Parry Sound, Ontario

On day 10, we drove from our campsite on Madawaska River through the lovely Algonquin Pronvincial Park and on to Parry Sound, where we were booked to stay outside a brewery through the Harvest Host program (free to stay the night, with the expectation you'll buy some wares--this is not too difficult a thing for me to get my head around at a brewery).

The Algonquin Park area is a pleasure to drive through. Hillier than expected, but nothing to gear down for, and a lot of lake scenery to keep you from falling asleep. The actual road quality so far in Ontario makes the status of Nova Scotian roads all the more disgraceful. Few to no potholes to speak of so far.

(As to why we didn't stop in Algonquin Park, I had been there a couple years ago for a pretty epic few nights of portaging, so RV camping seemed like a step down. Plus, we didn't want to pay the Ontario park fee when we already sprung for the Parks Canada pass.)

So, we drove through Parry Sound and found the brewery easily enough. 

The parking space had a decent view really, and was a great place to sleep if you enjoy being woken up early to the sound of a neverending freight train (presumably headed for the docks and then on to transport through Lake Huron, to which Parry Sound is connected through Georgian Bay).

They had a nice setting inside and the beers were solid, if not outstanding. $9.50 a pint was too much for a bender though, so we finished off our obligation by loading up on the fairly priced cans to go (starting at $3.50 per).

After picking up the cans, we had a walk through what proved to be a surprisingly quiet/rundown downtown, then checked out the coast.

It was about as uneventful as it sounds, all in all. Probably the coolest part was when we were chilling out in the Kodiak with a few cans and heard Neil Young reference Blind River, which just so happened to be our next destination, in the song Long May You Run (I was getting wistful about the Kodiak and had the song in my head all day). I never heard of Blind River, nor realized it was named in the song at all until then. Funny how things go.)

As this is the hometown of Bobby Orr, I was expecting some kind of a statue, but he didn't seem to be getting much play other than a museum shared with some other guy named Charles W. Stockey I've never heard of.

Either way, Parry Sound proved pretty underwhelming, but was a fairly reasonable excuse to stock up on beers as we headed west.

We drove on.