there.

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