Vancouver: The busy city life mixed with a healthy dosage of outdoor activity. This is a place that we know well and will miss. It has wealth, poverty , industry suburb and about anything else you can think of.
From there we went through many other smaller b.c towns surviving on a combination on natural resources and tourism.
Nelson and Fernie are the cream of the crop for tourism. Nelsons hippie attitude as shown by the community coop grocery store and trendy Eco restaurants is a higher end place for those seeking enjoyment, especially compared to Alberta.
Although Sparwood, B.C is a very different sort of strip mall, industry town, it was still alive in a way that the former industry towns of southern Alberta were not
Coleman, Crows nest and nearly every other albertan town was quite simply dead.
Wrentham was one of the nicest towns in this category and despite the strong will of the people and engery of it's kids was still having a hard time. Making a living on farming is not so easy these days.
Saskatchewan brought us more towns that we didn't expect. These were oil towns, where money and free time were very abundant. Interesting to hear about and pass through, these towns like wayburn were not places we wanted to stay.
Surprisingly enough, it was manitoba towns that still seemed to have that small town farmer feel and enough youth and affluence to keep them going. Souris was prime example of this
Although we have gone through many resource towns, Fort frances was the biggest. I'm sure there is a lot of beauty if you look hard enough but the ginormous mills in the heart of down town kind of put us off
Thunderbay, as a university town was a refreshing taste of some alternative thinking and city life.
The Bruce peninsula, exemplified by the town of toblermory, brought us back to the world of tourism with a bang. But with its small but hopping harbor and beautiful beaches not to mention all you can eat Fish and chips, it's hard not to like it.
I mention the makeup and character of these towns because at the end of the day each one had nice people, beautiful vistas or at least one other reason to peak our intrest for a night. Our destination today, Wasaga Beach, was not so lucky.
Coming out of Owen sound in the morning sun made us very glad we decided not to go any farther yesterday. The hills were super steep right out of downtown and the sun was fierce even at the early hour of 8:00am. It was going to be a hot day. What better destination than a beach at the end of the day. Even better, we had only 140 km until Orillia and 2 days to do it so today we were determined to be early to camp.
The cracks in Alan's rear rim where not getting any better and his spokes where not happy. Every 10 kms or so they would begin to click uncontrollably and necessitate an immediate truing of the wheel.
One such stop happened to be outside of collingwood at grandma lambes farm market. Upon hearing of our great journey The wonderful women working the till and grandma lambe herself immediately wanted to help. Thier generous gift of 3 maple sugar candies and 5 delicious cruchy apples was the perfect treat. Even better was her tip about the bicycle path which was right across the road which went all the way from midland to collingwood. For the rest of the morning we stayed cool in the shade and chatted merrily as we travelled along the path.
Some dilly dallying in collingwood put us right in the middle of a thunderstorm on route to wasaga beach ...oops!
Then we entered wasaga beach... We have discovered that you can tell a lot about a place by the conditions and price of it's campgrounds.
The bored and unhelpful information center summer student took some prodding to finally give us a few leads on places to stay and Ginny gave them a call.
"hi there, we are a family of 5 looking for a campsite, do you have any?" said Ginny into the phone.
"ahhhh.. We don't allow families at our campsite...." replied a scruffy voice on the other end.
"Ohhh" said Ginny
"it's singles only, try somewhere else"
That was how we first learned the makeup of wasaga beach.
Wasaga beach is a party town for 20 somethings intent on getting trashed on the beach. The beach is big and a bit dirty while the rest of town is mobbed by traffic and big box megastores. The campgrounds that would actually take us insisted on $100 for a site and we gave up all hope of a short day and plowed ahead to Elmvale.
Even here, out campsite gouged us for $52 for the night and insisted on a $10 deposit for an adapter to us the power. This was fine except we wanted to get an early start and they wouldn't give us the deposit back until 9am. We said screw it and hunkered down for the night.
Needless to say we are really looking forward to escaping from these crowed places with the Koza family when we cruise out on thier boat to thier cabin near perry sound on Wednesday!
Distance: 98.59 km
Time on bikes: 5:33:40
Average speed: 17.7 km/h
Distance from Vancouver: 4917 km
Start: 8:00 am
End: 7:00 pm
Wind: west (light-tail)
Conditions: sunny with showers
Cheers
- The Warpotay Team
Location:Elmvale, Ontario
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