Great Lakes Day 12: Ottawa to Fenelon Falls

June 30, 2016

Today was largely a driving day, about 225 miles from Ottawa to the Fenelon Falls, Ontario, where we are staying with my cousin at his cottage.

Peterborough Lift Lock

We got a relatively early start from Ottawa. One wrong turn coming out of the hotel, coupled with nearby construction work, made our departure unexpectedly challenging but we found our way. Once we got out of metropolitan Ottawa, the surroundings were quite rural; it appeared that much of the area is wetlands. We stopped in Peterborough, the largest city in the area, to see a notable lift lock, one of two in North America and the largest in the world. The Peterborough lift lock is part of the Trent-Severn Waterway system, which runs through much of this area, extending from Lake Ontario to Georgian Bay off Lake Huron. We continued through Peterborough and grabbed some lunch along the way. Traffic was quite heavy, probably because tomorrow is Canada Day.

After lunch, we drove to the town of Lindsay, stopping to show Celeste the ruins of the former flour mill where my grandmother had worked about 100 years ago. Lindsay traffic was also heavy, but soon we were on our final leg of the trip to the cottage.

Sunset over Cameron Lake

Fenelon Falls, Ontario is a village on the Trent-Severn waterway that is primarily a tourist destination for people in the Toronto area. My mother’s family came from Fenelon Falls, and my cousin has a cottage on Cameron Lake that I have been visiting since my childhood.

It was wonderful to return to the cottage, visit family, and decompress. After a couple of weeks of shuttling from place to place, primarily in cities, we all needed a breath of fresh air.

This article is part of a series about our recent vacation in the Great Lakes area. To see the introductory article in the series, click here.