If you’re looking for gingerbread in the bush – you’ll find it at the Commanda General Store Museum in Commanda, Ontario.

Commanda General Store on a sleepy Canada Day morning, just west of Highway 11.

Housed in a fancy Victorian building, inexplicably built in the bush in 1885, the Commanda General Store changed hands five times, survived a fire and was in regular use until the 1970s before it was abandoned and later turned into a local museum.

Commanda, much like Restoule, is named after an Ojibwe Chief.  The Chief, so the story goes, spoke English and led a band of Native troops in the War of 1812.  He picked up the title “commander” at some point during the war and made it his own.  After the war had finished, he brought his band out this way in 1830s.  Settlements first sprouted along Commanda Creek, and a post office named Commanda Creek opened in 1877, reflecting the name already in use by then.

Commanda, however, is the kind of place that makes Restoule seem like a proper town.  And that’s not a knock on either of them.  I’ve visited a lot of small towns blogging about Highway 11 and Yonge Street and places on either side of the highway.  But for some reason, I was unprepared for just how hole-in-the-wall Commanda really was.

There is a Lutheran Church – services every second-last Sunday of the month – a cemetery, and a “Commanda Mini Mall” sign directing you to drive up a dirt road.  Being early morning on a stat holiday we thought exploring local roads was rather inappropriate, lest it end up being someone’s driveway (always a risk with rural dirt roads) – but from my google searches it seems to be a second-hand shop with an enviro, artsy-craftsy bent that may or may not still be in business.

But when you think of its history, location, and industries, then Commanda’s size makes sense.  Commanda was in the upper third of the land serviced by the Rosseau-Nipissing Road.  This is a land of rocks and trees.  Soil here was so marginal that people barely bothered to eke out an agricultural living.  Instead, Commanda was home to logging, railway camps, and a general store – .

Just south of Commanda you can find ghosttowns.  Ron Brown’s book Backroads of Ontario and the Nipissing Road website provide directions to explore the abandoned outposts, forgotten towns, and cemeteries littered with headstones marking people who met an early end attempting to settle the area in and around Commanda.

With services every second-last Friday of the month, the Lutheran Church shows that Commanda isn’t another abandoned town.

Backroads in and around Commanda, Ontario, just west of Highway 11.

Ontario historical plaque at the Commanda General Store – now the Commanda Museum

Given that we’d have to kill another six-plus hours if we wanted to partake, we didn’t stay for the Commanda BBQ. As evidenced by my experience in Port Sydney, I’m not always a joiner.

Yes, this is my attempt at a panoramic view of Restoule Lake, in Restoule Provincial Park.

Ten kilometres west of Restoule proper, is Restoule Provincial Park.  It’s about a 45 or 50 minute drive Powassan on Highway 11 and extends along the banks of the Restoule River to its mouth at the French River.

(For those that aren’t from parts south, in southern Ontario the French River is often cited as the official start of northern Ontario.  What the locals think, I don’t know.)

When we entered the park we were greeted with the ominous sign and immediately realized we had forgotten our bear bells. When I asked the ranger if we should avoid hiking, he laughed. “I’ve seen one bear in the last ten years and I live and work here.” Well, what did he expect us to think after seeing this sign?!?!

The first thing you see when you drive into Restoule Provincial Park is this sign.  I love that Ontarians are so safety oriented that we scare our own tourists.

Restoule Provincial Park is more for camping and fishing than daytripping, although there are three trails.  We did the Fire Tower trail, though we didn’t bother going to the fire tower since outside of the special one in Temagami (which is still surprisingly rickety, just to warn you) you can’t climb old firetowers in Ontario anyway.  But we really liked the trail – the lookout was spectacular, it was relatively empty, eerily quiet and was just enough exercise to make us feel marginally better about our eroding middle-aged fitness.

Restoule Provincial Park is home to the largest herd of white tailed deer  in the province – chipmunks were everywhere, and grouse too – and is reportedly home to a large heron population, although the only one we saw during our trip was chilling out in a suburban storm water pond beside a Brampton highway.

If you’re visiting Restoule Provincial Park in the off-season, the main gate will be closed – take the fork to your left and head to the workshop – there is an administrative office there where you can pay your entry.  Restoule Provincial Park is also the administrative centre for South River Provincial Park, which is only accessible by boat and has no services.

DEER! Restoule Provincial Park is home to the largest white-tailed deer heard in Ontariariario.

The Fire Tower Trail in Restoule Provincial Park.

Beard’s Honey Farm in Restoule, Ontario is actually really neat. And the prices on honey were very reasonable. Try the flavoured honey sticks and the creamed honey spread.

I’m sure you get used to it.  But I suspect that when you gotta drive 40 minutes into a town like Powassan for basic services you are constantly reminded that your community is pretty small.

It seems like people around here know it.  A blog about like in Restoule – Living life in Restoule’s Fast Lane – shows that  a sense of humour is likely prerequisite to rural life in the near north.  Many of the blog posts detail the ordeal to get a cell tower erected in the community – and that, at the time of writing, was still not operational.  Ontario can be really funny.  Though by no means isolated within the grand scheme of Canada, sometimes life in rural places like Restoule surprises you if you’re from the south like me.

But just because Restoule is tiny – and it is – doesn’t mean that it is devoid of life.  There’s a local hall (Lion’s or Rotary, can’t remember) and when we took a look at the sign on the door we were surprised to find how happening the place is.  Hosting chicken wing nights, breakfasts, steak dinners, pancake suppers, pulled pork picnics – for both residents and cottagers alike – places like this show that there is a lot of life in small communities.  Just because it doesn’t jump out and smack you in the face doesn’t mean that people aren’t proud, organized and inclusive.

Named after an Ojibwe Chief, Restoule is located right between Restoule Lake and Commanda Lake, and is home to numerous outdoor activities, including Northern Pines Camp and the Lake Restoule Inn.  Restoule Provincial Park is about a 10 minutes drive west.

Restoule Lake and the Commanda River. Or is it the opposite? I can’t remember, but they’re both right near Restoule Ontario, about 45 minutes west of Highway 11.

Approximately 65 kilometres southwest from North Bay, Restoule’s official population is around 400 people.  But the village proper likely has 75 or 100 max and the population swells with outfitters, outdoorsy types, working class cottagers and American hunters in the nicer seasons.  Restoule is home to a pizza place, a cottagey-shop and a gas station. Visiting in October, we were the only people not filling up an ATV at the station.  And probably the only people that had ought a bottle of water (and not a pop) from that cooler in months.

Maybe I really need to think about removing the “Eat Local Ontario” and “My Other Car is a Streetcar” bumper stickers if I don’t want to stick out in places like this, eh?  Heck – it’s not even a bumper sticker.  I’m so lame and urban that it’s a magnet.  Don’t want to wreck the car in case of resale, no?

Highway 534 in Restoule, Ontario

Shops in Restoule, Ontario on the main strip

Winter roads around Christian Valley. (Credit: Lonny Erickson at Panoramio)

When you do a lot of road tripping, you start to notice small differences in maps produced by different companies.

For example, MapArt is really good producing clear, readable maps that have all the suburban residential streets you could ever want in a map.  Perly’s is great for anything to do with Toronto.  RandMcNally road atlases are the best to use for long-distance major-highway driving as they’re designed to be used whilst driving – they are easy to flip through and easily readable.  CCCMaps is good at providing extra backroads info and smaller regional and local roads that aren’t available in other maps.  Google Maps excels at directions, timing and feasible alternate routes.

Despite being the vanguard of online mapping, Mapquest has been long forgotten – excepet by the most rural back route drivers.  Why?  Mapquest’s forté is providing you with hamlets, townships, abandoned villages and generally as many dots-on-the-map as anyone could hope for.

More roads near Christian Valley, Ontario. (Credit: Lonny Erickson at Panoramio)

And that’s why this post is here.  Christian Valley is generally the most common dot-on-the-map in this area.  But a review of Mapquest will show you places like Alsace.  Mandeville.  Hotham.  Storrie.  Carr.  Farley’s Corners.

All survive in Mapquest as a testament to the efforts of governments to settle these areas since the 1850s.  Why all the names on the map?  Because, of all the places along the Rosseau-Nipissing road, this was the one that had soils that could support graazing and hay.  And even then, that’s on the marginal end of agriculture in this province.

The Rosseau-Nipissing Road long-eclipsed by rail, the 400 up to Sudbury and Highway 11 up to North Bay, the area is pretty sparse, and has been for some time.

There is a nursery that specializes in hardy and hearty perennials made to survive in the backwoods of the near north.  There are a few maple syrup, beef cattle and dairy outfits, an ice store, and a store that sells blinds on Ski Hill Road.  Which might mean there is a ski hill in the area – I don’t know.  But otherwise, Christian Valley and Alsace were pretty quiet and the town sites were not evident during my visit.

Backroads just east of Alsace, Ontario near Highway 11

About two minutes south on Chapman’s Landing Road (named after Nipissing’s first settler in 1862), just past Becker’s Berry Farm is what has to be northern Ontario’s most profesionally and innovatively marketed bed and breakfast – Piebird Bed and Breakfast and Farmstay.

Piebird isn’t a town – it is a two minute drive down one of Nipissing Village‘s sideroads – but we had such a great time there that it deserves its own write-up.

My wife grew up a farm kid, the daughter of backtothelanders who were committed to the idea of the kids pulling their weight and finding their own fun through parent-imposed farmwork.

So I’ll admit I was a bit surprised when I got an email from my wife whilst at work suggesting that we spend a weekend at a farmstay.  Yeah.  A “farmstay.”  Come on.  We’ve both never really understood the appeal of a farmstay – paying someone else to let you do farm chores, well that’s kind of like signing up with Molly Maid to play with other people’s vacuums.  But I figured she just wanted to get reacquainted with goats and chickens and use the farm’s cottage as a home base for exploring the area.

Piebird bed and breakfast in Nipissing Village, Ontario. (Credit: I stole this photo from Piebird’s website, but strangely I think they’ve borrowed one of mine as well. Complete coincidence.)

My eyebrows raised even further when she suggested that we have them provide us a supper.  Because Piebird is a vegan farm.  My background is half Italian and half Hungarian so there are some meals where my family was nearly carnivorous.  It wasn’t out of the ordinary that the only course without a meat component was the fruit plate.  And being asked if we’d like to participate in the yurt-building workshop that was taking place that weekend just made wonder how this would all turn out.  Yeah, there was a part of me that feared we’d be building a fancy tent larger than my urban backyard based on the caloric input of quinoa and chicory coffee.

Of course, none of my fears came to pass.  Because Piebird was awesome!

Piebird is probably one of the quietest places I’ve been – and I’m a guy that’s stayed out in northern Ontario and at a 10 000+ sq mile ranch out in one of the most remote parts of Montana.  Piebird was incredibly dark at night and just felt so relaxing, as if it was 1000 miles away from the city.  We stayed in the Birdhouse Cottage which was a two bedroom house with all of the amenities you’re used to, save for a TV.  Which was strangely liberating.  The main house has a few rooms, a parlour and a dining room all dedicated to the B&B guests.  The main house used to be a fancy cottage of a wealthy Torontonian.  But as the years went buy it felt into disrepair until two ex-Vancouverites saved it and fixed it up.

Despite water gushing through walls, a roof the leaked and a foundation that was maybe a year away from collapse, Sherry and Yan have fixed up the main house – even maintaining the unique pressed-tin walls that were original to the place – have added-on living quarters for themselves, built a sauna, developed a unique Piebird brand, started a cropshare and a seed company and have adopted a bunch of pets.

I think the big one is Ginger. And I think the second photo is the same goat as the first photo. I think the third photo’s goat is the same as the small goat in the first photo – the one on the wagon.  Right now I’m feeling guilty for not getting to know the goats well-enough to remember their names.

My wife and Sherry talked about their love of chickens and how they make great pets.  Yan taught me a bit about organic methods of nutrient retention, since I once had a job that involved more traditional methods of fertilizing soil.  Sherry and Yan keep something like seven goats.  One was named Ginger.  The little black pygmy goat was named Pepe the Awesomesomethingorother and he’d headbut you if you tried to pet them.  And not only were these goats cute, but they were savvy.  They’d ignore you unless you came to the fence with a handful of green grass that had been growing across the fence, beyond their reach.

Even the vegan meal was fantastic.  For this I was really skeptical, but my wife suggested why not?  At best, it’s awesome.

It turned out for the best.  Supper started with sunflower seed paté with a side of sunflower root and carrot, both grown on the farm.  The sunflower seed paté was quite savoury and didn’t betray its vegan origins.  Each vegetable was crunchy and played off the savoury paté nicely – the sweetness of the carrot and the freshness of the sunflower root.  This was followed by spelt and rice pilaf with a cabbage and lettuce salad and fantastic homegrown green tomato chutney.  And I don’t even like chutney!  Then two homegrown tomatoes – one large, one cherry – roasted in phyllo dough, with a bit of rosemary from the garden, and homegrown lemon balm tea with a spelt apple crumble with apple butter filling that competed with any traditionally-made apple crisp I’ve ever had.  Oh man!  I coudn’t believe how satisfying it all was.

The Birdhouse Cottage – a super cozy place to stay if you don’t want to stay in the main house at Piebird

And what is also really cool about Piebird is that it’s the kind of place where you don’t mind eating with strangers because you know that to come to a place like this they have to be kinda nice or pretty interesting or, at worst, a little out there.  In this case, they were hilarious and very charming.

A young couple had come up to vet the place as the site of their future wedding.  The two kids (editors note:  you know you’re getting old when you refer to twentysomethings as “kids”) were quite crunchy.  Obviously organic.  Very vegan.   Unquestionably urban.

Although the yurt-building workshop didn’t go down the weekend we were there, Piebird often hosts festivals, concerts and community events

But their parents were quite the opposite.  One set of parents was from Timmins.  The other from Cleveland.  I’ve been to both places.  I don’t think there are two more meat-eating cities in North American than Timmins and Cleveland.  Just check out Poutineland or Sokolowki’s University Inn, respectively.

And so it’s clear to say that the parents, while good sports, weren’t jazzed about the idea of a wedding hosted four hours north of Toronto that was going to serve veggies, more veggies and only veggies.

They were never rude, but they sure were funny.  Their eyes widened with each new entrée.  They’d make remarks confirming that there truly really was no butter in any of this?, or that there wouldn’t be an egg served for breakfast?  They took tiny bites of the homegrown stevia and avoided the herbal teas.  They tried to commiserate with us – the parents assumed we must be similarly carnivorous.  Wouldn’t you just love to follow this up with some meatloaf? joked one parent, in confidence.  When my wife went to the washroom, another made a crack about composting toilets not being necessary as there was so little to digest.  It’s in my nature to empathize even if I’m not totally on-side but I had to fight the urge to defend the Piebirdians, because the meal was fantastic, or admit that, yeah, usually I’m a bacon on my roast kinda guy.  I just can’t describe it.  It was a like a scene from the organic crunchy granola vegan hippie version of Meet The Parents, except that instead of being snarky it was honestly very sweet and well-meaning seeing these parents trying (albeit failing) to embrace their children’s wishes.  Many other parents wouldn’t have even shown up.

We plan to stay there again – maybe even take a course in gardening or vegan cooking.  There’s a sauna if you’re into that sort of thing, a bunch of bikes to borrow and probably a canoe too.  They regularly host concerts – Cuff the Duke was up there the weekend after our stay – and they host events like canning bees and yurt-building workshops.  I can’t recommend Piebird highly enough.  We had a great time.

Yes, they’re yummy yummy friends…just not at Piebird

Chapman’s Landing on the South River, just a minute’s drive west of Piebird B&B.

Piebird woodpile!

Welcome to Nipissing Village, Ontario, just west of Highway 11 / Yonge street.

Nipissing Village is a hamlet that sits just south of the lake of the same name, approximately fifteen minutes west of Powassan on Highway 534.

Nipissing Village is pretty tiny.  There’s a museum that’s open during the summers, a display with old logging equipment (reminiscent of the mining equipment out on display in Cobalt), a berry farm, a quail farm, an alpaca breeding farm (that is not open for tours), probably a couple of other farms, a salon and a gas station south of town.  Let’s be honest here.  Nipissing Village is so small that the post office is someone’s house.

Today it seems like a pretty nice place to live – there are beaches, a community centre, a fitness centre and an outdoor ice rink.  And there is something of a mini hippie revival going on – there is some sort of whimsy-antiquey-artsy-fleamarkety type shop ont eh main drag, there is an organic seed company (Soggy Creek Seed Company), there’s a cooking studio (though it seemed to be for sale when I was there last), and of course there is Piebird (more on that later).  But I suspect those original settlers weren’t so lucky.

Soggy Creek Seed Company – probably the most innovative seed marketing ever.

Named Nipissingan until the 1880s, the village was the terminus for the Rosseau-Nipissing Road – a mucky, dirty, lonely backroads route conceived by the colonial government in the 1850s to encourage colonization between Georgian Bay and the Ottawa River.

Originally, supplies were brought into Nipissing from Pembroke by canoe over the Champlain Trail and up the South River until the road was completed up to the Nipissing area in the 1870s.  Nipissing Village soon became the main route for shipping supplies into the region and to the fishing outports on Lake Nipissing for about a decade.  And boy, was that a decade – three stage coaches arriving per week, a sawmill, a hotel, the usual frontier amenities and all the isolation turned Nipissing Village into something of a party town.

That is, until the railway from Gravenhurst to Callander cut Nipissing Village out altogether.  It was then that the government’s folly of building a road from nowhere (sorry Rosseau), through nowhere (it’s true Magnetawan) to nowhere (no offense intended Nipissing Village) was revealed.  The land was poor, the weather cold, the surroundings isolated, the supplies intermittent.  If you’re going to put up with conditions like that, you might as well brave the wilds and farm the claybelt.  That makes more sense.

Ok this is really cool – a land-locked purpose-built floatplane airport, in Nipissing Village, Ontario – just off Highway 11.

We arrived in Nipissing around 11.30 pm at the end of an almost five hour drive that we expected to take maybe a little more than three.  Complete darkness, intermittent rain, wet snow, horizontal freezing rain, a few really slow trucks, at least two lane closures, one construction delay, a bunch of those really annoying drivers that speed up and pass you only to slow down in front of you, bad traffic between Bradford and Innisfil, and an extremely leisurely server at the East Side Mario’s in Barrie who assumed that my wife and I were on a date (and not just stuffing our faces so we wouldn’t have to leave Highway 11 for the rest of the trip) all conspired to keep us in the car much longer than possible.

When we planned this trip we’d seen stuff online and in “tourist literature” that touted the historic nature of Nipissing Village.  The quaint beauty.  The idyllic settings.  Now – don’t get me wrong, we had a nice time up there.  But after all that driving, the anticipation that gets built by unforseen delays, and just a general desire to get my rear out of the Pontiac we increased our expectations maybe a bit too much.  So, in some sense, I identified with with the original settlers of the Rosseau-Nipissing Road.

OK, maybe that’s a stretch.  But who knows what they were told.  Who knows what they thought.  But too often that government plans are based more in Field of Dreams than reality.  If you build it, they don’t always come.  You have to feel for the people that took chances back then – we hear about the ones who succeeded, but almost never get to hear about the ones who didn’t work out.  That’s history, I guess.

DEER! EATING THE NIPISSING VILLAGE SCHOOL SOCCER FIELD! SO COOL! Oh boy, I’m such a southern Ontarian.

Becker’s Berry Farm in Nipissing Village, Ont.

The Nipissing Village Museum with logging equipment on public display. I think it is so neat when little towns find ways, time and money to document and display their history. We were there in October, so we didn’t get to stop in.

Wade’s Landing, on Lake Nipissing, in between Callander and Nipissing Village

As a kid I was fascinated by maps and they places they represented – Who lives there?  What do they do?  What does it look like? – so while relaxing before supper at Piebird, I took the car out for a ten minute excursion to see just what was Wade’s Landing.  It was a dot on the map and I can’t resist exploring a dot on the map.

Wade’s Landing isn’t really a settlement – it is more just a small docking station for personal boats on Lake Nipissing at the end of Lake Nipissing Road, five minutes from Nipissing Village.

There’s a bait shop and variety store, the Fish Bay full service marina, and a number of different camps, cottage rentals and fishing outfitters in the vicinity – more than 30, in fact.  Lake Nipissing Road twists west and south after you’ve hit the marina but I didn’t go further than the lake front.

And that’s about it.

There really are a lot of lodges and camps in and around Wade’s Landing

Wade’s Landing’s boat shacks are reminiscent of Long Point, Port Rowan, and Port Stanley – southern Ontario’s blue-collar cottage country along the north shore of Lake Erie.

Hugging the shore of Callander Bay on Lake Nipissing, Callander is a small town in between North Bay and Nipissing Village.  With about 20 percent of the population speaking French, Callander is the start of francophone northern Ontario.

Callander Bay, on Lake Nipissing. (Photo c/o Wiki Commons User P199.)

Inhabited for something like 9000 years by Algonquins and Ojibways, the area around Callander first came to the attention of colonials as an important portage route used by explorers like La Verendrye and MacKenzie.  This led to the usual history of northern Ontario settlements: a fur trading post, then lumbering, then some half-hearted attempts at agriculture with a permanent settlement in the 1880s named after a place in Scotland.

Today most residents commute into North Bay, although there is some agriculture in the area (particularly cranberry bogs) and the local lodges and fishing resorts get busy in the summer months.  Ice fishing is also popular in the winter with locals and tourists alike.

We were going to head to the Cranberry Festival, held every year on the first weekend in October, but the threat of rain and exhaustion from our hike in Restoule Provincial Park convinced us to just head back to Piebird and spend the afternoon reading.

Main Street, in Callander, Ontario, just west of Highway 11

Callander is probably best known for the birthplace of the Dionne Quintuplets.  Although their birth was registered in Corbeil, and the house built for the girls was in North Bay, they were born in Callander.

Today, the tragedy of the Dionne’s story is well-known.  Taken away from their parents by an Act of the provincial legislature, moved up to North Bay, put on display three times a day for tourists, put in the movies, used for propaganda films, it is sometimes surmised that the Dionne Quintuplets were a central part of the province’s plan to tackle the Great Depression.

What’s often missed is that the Dionnes had five other kids before they had the quintuplets, that there was a sixth fetus that miscarried, and that after they had the girls the Dionnes then had another three after that.

Today, the former home of the doctor that helped deliver them is the Callander town museum.

Docks on Callander Bay, Lake Nipissing (Credit: Wiki Commons User P199)