Ontario – Slow Lane Musings

A Toronto escapade

In Ottawa this year, there was a long spell of lingering grey weather at the end of March. It made us feel we needed a little break away from winter. We decided on a train trip to Toronto, a night in the Royal York Hotel and a visit to the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), world-renowned for its natural history collection.

Some people may know W.C. Fields’s tongue-in-cheek tease about Philadelphia. The Canadian version of the joke goes this way: the first prize in a contest is one week in Toronto; the second prize is two weeks. For many people who commute to work or fly in and out for business meetings, a visit to Toronto may not qualify as a treat, but we have developed a fondness for the city, warts and all, having lived and worked there for years. Our little escapade turned out perfectly.

Mission improbable

Sainte-Marie among the Hurons was a short-lived attempt to establish a first French mission-settlement in Wendake (“a land apart”), the ancestral land of the Huron-Wendat People, in what is now Ontario. From 1639 to 1649, Sainte-Marie was a thriving French community. When the mission failed after a decade, it was abandoned and burnt to the ground.

The site remained forgotten for two centuries. In 1920, the Government of Canada recognized it as a National Historic Site and the buildings were reconstructed in 1964. Today, Sainte-Marie among the Hurons tells its fascinating story to all who take the time to visit it in Midland, a two-hour drive north of Toronto, on the shores of Georgian Bay.

At one with nature

Ontario Parks, the body that manages our provincial parks, posted a clever tweet on December 31st. It invited followers to share a “favourite park” memory. The excuse given was that New Year’s Eve is a time for reflection. It may be so, but it is also in the depth of winter and most parks will not reopen before late May. We saw the tweet as a gentle marketing prompt. Nevertheless, this simple request triggered a pleasurable process of reminiscing and dreaming for us.

Discovering Tobermory

We first heard of the Bruce Peninsula, the Bruce Trail, the Niagara Escarpment, and Tobermory when we lived in Toronto back in the 1990s. We could see the Escarpment on day trips to the west of the city and it looked very imposing. We learned that the Bruce Trail, which courses along the top of the Escarpment is the oldest and longest hiking trail in Canada, extending (with side trails) approximately 900 kms from Queenston in the Niagara Peninsula to Tobermory, at the tip of the Bruce Peninsula.