Just spent Wednesday to Friday on a vacation with my girlfriend. We went up north to the Muskoka area, the main cottage country destination. She had never been there. We went up to Huntsville where we dropped CDN$150 at Three Guys and a Stove, one of the best restaurants in the province and possibly the world. We drove to Dwight then down to Dorset, which is one of the prettiest drives anywhere with winding turns and forest on both sides of us. As you go further east, the terrain gets more like a roller coaster. We then went through Baysville and Bracebridge and into the area around Lake Muskoka, a large lake that is the ideal spot for a lot of people. We continued northwest through Port Sandfield and north to Rosseau then back along the highway towards Huntsville again. Several years ago on this road, I saw a group of four guys and a woman at the side of the road waiting for their transportation to come. No mistaking the woman. Nobody else looks like Goldie Hawn and that was her, a bit more tanned and leathery than she appears in public and she has a home up on Lake Rosseau.
The next day in sporadic rain, we took a short 122 km trip north to North Bay on the east side of Lake Nipissing, a place close enough to the Quebec border that most people are bilingual French and English. The food there is good - even pub food is a cut above what you get further south. We then went to Parry Sound on Georgian Bay, part of Lake Huron, then we came back to Toronto. Say what you want about the French, they take their food seriously.
At the hotel where we stayed in Huntsville, we were across the hall from a frail old man who used a rolling walker, the kind with the brakes on each handlebar. I talked to him the next morning and it appears he had a nice life until he bought a duplex where he lived on one side and his son and daughter-in-law lived on the other side. For some reason, they got a restraining order on him and kicked him out of the house and called the cops on him when he tried to call his wife. Obviously not for violence, he was barely able to stand up. He had no car, so he couldn't get to his bank to get money out so he had pulled out $5000 and stayed at the $125 per night hotel we were at. That lasted him a month and he was going to have to leave soon. I did catch on to the dementia he was suffering. Why is it that there are women's shelters everywhere but no men's shelters? It is the same in Canada as the US, where there are thousands of women's shelters and two men's shelters. He said he was quite willing to walk into the woods and freeze to death in the winter there because there was nothing else he could do.
There was one minor maintenance issue at the hotel that was amusing - the screen for our window had been popped off and was lying on the lawn. You could not only open the window, you could climb out! We were on the ground floor and we could see the screen lying on the lawn. I had the night manager come by and put it back in.
The trip was a success - my girlfriend had never been north of Casino Rama, about 100 km north of Toronto and she got to see cottage country for the first time.
