Last May we purchased a tiny cottage in Muskoka, about a 20 minute drive just south of Gravenhurst. This past summer was truly magical! Both kids loved the cottage and every single aspect that went along with it. Swimming, fishing, boating, campfires, playing and just exploring. Even the 3 rainy days we had in a row weren’t too bad. Okay maybe those 3 days were a bit rough ;-).
But we did explore a bit and found a few gems here and there. First of all we did some geocaching. There’s a lot of caches hidden in cottage country and if you haven’t done it before it’s an awesome thing to do with kids! One of the geocaches we found was on an island and my daughter and I canoed our way over and logged it in!
Joe was happy to find the Blue Marlin Seafood Market on Hy 11 just south of Gravenhurst. It truly is a mecca for fresh fish and seafood! We bought some delicious shrimp and calamari that we bbqd for lunch. They also have a meatshop right next door which had beautiful cuts of meat! They’ve become one of our regular stops now when we come up.
We also stopped in at the Muskoka Store also on Hy 11. While very pricey, for us anyway, they are a huge store (35000sq feet!) and have tons of cute items and some beautiful items to buy. Definitely a store that you need a lot of time to browse and not with your kids. Ahem…speaking from experience. My daughter was okay, but a 20mth old really has no patience, or at least mine doesn’t.
One on of the rainy days we took a drive up to Bracebridge. We were going to visit Santa’s village but honestly when we got there it was raining quite a bit and we didn’t feel like shelling out over $80! for the four of us to walk around in the rain. So we drove into town and parked the car and strolled around on Manitoba St and found a bookstore that was going out of business that also had some gorgeous artwork and we found a beautiful picture of birch trees that we bought.
I also wanted to stop in at Simply Cottage. They moved however, to bigger and better location and so we saved that stop for another visit. Check out their website and Facebook page for gorgeous design settings and inspirations for your home. If I had the money I’d buy almost everything there!!
There’s so much more to do and explore up in cottage country. This was only our first summer, cannot wait for the season to start! Despite the terrible flooding that has occured in these areas this spring I know the summer will be wonderful.
Notes from Home 