When is the best time to visit Ontario? Judging from the suggestions you can find on the (very helpful) offical website for Ontario travel, it is summer. And who wouldn’t love summer weather, frolicking in recreational areas and national parks, swimming, sailing, and enjoying a bounty of outdoor activities? If you are into amusement parks with lost of outdoorsy stuff, summer is right for you.
For me, though, the perfect time to visit Ontario is now. — Why?
Let’s start with something not that obvious: the weather.
Yes, there may be some snow, even in the middle of May, if you are unlucky, even in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). But you will also have days with pleasant warmth, steel blue skies, and lots of sunshine, and you will see many things you won’t experience later on in the year – nature waking up and expanding to a full bloom. And even in May you can have gorgeous evenings, bathing the Niagara Falls in a postcard-worthy glow – which you will have pretty much to yourself. Seriously. Look at those crowds! (Add hundreds of tulips in full bloom, though, and Canadian geese pretty much everywhere on the lawns…)
Spring weather also means, your car won’t turn into an oven–and you won’t be hot and sweaty, even if you decide to take a long hike – we walked from the Horseshoe Falls to the US side, through the park up to the Three Sisters, and back, and had a wonderful time.
The Rock Glen waterfalls are stunningly beautiful. While some parts of the recreational area are really wet this early in the year, the view is a stunner with fresh foliage on the trees.
Have you ever seen those?
On the not so windy days a trip along Lake Huron ist another thing to do. Although many attractions in Ontario don’t open until Victoria Day, there are lots of great places to see and enjoy in the off-season.
Inspired by an idea we found through geocaching, we had a chance to see the provincial flower of Ontario in full bloom, because there were Trilliums, Trilliums everyhwere. – Fun, educational. a great discovery.
I am a water person. I love long beaches – and who would argue with that with such a great view?
The coastal towns with their lighthouses, harbors and marinas are a lovely place to stay and breathe fresh air, long before the summer rush to the beach turns the streets into one huge traffic jam.
But of course there are many other things to see besides nature (okay, so the Royal Botanical Gardens are, strictly speaking, nature), say Hamilton with the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum, many interesting old cemeteries along the roads,
and of course most of the attractions of Toronto – from a tour through a Sake brewery or the Steamwhistle Brewery, to sharing the Toronto islands mostly with residents and geese.
To see a lot of the country, there truly is no better time than spring for a trip to Ontario. Are you ready to go?
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