Vacations in Ontario Canada
Vacation Ideas

The Logging Museum has some great exhibits to help the visitor understand the industries of the area. Part of the museum is a reconstructed logger’s camp complete with logging machinery and artifacts.

The Art Center has both an indoor and an outdoor gallery. Indoors are the excellent paintings of local artists whereas outdoors you’ll find stone carvings.

With over 1,000 miles of canoe routes and over 50 miles of hiking trails, the favorite park activities are fishing, bird watching and canoeing.

The area is chock full of adventurous activities such as skiing kayaking, snowmobiling, canoeing, wind surfing and sailing. This is the land of clean air, thousands of lakes and thousands of trails so bring all of your ambitions and your energy. Also, there are several indoor activities such as bowling, visiting art galleries, visiting the Chippewa Park & Wildlife Exhibit and some first class theater performances

After an 11-hour drive from the United States, we checked into the Best Western Hotel - Swan Castle Inn - and enjoyed a restful night. The next morning, we wandered around town. Cochrane is small, but they have lots of good places to eat, including carryout pizza from Weigh 2 Save, which is an excellent bulk foods store near the railroad, and The Station Inn, which is a local restaurant.

We walked over to the habitat and wandered around until it was feeding time. The keepers threw in watermelon, carrots and lettuce for the polar bear to eat, which it did within inches of the thick glass separating visitors from the bear.

We ended up going in the little swimming pool for a couple dollars extra, so we got even closer to the bear. After our time at the habitat, we took pictures with Cochrane's giant polar bear statute, Chimo, and then headed home.

No prior boating experience was required; the staff train clients on houseboat operation, and within a few hours even novice boaters are ready to venture out into the lakes. Perhaps the best aspect of a houseboat is its width, which creates a stable surface on the water and makes the boat less prone to violent rocking on the water.

The houseboats always seemed huge and luxurious to me; there was a spacious living room and kitchen area, and a master bedroom and bathroom on the first floor of the boat. I slept comfortably in a second-story loft accessible by a ladder on the interior of the boat.

The cockpit was located in the front interior of the bottom floor; there was a second, external cockpit that was accessible by climbing an exterior ladder up to the top deck. This top deck was also where we'd climb up to use the attached waterslide, which was easily my favorite part of each vacation!

These steep, plastic slides were lubricated with a bucket of water before each person went down; they were installed at an extremely steep angle and easily shot both children and adults about 20 feet away from the boat! It was such fantastic fun. During each houseboating trip, we spent many enjoyable hours plotting our course and soaking up the beautiful scenery as we traveled around the lake system.

We fished frequently off of the side of the boat, but always released what we caught; we also enjoyed getting to know the other houseboating families that were on the water at the same time as we were. There were also many lazy hours simply spent together, chatting or reading and letting the hours pass. I would highly recommend houseboating to everyone with a love of water travel!

Some of the museum’s outstanding collections are in the fields of African and Near Eastern art, European history, dinosaurs, Canadian History and fossils.

This fossil collection is particularly important as it is world class with over 150,000 objects. You might just visit the Royal Ontario Museum & Art Gallery to admire the super modern architecture of several of the most recent buildings.

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