Small Towns, Big Falls: Lots to See Outside Toronto

Visitors to Toronto may be wise to budget a few extra days for visiting the small towns and beautiful countryside lying an hour or two outside the city. The province of Ontario offers everything from world-renowned theater festivals to lakeside getaways to the continent's most famous destination, Niagara Falls.

An hour north and east of Toronto along Route 11 lies Orillia, the small town fictionalized as “Mariposa” by beloved Canadian author Stephen Leacock in his short story cycle “Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.” Farther north are the 19th-century towns of Gravenhurst, Port Carling, and Huntsville in the Muskoka Lakes region, once accessible only by boat, now bases to explore a region filled with natural beauty. Resorts in the area offer attractive settings and challenging courses for golfers.

East of the city along Route 401 are Cobourg and Port Hope, a restored Victorian town. Both offer pleasant restaurants and opportunities for antique hunting.

Many regional points of interest lie west of Toronto. The next major city is Hamilton, an hour away by car or the Lakeshore line of the GO train service from Union Station. Hamilton features the Royal Botanical Gardens, with events at the annual Lilac Festival scheduled for the weekends before and after APA's annual meeting. The Lilac Dell contains the world's largest collection of lilacs, as well as 100,000 tulips, 250,000 iris blooms, 3,000 rose bushes, a 30-kilometre trail system, and four nature sanctuaries. Hamilton is also home to McMaster University, best known to physicians as a primary source for the evidence-based-medicine movement.

Beyond Hamilton, visitors can travel along the Ontario Wine Route. More than 20 wineries offer tours and tastings for visitors. For traveling gourmets, several wineries also offer full-service restaurants. The well-signposted Ontario Wine Route follows less-trafficked secondary roads between Hamilton and Niagara-on-the-Lake through towns like Grimsby, Beamsville, Vineland, Jordan, and St. Catharine's. The vineyards lie between Lake Ontario and the protective slope of the Niagara Escarpment.

Farther along lies Niagara-on-the-Lake, whose early 19th-century architecture provides the setting for the Shaw Festival. The festival presents the works of George Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries, and since Shaw lived from 1856 to 1950, “contemporary” covers a lot of theatrical ground. During the APA meeting, the festival will present five plays in repertory. The town is also home to many restaurants and boutiques along Queen Street.

Theater lovers may also look to Stratford, two hours northwest of Toronto by car and home of the Shakespeare Festival. The festival presents the works of the master and other great playwrights on four stages. Matinees every day except Monday make day trips feasible from Toronto. Visitors may want to stay longer, though, since the town is equally renowned for its restaurants, whose chefs make excellent use of the local agricultural bounty.

Also northwest of Toronto lies Mennonite country. St. Jacob's holds its market days on Thursdays and Saturdays, while Fergus and Elora, on a deep gorge along the Grand River, are home to fine food and numerous craft breweries.

Straddling the U.S-Canadian border, Niagara Falls has been a destination for honeymooners and other tourists for over a century and a half, yet it still has the power to impress the most jaded traveler. There may be higher waterfalls in the world, but they tend to be in remote jungles, with intermittent water flow.

“Niagara Falls is a grand, natural spectacle, easily accessible, and the water flows pretty constantly in any season,” said Sherman Zavitz, the Canadian city's official historian and a former teacher who now guides visitors around the town.

Niagara Falls is 80 miles from Toronto. It became a tourist destination in the 1820s, but the advent of the railroad in the mid-19th century made access easier from major Canadian and U.S. cities. Soon the falls were the place to go for honeymoons for the next century. Even now Zavitz said he'll be leading a tour group, and older people occasionally sidle up and recount how they came as honeymooners half a century ago.

“Niagara Falls is a place set apart from the ordinary,” he said. “Maybe that's why it became the place to go at an extraordinary moment in life, when people were poised between the single and married states.”

Visitors to the falls can approach from either the United States or Canada, but the Canadian side of the Niagara River offers better overall views of the two cascades. Maid-of-the-Mist tour boats leave from either side, chugging upriver to get close to both the American Falls and the Horseshoe (Canadian) Falls. Crew members hand each passenger a plastic rain poncho because spray from the falling water amounts to a light rainstorm as the boats draw near.

Niagara Falls has always attracted some people whose fascination with the deep gorge and rushing water crosses beyond the limits of tourism.

“I wanted to do something no one else had ever done and make some money honestly and quickly,” said Annie Taylor, who was the first to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, in 1901. She was certainly the first, said Zavitz, but she never made much money off the feat in those pre-Oprah days. Officially, 17 people (including Taylor) have tried their luck at going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, and a dozen survived.

Seven-year-old Roger Woodward may have been the luckiest person to make the trip. He did it accidentally, wearing only a bathing suit and a life jacket after his boat capsized five miles upstream.

Yet another group is attracted to the falls for the same reason they are drawn to the Golden Gate Bridge. People contemplating suicide may be mesmerized by the flow of water and the surrounding heights, said Zavitz, sharing the tale of a young bride of an elderly millionaire who leaped 250 feet to her doom from a cable car in 1934.

Not everyone has been impressed by the watery display. After a visit, Oscar Wilde observed, “Niagara Falls is simply a vast unnecessary amount of water going the wrong way and then falling over unnecessary rocks. The wonder would be if the water did not fall.”

When tourist traffic slacked off in the early 1990s, the town and provincial elders built a casino. Some residents worried about crime and the loss of the family atmosphere, but there were no drawbacks to interfere with the success of gambling, said Zavitz. In 2004 a second casino, costing $1 billion, opened with a view of the falls that is probably wasted on most gamblers. The two casinos have sparked development of hotels and residences.

There's more to the Niagara region than the falls, however. Two thousand species of butterflies flit about the nearby Niagara Parks Butterfly Conservancy. Several battles in the War of 1812 were fought nearby, at Lundy's Lane in the town and at Acton on Lake Ontario. ▪