Goderich, our future home

We found our retirement home city - Goderich Ontario, population 8,000 but with more vitality than Iowa City. Goderich bills itself as Canada's prettiest town and we wouldn't argue. It has a town square that's an octagon, a bustling business district, live music several times a week, a gorgeous lake front, plenty of bike paths, easy access to Stratford, London and Toronto, in short it looks great to us.

Don't worry we won't be moving anytime soon; we are nothing if not deliberate. What we are saying is that once both of us are no longer working, we likely will have a home base other than Burlington and more than likely it will be in Canada. For several years, we've thought our likely retirement home would be Vancouver, but Goderich looks much better and it would surely be quite a bit less costly.

We arrived in Goderich just before our 6PM dinner reservation at Bailey's. Bear in mind that this is a town of 8,000 and Bailey's is just one of several excellent restaurants. It was reasonably busy and all but us were locals. We liked that there was a mixture of ages. Our meals were great and the Jackson Triggs Gerwertztraminer was a real treat. We talked for a few minutes with a couple who welcomed us to the town and told us not to miss the lakefront. We had tickets for "Hockey Mom, Hockey Dad" in Blyth so we had to hustle to make it on time. Blyth is a town of 950; it boasts a professional theatre, a number of downtown businesses and a community campgound with 800 serviced campsites - Blyth hosts an annual thresher's festival. The play was fun and we decided to stay in the nearby campground; we were the only ones there so we had the pick of 800 sites!

Our practice is to have everything packed away each nite so we can easily move to a breakfast camp. We woke early Sunday and headed back to the Goderich lakefront. We were blown away. Goderich is the only deep water port on Ontario's west coast. There was an ocean going ship in port and another arrived shortly after we parked. The recreation portion of the lake front is about a mile long. A beautiful beach with a boardwalk and several shelter houses. We parked on the section where pets were allowed and let the guys out to play while cooked breakfast - blueberry pancakes. Melodee has been using the fresh blueberries we've been buying at the fruit stands and boy are they ever good.

We had picked up a hiking guide to Huron county. There are easily a week's worth of good hikes; we picked the Tiger Dunlop - Menestung trail and were not disappointed. The trail crosses the Maitland river on an old railroad bridge. Gorgeous lake and river views.

There is a another lakefront park on the top of the bluff overlooking the beach park. We made a lunch camp here and took in the lake view. We then had to decide what to do - take another hike or try out one of the bike trails. We had come to this are because my guide to camping in Ontario said that Falls Reserve park had the finest natural water park to be found anywhere so it made sense to at least see the Maitland River, besides we had a campground reservation there. The Maitland river runs over solid rock here that must have had some softer rock embedded in the harder rocks that remains. The result is that there are little rivulets of deeper fast running water. Lena had a few problems getting used to the fact that one step would put her into this fast moving water and she just wasn't sure what to do. We spent some time watching the young people play in the rapids then headed back to the Goderich lakefront to make dinner and watch the sunset.

We had a real treat. Shortly after we got to the lakefront, 2 square riggers appeared on the horizon. We think they were the boats modeled after Columbus' ships. Made for some very good pictures, but if they could have just waited about 45 minutes they would have been silhouetted against a pretty good sunset. As is we had to settle for the best sunset of the trip.

There is a great coffee shop on the square that is open until 11:30 on Sunday. We got there about 9PM and expected to find it empty. Once again we found a vibrant group of locals enjoying the best coffee shop we saw on the trip. We used the wifi to update the blog and headed back to Falls Reserve after a very full day.

The next morning we headed back to the lake shore for breakfast and then went to the visitor information center. Goderich is truly a town built for living.