Europe in Ontario 2021: Day 1 - Port Colborne

The first day of our “Europe in Ontario” road trip was spent in Port Colborne, which is located east of Port Dover and west of Fort Erie.  This first stop was in part a scouting trip.  There is a 16km, relatively flat and paved multi-use path called “The Friendship Trail” that runs parallel to the north shore of Lake Erie between Port Colborne and Fort Erie.  Next summer, we would love to bring our bicycles and ride this trail, so we wanted to check out where it started from on the Port Colborne side.  This picturesque trail passes through farmland, villages, watersheds and quiet residential areas before connecting with Fort Erie and the Niagara River Residential Trail.  There also seem to be bike trails that follow north along the Welland Canal, so there are many cycling opportunities in this area.

Arriving in Port Colborne around 4pm, our plan was to check out the lift bridge that spans the Welland Canal, explore the shops on West Street (the main drag by the canal), then select a restaurant for an early dinner before heading off to a show at the Showboat Festival Theatre.  The Clarence Street Bridge is a vertical-lift bridge completed in 1929 to link the east and west sides of Port Colborne.  While the bridge is down, it provides an automobile roadway and pedestrian/cycling path across the canal.  There is a little control centre situated on top of the bridge, manned by an operator who looks out for ships and controls the raising and lowering of the bridge.

Using electric motors and counterweights, the bridge is raised 120 feet into the air to allow vessels to pass underneath to travel across the length of the canal. We were hoping to witness the raising and lowering of the bridge, which takes about 90 seconds each way, and to watch a ship go through. When we walked across the bridge, away from the main drag, I looked down the waterway and saw a ship in the far distance, but it seemed to be stationary.  Thinking it was too bad that there was no ship approaching, we continued on to the east side to check out the start of the Friendship trail.  Imagine our surprise when we returned to the bridge to cross back to the other side, just to find it raised up in the air, with lowered gates and flashing lights warning cars and pedestrians that they would need to wait..  That “stationary” ship was actually approaching, albeit at a snails pace!  We stood and watched as it finally came into view and very slowly passed under the lift bridge.  Once the ship was safely across, we watched as the bridge gingerly lowered back into place and traffic was allowed to flow through once again.

There were several interesting shops to check out on West Street before dinner.  We enjoyed wandering around Candy Safari, which was brimming with different varieties of both domestic and international candies, including some vintage brand names that invoked nostalgia.  We regretted not picking up a small bag of marmite-flavoured chips as a souvenir for our South African friend, who is fond of this savoury food spread that is a by-product of beer brewing. We also had fun browsing the Canalside Kitchen Store, since in addition to having practical, functional kitchen apparatus, it also has some kitschy items including a glass-blown fish teapot and salt and pepper shakers shaped as two smiling porcelain cats sprawled one atop the other.  The store also had some fun mugs and we might bought something to bring home with us, if we didn’t live in a condo with limited storage space.  The town was already decked out for Christmas.  I especially liked the spinning Santa Claus “behaviour” scale that ranged from Very Nice to Very Naughty to Out of Control.  We wanted to buy some treats from The Pie Guys to have for breakfast the next day. Unfortunately, almost everything was sold out by the time we got there and although they reopened at 9am the next day, they would not have their full array of options available for sale until 11am, by which time we would be long gone.  We settled for buying some packages of Gourmet Village orange hot chocolate, a flavour which we had never seen before.

We wanted to have an early dinner before attending the live theatre play that we had tickets for.  We chose the aptly-named Canalside Restaurant and Inn, located right next to the Clarence St. Bridge on the west side of the canal.  What caught our attention on the menu was the option of breaded Alaskan “Walleye” wings, or in Canadian terms, the meat under the fins of a pickerel.  Despite our intention of having perch and pickerel for lunch the next day in Port Dover, we could not turn down the opportunity of ordering the perch dinner since this is not a fish that is readily available in Toronto.  As it turned out, we ended up having either perch or pickerel for all of our main meals during this road trip.  The restaurant has a nautical theme with steering wheels, model ships and sailboats decorating the walls, and chandeliers shaped like boat propellers.  There were also some beautiful images of the lift bridge at night.

After dinner, we headed to the Showboat Festival Theatre in order to watch Canadian playwright Norm Foster’s romantic dramedy, Old Love.  The play follows the interactions between Bud, a salesman and Molly, his boss’ wife over 3 decades. Although there are multiple other characters in this story including Bud’s wife, Molly’s husband, as well as Molly’s son and daughter-in-law , the same two actors play all the roles including the progressively aging main protagonists.  They did a marvelous job differentiating between the various characters with a minor change of wardrobe and more importantly, changes in mannerisms and speech patterns.  When I looked at previous mountings of this 2008 play, I found ones where each distinct role was played by a different actor.  I’m not sure whether it was an artistic choice to use just two actors, or if this was dictated by COVID restrictions and limitations, but I thought it made the play much more interesting and gave the actors a larger challenge.

Before leaving Port Colborne early the next morning, we stopped by the Port Colborne Historic and Marine Museum to look at the outdoor displays, since the museum was not yet open.  The main building of the museum was once the 19th Century Georgian revival-styled home of the Williams family before it was donated to the town by Arabella Williams at the time of her death. A small cottage has been converted to a Teahouse which bears her name.  There is a logged schoolhouse and other buildings on the property.  As it was the week before Remembrance Day, the wrought-iron fence surrounding the property was decorated with many hand-crocheted poppies.  On the grounds, we found the wheelhouse from the 1946 steam tugboat Yvon Dupre Jr., which still contains all of its original equipment.  The tugboat was scrapped in 1972 and donated to the museum in 1975.  We also saw the 1871 anchor from the wreck of the propeller ship Raleigh which sank in 1911, the 1949 50-passenger lifeboat S.S. Hochelaga, and a very moving war memorial consisting of a ring of WWI rifles planted downward into the ground and topped with soldiers’ helmets.  Known as the “Battlefield Cross”, this configuration was used as grave markers for fallen soldiers on the battlefield.