What A Nifty Gift Shop

Summer. Port Sandfield Marina, what a nifty gift shop. The big marina too, has such a glossy feel to it, dozens of fabulous yachts and cruisers you could buy or rent. Fell in love right here with this classic beauty. And she's got a sister berthed beside her. Reminds me of the way I used to feel about cars. Reminds me too of the glamorous days of old Muskoka. A lot of the action then was at the grand hotels. Like those left at Cape May, New Jersey. They vanished in fire, one by one, in the lonely off season. If you're up at Pointe au Baril Station, one of the last, the Ojibway Hotel, built by a timber baron in 1906, survives as a cottagers' clubhouse. If the grand hotels disappeared like lovely Victorian ladies in the fog, the big resort operators mushroomed in with their golf courses, spas and pools. Not exactly native ecofriendly tourism, more like vacation theme parks, without the Muskoka flavor. Pools in Muskoka when you've got a thousand lakes? You could be in Beverly Hills, or as the NY Times calls it, Malibu of the North, which is nice enough.

The Inflatables

Summer. Port Sandfield Marina, The Boathouse Gift Shop overflow. The Inflatables. They were a lot smaller when I was a kid. One thing you don't see much is kids with so much stuff available for them. That goes equally for cottagers, the 40 somethings and over, and the town folks blasted by winters, who look older. We import them now I suppose. Not Latinos like in the US, but Jamaican girls to clean the rooms at the fancy Muskoka resorts. Downsizing of families even in small towns is a surprise at first. You think maybe it's that unconscious modern culture shaping us again. But you see why soon enough. The small paychecks for small jobs in retail and the seasonal jobs. That's how small families get by.

The Old-Timers

Summer. Port Sandfield, part of the old marina. When this boathouse was new, there were still a lot of cottagers. At a Jazz Night do at some old community hall I ran into a table of them. Asked these old-timers how they got here. For one thing they didn't look like old money or new. And the cottage and boat talk wasn't about fixing a hole in the roof of a cabin. Still are cottages like that, $120,000. They were old cottage friends, several tables of Canadians and Americans, colorful characters. Basically there were two stories, the Canadian and the American. Most Canadians had family cottages handed down to them. Most Americans bought land when it was cheap. For real cheap you have to go way back, but a couple said their grand uncle left them some Muskoka land as a gift, paying a dollar an acre to the government. It was no good for farming, so they gave it away, millions of acres, whole islands for $200.00. Others built a little more every year, subdivided their lots and built and subdivided. All nodding together, big grins. Never could afford my own place now!

The Cottagers Parade

Summer. Port Sandfield. That's the thing about cottagers, they're at the cottage. A walk by the boat channel. Town's a tiny place. One general store with ice cream to go, a luxury cottage furniture shop, The Loft, and the fabulous marina, plus cottagers around somewhere of course. Maybe we should parade them out, declare a public holiday. Cottagers parading with fistfuls of asparagus at $7.99 a bunch, cottagers with yacht caps and inflatable rafts, cottagers line dancing with Molson Canadians, cottagers marching smartly with golf bags on their shoulders, cottagers and card tables, cottagers waving from convertibles, c'mon let's have some fun!

Like America But Cleaner

Summer. Port Sandfield and the boat channel between Lake Joe and Lake Rosseau. You could spend years of happy boating through these huge lakes and Lake Muskoka connected to the south, with well over a hundred islands and a thousand bays. Europeans go agog over this. They can count their lakes on one hand. Americans who are probably a third of all the cottagers in Muskoka, mostly from the North East and with plenty of water too, must be impressed. Of course the waters here are quite clean.

Cottagers For Life

Summer. Port Sandfield Marina. If you come for a visit you might wind up buying a boat. Many tourists wind up staying, transformed into cottagers for life. I dunno. It can be boring. It depends how boring your friends and family are. There are always a lot of, pricey in the extreme, dream cottages for sale in Muskoka, but hardly any for rent, booked months in advance. My theory, based on solid barroom research, is it's great if there aren't any hassles, pretty good if the hassles only last a summer, not so good when the pipes freeze and you've got to dig yourself out of the snow to go into town a half hour away for a quart of milk, and beg the guy at the store to fill your jerrycans with water so you can take a bath or do your laundry. If you're a happy camper or boater maybe you should leave it that way, or at least come up for a winter of cross country skiing and snowmobiling, before you buy that dream cottage thinking that's where you're going to retire, when even the birds fly south, and Canadians too.

The Heart Of Muskoka On Peninsula Road 7

Summer. Port Sandfield on Lake Rosseau. If there's anyplace that has more well-heeled charm in Muskoka it must be some island pleasure dome like the Whistling Pines Beach and Boat Club Resort that hasn't been built yet. But this winding isthmus, oddly on Peninsula Road 7, between Lakes Joseph and Rosseau was breathtaking even before the money came, old and new. You should go. For a day trip, start in Parry Sound and take the scenic and smooth Hwy 141 East. Stop for coffee or breakfast at Bent River's only Minature Golf-Gas Station-General Store-Restaurant. If you can extricate the kids, keep going to the undiscovered Village of Rosseau at the north shore of the lake for antique shops, and lunch at The Crossroads, an excellent upscale cottagers' hangout. For a fine light lunch instead, try Coffeeville. Then head south on the pristine blacktop 2 lane road through the hills and lakes to Minett, Port Sandfield and cool and trendy Port Carling for dinner. If you've still got time, take Hwy 169 South to Bala, where Muskoka begins. Try biking it or on a motorcycle, but be careful. Bikers wipe out even when it's bone dry.