"Pretty Town by the Lake" Barrie by mikey_e

I probably had been to Barrie during my childhood, on some trip we took "up north" that I have only vague memories of. In any case, I'm quite sure that even if I could remember what Barrie was like then, it wouldn't be anything like what it is now, as the town appears to have undergone some serious rejuvenation in recent years. Barrie always had a bit of a mystical aura of a small hick town in my mind, partly because of a girl I knew from Orilla, a town near Barrie. Kathryn was, in fact, one of the people I shared a residence apartment with in the first year I spent at the University of Toronto, and she filled the stereotype of a small-town girl to a tee: sort of plain, really nice and friendly, slow speech with a marked Ontario accent and a tendency to be a homebody tha confounded many of us who grew up either in the city or in one of its satelite suburbs.

Along Kempenfelt Bay

In any event, I remembered from stories my mother told me of our uncle's cottage and from various peeks at the Ontario road map, that Barrie was on the shores of Lake Simcoe. Actually, Barrie is on the shores of Kempenfelt Bay, a finger a water that juts out of Lake Simcoe. Whatever, the actual geographic description of the town's surroundings, I knew that there was likely to be a very pretty waterfront, owing to the fact that Barrie is the big city near much of cottage country, the mainstay of this part of Ontario during the summer. I certainly wasn't disappointed, as the waterfront is perhaps the most beautiful part of the entire trip to Barrie, with plenty of sculpted gardens and duckponds to please all visitors, especially those with cameras.

Memorial to the fallen from WWI and WWII

Apart from the rejuvenated city centre and the waterfront, one of the most interesting parts of Barrie's landscapes is the memorial to the fallen in Memorial Square. Regardless of your views on the military and war, it is hard not to appreciate the effects that various wars have had on towns like Barrie through the entirety of the country. During the First and Second World Wars, this town was largely cut off from the daily happenings in major Canadian cities, and the drafts were perhaps the two greatest shocks to the pattern of daily life ever experienced by the town's residents. Boys and men who would have otherwise never left the area were suddenly sent to far off parts of Europe to fight for King and Country. It had profound effects on the makeup of the town, and it leaves you to wonder of the changes the Afghan War is having on small towns like these (since many of Canada's troops come from places like Barrie rather than large cities).