On Dragon Hill: Motoring to Muskoka

Fall colours and a bit of rain

Although there are plenty of things to do here in Downtown Toronto, my Alfa Club drive through the countryside got me interested in venturing out to see more of the fall colours north of the city. I had received a suggested tour of Muskoka that went around Muskoka lake and visited towns around the lake from an e-mail newsletter, so we decided to borrow our son’s car and go and see just what this Muskoka place was all about.

Now I had heard about Muskoka from people who had been there or had heard of

Hook & Ladder Pub

it. My opinion was that it was the ultimate cottage country location; the area that the residents of Toronto and other big cities bought cottages to get away from the city on weekends and vacations; lots of lakes and idilcc water frontage properties. But I also had the impression that the area had been largely taken over by the rich and famous and the cottages were priced in the millions; not at all the “Cape Breton Bungalow” or the British Columbia “camp” I was used to.

One f the waterfalls

As usual, “out of town” meant a long drive and the tour we had planned was around Lake Muskoka, starting in the town of Gravenhurst at the south end of the lake and it was a 90 minute drive just to arrive at the starting point of our two hour fall colour drive. We had timed our outing very well however and the leaves were at their most spectacular, in full red and yellow colour with most trees still full of leaves, so the drive up was actually very rewarding.

Muskoka itself was a bit disappointing. The fall colours were beautiful, but the

The locks were not working

cottage country I was expecting was obviously somewhere else. There were lots of very ordinary little cottages in beautiful settings on the lake, but there were also many closed and shuttered businesses, and not just “for the season”, but permanently closed with broken windows, leaking roofs, and yards and parking lots overgrown with weeds and covered in debris. The cottages we saw did not look like million dollar ones, unless the real estate market here is really very overpriced, and the full time locals did not look like they were benefiting from the influx of cottage people every summer. You could see that many of the businesses we passed were geared to the cottage industry with lots of small hardware stores and boat storage facilities full of motorboats put to bed for the winter, but there were also many failed enterprises looking very deserted and sad.

Bracebridge Main St.

Although it was not what I expected, we still had a lovely day exploring Lake Muskoka. We stopped at the Hook & Ladder Pub, a cute little place with a firefighter theme for a delicious pizza for lunch, and then at the Sawdust City Brewery for a drinks and sandwich supper. It rained a bit, but there was also sunshine, and we stopped to photograph a couple of nice waterfalls and to explore the shops in a some of the towns we passed through.

Those million dollar cottages were obviously hidden away down side roads away from the curious eyes of “day Trippers” like us.