If you lived here you would be home by now.

828km.

That’s the distance – 514 miles or so – between London and Aberdeen. It’s also the distance we drove on Canada Day [1] weekend from Mississauga, ON, to Tobermory, then to Bracebridge via Collingwood and then back to Mississauga via Toronto.

It’s a massive loop. It took about eleven hours in total to drive over the course of the weekend. You could probably fit six or seven Londons in that space.

We drove all this way to visit some family friends at their cottages. Now, cottages here are basically second homes in the country that some Canadians retreat to at the weekend or for holiday. You know that other massive country that is largely frozen, called Russia? They have those too: dachas for Russian comrades. (Or, Dorset for Russian oligarchs.)

I wouldn’t say everybody here has a cottage, far from it. But they’ve got to do something with all this spare land. This is the land of forest, the muskrat and raccoon, and up towards Bracebridge and in Muskoka county, the moose and bear. The proliferation of cottages barely makes a dent.

Three of the places that we passed through – Tobermory, Wiarton and Bracebridge – are worth a look. They’re all marked on the map.

Tobermory

Fun facts about Tobermory:

1. Tobermory, as well as being a Womble and a town on the Isle of Mull in Scotland, is the town right at the top of the Bruce Peninsula, that dangly bit into the lake four hours north-west of Toronto.

2. Tobermory’s attractions include the ferry to Manitoulin Island, and Fathom Five Marine National Park.

3. On the road about 25km south of Tobermory, there is an old man.
The old man is on a tractor.
The old man has a beard.
The tractor is red.
The tractor will pull out in front of you without looking.
You will swerve into oncoming traffic.
The old man is morbidly obese.
The old man is naked apart from boxer briefs.
You will survive.
You will consign the experience to nightmare fuel.
And you will never be able to look at a red tractor again without shuddering.

Wiarton

By jbcurio on Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0 by

I don’t have any of my own pictures of Wiarton, ON, as I was driving at the time. But Wiarton is most famous for Wiarton Willie. Wiarton Willie was a groundhog that predicted how soon winter would end in a big town-wide festival every February. You’ve been here before, haven’t you?

The original Wiarton Willie died in 1999. Unfortunately he did a couple of days before the festival. Faced with crushing losses and disappointment from the cancellation of the celebration, the organisers did the only sensible thing, which was to dress another groundhog’s dead body in black and display it in an open casket, then tell an Associated Press photographer that it was the real one.

The festival’s still on to this day: a couple of new groundhogs have taken over, although they tend to die a lot (they’re buried under the tombstone in the picture). The only thing that remains of the groundhog itself is this sculpture which is not only incredibly phallic but is called, um, Willie.

Bracebridge

It’s a very very long way from Wiarton to Bracebridge, all along the coast of Georgian Bay down lots of long straight roads that look like the above.

I very much liked Bracebridge. It’s not the most important town in Muskoka, but it has tons of bridges, waterfalls, used bookstores, and you can take tours down the Muskoka river.

Bracebridge is also the home of Marty’s World Famous café. I’m always impressed when I come across something in Canada that is actually more expensive than it would be in London. Butter tarts, which are at most one and a half inches in diameter, cost $3.50 (£2.50) – each. And lunch for two people cost $35 (£25). Not including drinks.

To be honest, I probably ought to have heard alarm bells when I saw that instead of prices on the chalk menu that day, there was a note saying “please be kind and generous”. Also, there was a reprint of a Toronto Star article, sadly unavailable online, in which the proprietor was asked to justify his high prices, said he had never read a book all the way through, and admitted to the previous heinous sin of being a property developer. And – and – I have major issues with the facial hair.

Oh well, at least the library was nice.

Anyway. Enough of that. After this weekend, I can now tick one more animal off my list of North American animals I have yet to see in real life…

☑ Raccoon
☑ Muskrat
☑ Chipmunk
☐ Groundhog [2]
☐ Beaver [3]
☐ Moose
☐ Skunk
☐ Bear

This muskrat, unfortunately, I have no photo of, as it was dusk and it was swimming next to the shore of a lake. It might not have looked dissimilar to this picture.

But I have one real regret from Canada Day weekend: I’m sad to say I missed ticking off the box marked ‘moose’. There were lots of ‘Danger! Moose’ signs on the road, and abundant forest, but no moose came out to wave a friendly antler hello.

Whoa, wait a second. Is that…

Yay!

Related links

Moose FM CFBG 99.5 Muskoka – this has better content than most other mainstream radio websites
How Wiarton Willie got started
BBC recipe for Canadian butter tarts

[1] Yeah. Sorry. This blog has come about nine days after Canada Day. I blame having to spend most of my free time shopping last weekend to replace much of the crap I left behind in the UK. And I’d also like to find a way to blame the mosquitoes. [back]

[2] Giant phallic stone ones don’t count. [back]

[3] I always thought a great name for a tech blog or podcast from Oregon would be ‘Beavers Cherries Input‘, from Johnny 5 in Short Circuit. I’d use it, except, er, I didn’t move to Oregon. Darn. [back]