The Great Ontario Communities Series (Muskoka)

 During the past 14+ years Judi and I have visited over 300 Ontario community festivals and events. The majority have been planned and managed by dedicated community volunteers. As a salute to these wonderful communities and their hard-working residents, I will be writing a series of blogs entitled “Great Ontario Communities”. These blogs describe the communities we have visited and will tell you about some of the interesting things we have experienced and the people we have met. The seventeenth article is about Muskoka, land of lakes and recreation.

MUSKOKA - One of my all-time favourite places to visit is Muskoka. That's probably because this is where I spent most of my childhood summers. My first memory of Muskoka is of Lake of Bays and Baysville. For years my parents had been going to a lodge for our summer vacations, but that changed when I was about 10 years old. My mother and father decided to purchase a cottage rather than rent rooms at a lodge. The cottage search started in Haliburton, but was quickly curtailed when my mother saw a bear lumbering up a dirt road near where my parents were considering their new cottage. This took their search to Muskoka!  I don’t think, at the time, that my mother considered the fact that there were probably the same number of bears in Muskoka as there were in Haliburton! That being said, we all loved Muskoka, Lake of Bays and Baysville. After a fairly short search, they found a wonderful cottage on a small bay on the Lake of Bays. The cottage was on the west end of the lake and was located between Baysville and Huntsville. Those were halcyon years and set me for a life long love of the area. Even though we no longer have a cottage (sigh) there, I still gravitate back to the area! 

Muskoka cover a very large area with many beautiful lakes to discover and unique villages to visit.  There are four larger lakes and they include Lake Rosseau, Lake Muskoka, Lake Joseph and Lake of Bays. The major towns in the area include Bracebridge, Gravenhurst, Rosseau, Huntsville and Bayside.