INTRODUCTION

Travel books and tourist guides and travel magazines wear me out. Rarely do you get a sense of place and what's really going on. It's the fast food approach from people on the rush through fabulous must-see destinations.

Instead of a cluster bomb experience, on this blog you can spend some time absorbing the life of a particular place, Muskoka on Georgian Bay. It's home to many who can't play at the 101 golf courses or lounge around the resorts, the townsfolk who don't have 5 million for a cottage, but who make this place work for everybody else who comes. These pictures are what they see and live.

Others do come in droves, calling Muskoka and the Parry Sound District further north a second home, doubling the local population every summer, the cottagers from Toronto and the American Northeast who've been at it for a century and think to and do retire here. The many more tourists in cars, the fifth wheelers and doggone campers and luxury RVers and busloads from everywhere in Canada and the US, not forgetting the obvious Germans and Japanese nature-lovers. It is one of those must-see destinations, perhaps because it's immense ancient rock, lakes and rivers everywhere, forests pushing up over our heads. After five years here, I'd say it's a friendly place that beckons any traveller to return. That's why after all the mosquitoes, black flies and noseeums (only in spring), the pricey this and that, they're all here. Welcome to Muskoka and Parry Sound.