Muskoka villages with advantageous waterside locations combine classic boats with vintage cars. Rosseau hosts its annual Cruise Car and Boat Show in its beautiful waterfront park. Baysville’s Lake of Bays Antique and Classic Boat and Car Show last summer drew people to its park. Amidst some 100 vintage vehicles a picnic atmosphere prevailed as folks unfolded chairs, spread blankets, heard live music, and explored vehicles made of steel, leather, rubber, and wood, with working mechanical parts like clutches, gear shifts, and window openers.
Vintage cars and classic boats share many attributes, most notably needing enough space to be properly seen and a favourable atmosphere in which to be fully appreciated.
Gravenhurst’s quarter-century record-breaking success hosting “Northern Ontario’s largest car show” is due not only to presenting over 500 vehicles, or numerous vendors with quality items, foodstuffs, and beer, or a kids’ zone, or many trophies and awards, but also the natural appeal of its convenient Gull Lake parkland setting.
The pine tree scents, breezes from the lake, and grasslands on which to display automobiles go hand-in-hand with ample parking and easy walking distances. The park’s permanent facilities include proper public toilets. Gravenhurst’s Legionnaires open their nearby hall for full buffet $9 breakfasts. Canadian Tire is, aptly, principal event sponsor, while Wayne’s Tire Discounter supports the coveted Piston Cup. Improving every year, the 26th show’s theme this June 15 will be “A Century of Chevy Trucks.”
Huntsville’s 15-year Classic Car Show was shorter lived. Despite many spacious town locations, Huntsville’s Business Improvement Area Association hoped to serve its interests by closing off Main Street as an event venue and having the cars alongside BIA members’ stores.
However, vintage car owners are a self-contained lot, their identity bound up in what they’ve centred their lives around, their badge of honour government-issued classic car licence plates.
“That’s the car I never could afford when I was in high school,” one older owner told me, pointing happily at his eggplant-blue 1948 Chevy. “I still can’t afford her!”
He and his wife were on tour. Like others clustering around their vehicles, after polishing chrome and washing off windshield bug splat, they set up folding chairs, unpacked jammed food hampers, opened bottles and thermoses, and waited for locals to draw near and admire.
Neither they nor the car-curious bothered about stores open for business. One retailer, striving to make something special of the day, created sidewalk billboards displaying photographs of older cars on earlier Muskoka roads, and offered the fascinating book “Muskoka’s Main Street.” Not a single copy sold during the entire day.
As the car owners departed, about the only cash they’d left behind was for gas in their prized vehicles’ tanks. This year Huntsville’s BIA has cancelled showing other peoples’ cars in August, trading up to a more engaging local Harvest Festival over the September 16 weekend.
Bracebridge’s faltering event, overshadowed by Gravenhurst’s triumph, might better showcase cars in a waterside park as Rosseau and Baysville do, or, better still, just follow Huntsville’s inspired lead.
