More from Burlington, Ontario – this time, turning my back to Lake Ontario and grabbing the cityscape.
Burlington is a nice town. You could tell from the cars and the restaurants, plus all the new high-rises sprouting up, that this city had money.
And architecture to spare.
The first thing you notice as you approach Tobermory, Ontario, is the islands. They come up on the ferry in quiet way, and then the peninsula appears. The islands are just a preview.
Jutting out into the Georgian Bay of Lake Huron, on the same piece of limestone as Toronto and Niagra Falls, Tobermory is a special place. It’s lifeblood is the Great Lake freshwater that surrounds it, and its flesh is the hard, unforgiving stone it sits upon. There’s no sandy beaches here. No, it’s all stone, either in slabs – big, brutalist shelves of pain – or pebbles.
Someday, a million years from now, there may be sand.
I used my pair of mirrorless cameras, the Fuji X-E1 and Canon EOS M, as a no-fuss way of capturing the place. After all, I was here to explore, not lug a bunch of photography equipment. I had cliffs to climb and trails to hike. The woods called.
So did the boats. Ferries run from the peninsula town to the wild islands out in the bay, and other, smaller boats are all over the place. It’s a place that lives and breathes water. Water is everywhere.
For those of us living around the Great Lakes, this is nothing new. But Tobermory has that lakeside town feel, the kind of place you see up and down the west coast of Michigan, that makes it the perfect vacation spot.
Islands and boats and water and rock: the four true elements of Lake Huron.
The lodge at Tobermory, Ontario, offered a perfect view of Lake Huron and the Georgian Bay off the back patio. The way the light came into the main sitting room was perfect.
You want a great place to stay along Highway 17 in Ontario, along the Georgian Bay in Lake Huron? Give the Red Top Motor Inn a try.
It’s classic motor lodge, with vintage decorations, Centennial design, and a great dining area.
That’s what’s great about these roadside motels in Ontario: a ton of them have little restaurants attached, with great food.
We take the ferry out to the island at a leisurely pace, seeing shipwrecks as we travel in Lake Huron, on a bright and sunny July day.
Things are different up here. There’s no sandy beaches, and the water is a degree or two above freezing. It’s just rock and water and wood. A peninsula jutting into the Georgian Bay, surrounding by little uninhabited rocky islands.
We get to Flowerpot Island, and there are tourists everywhere on the initial beach. Well-dressed Asian ladies and children scrambling over the limestone shore, into the freezing water.
But as you go deeper along the trails, away from the “flowerpots” that named the island, things are quieter. No screaming kids, no well-dressed Asian ladies. It’s just moss and rock and cedar trees.
And little trails of mottled light that reach the forest floor.
It reminded me of one of Tolkien’s forests, full of story. The trees here aren’t nearly as old as Fangorn because their roots can’t get a good grip on the limestone rock, and so they fall. No tree here is ancient.
They are hardy, though, and they grip to life through terrible winters and stiff winds from the lake.
The sunlight reaches the forest floor in patches, highlighting a felled tree here, or a moss-grown rock there. It’s dramatic, and on parts of the island no one ever sees it.
I had a lot of fun stopping at the more lovely light patches to grab a few photos. Shadow and light – the mix was addictive after hiking along the trails, and I had to stay in the back of our group so I didn’t hold anyone up.
It was worth it. The photos have a mystique to them. Places without people often do, and that’s why we go there.
