Day 3 : May 4, 2011 Kincardine to Grand Bend

Day 3 : May 4, 2011 Kincardine to Grand Bend

Surprise - a Sunny morning, but still COLD at 4c. Had a long conversation with the owner of the Harbour Inn Motel now called Inn at the Harbour [http://www.innattheharbour.com/].  They bought  this motel a year ago and are planning on expanding it to include the next door property with is a historic stone building, should be even better in a year or two.  You could not ask for a better location, central to the historic harbour and one block from main street, with lots of restaurants and shops.  Be sure to check out these restaurants on your visit.

• Hawgs Breath Saloon
• Tramonto
• Erie Bell (next door to the Inn at the Harbour)

So it isn time to ride, and my first stop after Kincardine is the faming communities of Rippley, Dungannon and Lucknow.  Returning to "Ontario's West Coast" and the city of Goderich, famous for its salt mines under the Lake Huron.  This mine is one of the largest salt mines in the world and produces 8,000 rail cars of salt a year.  The city was served by two railway lines, CN and CP, so the  CP station on the harbour made for an excellent MOAZ photo for "G".  Goderich was also a good place for lunch and gas.


Next stop was Clinton, wow!!, the town square has a 100ft wide by 75ft high radar antenna, you have got to ask what this relict of the cold war is doing in Clinton, in the middle of farming country.  Turns out that in the late 1940 and into the early 1960's, this was the home of North America's only radar training schools, used by both Canadian and American military. The old base is still South of town, but other then some two storey wooden barracks building and streets there is not much left.

Onward to Zurich, another stop in the MOAZ project, there are not to many places in Ontario with the letter "z", but Zurich is a farming town, famous for the Zurich Bean Festival.

From Zurich to Grand Bend it is only another 25minutes on Highway 21, arriving at the Pine Dale Motel around 4pm.  I will be staying in Grand Bend for the next three days as my wife is attending a writers conference for the week.