AIR MILES Brought Us Closer To Hot Chocolate With Born Ruffians

This past weekend, Notable Life headed up to Collingwood, ON for Family Day Weekend to hit the slopes, eat some Beavertails and check out the AIR MILES Toque Tour! Spending the long weekend outside the city is definitely something we were pumped for to begin with, but then we got the heads up from our friends at Air Miles that there was an exclusive opportunity going for AIR MILES Collectors up at Blue Mountain. We’ve been following this Toque Tour pop up at ski hills across Canada with surprise hot-chocolate and live entertainment. AIR MILES has definitely given us the heads up on some fun opportunities in the past, like exclusive meet and greets with Arkells and even tickets to Arcade Fire! So we knew we wouldn’t want to miss this exclusive offer.

When we got up to Blue Mountain, it was extremely hard to miss the Toque Tour. The toque stood out amongst the skiiers and snowboarders, shaped like a big blue igloo. In order to get inside the rustic cafe, you had to scan your  AIR MILES collector’s card as your ticket.  

It’s safe to say that if you live in Ontario and don’t have an AIR MILES Collector’s card, you’re seriously missing out. Young Canadians can seriously cash in on miles at places like Shell, the LCBO, and partake in dozens of exclusive perks just for being an Air Miles Collector. I was more than happy to have mine on hand for free entry into the warm cafe.

Once inside, I loaded up my own personal hot chocolate with mini-marshmallows, toffee bits, and chocolate chips, for the perfect apres ski treat. As if the cafe wasn’t fun enough, one of my favourite indie bands, Born Ruffians, was doing a set later in the day exclusively for AIR MILES Collectors. Since they were in town, I even got to chat with them for a pre-set interview about travel.

#MilesBringYouCloser to really cool activations like this and other fun events around the world. If you were to play a show with one band, in one country, who/what would they be and why?

LUKE: I would probably say Antartica, because it’s somewhere that I would never be likely able to go. And we’d go with Bruce Springsteen. We’d never get the chance to play with Bruce Springsteen so might as well.

MITCH: We’ll take Antartica and Bruce Springsteen. I think that would be amazing.

(@AirMiles, make that happen!)

As good old Ontario boys, you’ve played with a bunch of other Canadian acts throughout the years. Name 1 that you love right now, 1 you’ve always looked up to, and 1 you hope to work with soon.

MITCH AND LUKE: A band we love right now is a band called Little Junior – they’re from Toronto, but we have done quite a bit of touring with them in the past year and we love them. They’re fantastic young men. Their record that just came out last year, Hi, was one of my favorites of last year. Royal Mount Records, check it out. Someone we’ve looked up to would be one of the all time greats, Neil Young. In terms of looking up to somebody who’s become a legend out of being someone from Ontario, that’s pretty wild. A band that we all bonded over when we were pretty young are the Constantines. A Toronto-based band who would be very fun to work with. A Canadian band that represents Canada lyrically and emotionally to me in a way in the same way that Neil does, but in a modernized kind of way.

You played your song Hummingbird on one of my favourite shows, UK Skins, what’s a show you wish you could make a cameo on right now and why?

MITCH: Tara’s House. I would LOVE to be on Tara’s House. It’s a Japanese reality show on Netflix. It doesn’t sell itself initially as a singles looking-for-romance reality show. It is just like three men, three women, living in a house together. But you get a real insight into like the dating culture in Japan and why it’s different. The best part of the show is they have a whole panel of comedians during the show that they cut to that then make jokes about the show, like commentary. It doesn’t make any sense when you explain it. You just have to watch it.

In the theme of AIR MILES travel, if somewhere were travelling through Ontario to your hometown of Midland, where’s one place they would have to visit?

LUKE: I would recommend going to Little Lake Park and get some fries, especially in the summertime. Yeah, there’s like a fry fried shop there and go get some French fries in Little Lake Park. That’s an ideal day.

If you want to check out the next stop on the Air Miles Toque Tour, you can head over to Big White in Kelowna B.C. March 16th-18th to sip some hot chocolate and catch a set from Said The Whale! To get your AIR MILES collector card now, click here!And don’t forget to enter our special WIN YOUR DREAMS contest with AIR MILES for a chance to win a 25,000 Air Miles, enough miles for a round-trip ticket around the world! Click HERE to enter!