Put an Ontario road trip or two on your calendar this season
Above image: Hollinger Golf Club, Timmins, Ontario
Looking for a little variety this summer? The province of Ontario has enough to last several seasons and then some.
With over 800 courses, it’s a bit daunting to know where to start. It’s like the old joke, “How do you eat an elephant?” Answer: “One bite at a time.”
The fun begins when you decide to take that first bite.
Ontario doesn’t have any “official” golf trails that I’m aware of. A couple of years back I wrote about the Toronto Golf Trail, a mythical compendium of the highest ranked public courses in the GTA: six sites, ten courses in total: Glen Abbey, TPC Toronto (3), Bond Head (2), Copper Creek, Eagle’s Nest and Angus Glen (2). You can read my article HERE.
Three of those courses have hosted the RBC Canadian Open and the North Course at TPC Toronto will do so in June. That’s a splendid list of courses, maybe a Bucket List for some. And while they all command a hefty green fee, I don’t think anyone will begrudge the dollars for such rewarding experiences.
Here’s a few more mythical golf trails you could consider. Ontario is a huge province connected by relatively few highways. How about the TransCanada Golf Trail (Ontario portion) that starts at the Hawkesbury Golf Club in the east and traverses Hwy 17 for 2,067 kilometres to the Kenora Golf Club, hard by the Manitoba border?
How many courses? “Nobody knows,” to quote one of my favourite comedians but there are plenty of stops along the way including larger cities like Ottawa, North Bay, Sudbury, Sault Ste Marie and Thunder Bay, each offering multiple golf courses, not to mention having lots of other things to see and do.
And sometimes it’s the smaller towns that have hidden gems that get little outside attention but are like a surprise bonus on your itinerary.
For something that starts closer to home in the GTA we have the Yonge Street Golf Trail. Begin with the Don Valley Golf Club in the south and then follow Yonge Street, which becomes Hwy 11 in rural areas, for 1,332 kilometres to North Shore Golf Course in Nipigon on the shores of Lake Superior.
There are lots of courses to play before you get out of the GTA but if your itch is to see more of the province, you could easily spend a week in Barrie, two weeks in Muskoka and a week in North Bay playing a different course every day. Then you venture farther north through Kirkland Lake, Kapuskasing, Cochrane and Hearst, where the locals are just as likely to talk about fishing as golf, but both are excellent.
My final mythical trail is the 401 Golf Trail. It starts at the Ambassador Golf Club in Windsor and ends 832 km later at the Heritage Golf Club in Lancaster near the Quebec border. Windsor, London, Kitchener / Cambridge and Kingston are wonderful destinations on their own with a wealth of things to see and do and more than ample golf courses too.
Two of my favourite road trips are along this route. A stop in Woodstock offers Craigowan, Tarandowah and Otter Creek, while the Brighton – Belleville area is equally compelling with Timber Ridge, Black Bear Ridge and Trillium Woods.
Maybe a mythical golf trail isn’t your thing. How about geographic points of interest? Oxley Beach Golf Club, Hawkesbury Golf Club, Kenora Golf Club and Red Lake Country Club represent the most southern, eastern, western and northern places to golf in Ontario. All of them are on my itinerary for this summer.
Speaking of geography, you could develop a list of courses on islands. Or courses with Lake, Bay, Creek, River, Valley or Ridge in the name.
Or courses close to casinos. Or historical points of interest.
There’s no end to the ways you can slice and dice the golf courses in this province to produce a plan to take your game on the road. The stories you can tell, the friends you’ll make, and the non-golf experiences will be fantastic.
As I said, it all starts with the first bite.
Hope you take it. And if you do, I’d love to hear your stories. Maybe we’ll even cross paths somewhere on the road this season.
