French River Visitor Centre

I almost never drive past the French River without stopping. In my younger days, there was little more here than some picnic tables, lats, garbage cans and a view of the river from the safe side of a chain link fence. The addition of the Skidoo Suspension Bridge makes it much nicer to walk out and get some shots of the river and now there is a huge visitors centre with historical displays and a standard Parks Ontario gift shop. One of the neatest thing about the center is that it was clearly designed to blend in with its rocky wooded suroundings - I wonder if the pier above is meant to look like a tree - and the engineer in me wonders about the amount and arrangement of rebar - but what can you do? The mirrored glass reflects the forest and the building hugs and mimics the shape of the rocky rise its built upon... and there are now flush toilets there in the summmer although this time of year everything is shut down.

This was the leg of the trip where it was dry, aside from flooded sections of road, but there were 100 km gusts of wind to pummel us. We tried to drive down the snug harbour road to get a view of the waves on Georgian Bay, but the best bet of a road was under a significant amount of water (more than I was willing to drive my car through by a great amount) and the other options led only to places where there were private cottages between us and any view and no view appearred worth risking trespassing as much of the lake was frozen and the waves we hoped to see were not in evidence. We probably should have tried for Kilbear Park - at least it is public and the road probably wider and better cared for - but it was getting on in the day and we had still a fair ways to go before reaching Sudbury.

Still, I was glad to stop here as it was one of the first places I drove my car on the way up to a weekend camping in Killarny. You'll have to scroll to the bottom of the link for my Killarny pictures. I was last here for my Superior Alone Tour - aka my solo roadtrip to Thunder Bay and Back. That was in the fall and so it looked quite different.

Okay... I've got tasks to tackle - and I don't know when I'll next have time to take pictures here... so I'd best save a few.