Every spring, four women pack their bags, put on their tiaras and reunite for what they proudly call the “Queen’s Convention.”

No husbands. No schedules. No cooking. Just several days devoted entirely to friendship.

Thirty-six years in, the tradition is still going strong.

“We literally treat ourselves like queens when we get together,” laughed Wendy Fraser of Kenora.

This year, Fraser welcomed her longtime friends Nancy, Betty and Beverly to Kenora for the group’s 36th annual getaway. The visit included dinners out, shopping, laughter, hot tub visits and catching up on another year of life.

The tradition began almost by accident in the late 1980s.

Fraser had travelled to Brandon, Manitoba for Nancy’s surprise 40th birthday party, where she finally met Betty and Beverly, two women she had heard about for years through mutual friendships but had never met in person.

The next morning, the four women went out for coffee and immediately clicked.

“We decided that year we were going to go to Winnipeg, stay overnight and celebrate our birthdays together,” Fraser recalled. “And then, of course, we decided one night was nowhere near enough.”

The weekends quickly turned into a lifelong tradition.

Over the years, the women have travelled to Palm Springs, Vancouver Island, Gimli, Clear Lake and communities across Manitoba and Ontario. They’ve rented sailboats, collected matching wine glasses and coffee mugs, and proudly worn their “Queen” t-shirts and tiaras almost everywhere they go.

Fraser said the tiaras have become part of the tradition and still make appearances at restaurants, road trips and girls’ nights more than three decades later.

At one point, Fraser even built a giant welcome sign on her front lawn, complete with balloons, to greet the group when they arrived in Kenora.

The women have also documented every trip in scrapbooks and journals that have become a record not only of vacations, but of life itself.

Within those pages are stories of births, deaths, marriages, divorces, grandchildren and now great-grandchildren. One member is currently coping with her husband’s dementia. Another recently welcomed a foster baby into her home at age 75.

“There’s a lot of history in 36 years,” Fraser said. “We just know each other so well.”

Despite living hours apart and raising families while working demanding full-time careers, Fraser said the group always treated the annual reunion as non-negotiable.

Before each convention ends, plans for the next one are already underway.

“Somehow it was just, ‘No, we need to take that weekend, and we need to figure it out,’” she said.

This year’s gathering also included a surprise performance by Fraser’s singing group, Enchante, a four-part harmony a cappella group that serenaded the “Queens” during their stay.

The women still laugh until they are exhausted. They still tease each other endlessly. And they still joke about the growing number of “wannabes” who wish they could join the exclusive club.

“There are lots of wannabes,” Fraser joked. “But nope.”

For Fraser, the annual convention has become much deeper than a girls’ weekend away.

“It’s the glue,” she said. “We wouldn’t change it for the world.”