Drinking In Small Towns on the Canadian Waterway; B-Town

My fellow Purser and I convinced our captain and Engineer to let us off our fire duty to do some field work for my blog. It had been ages since I posted anything and also ages since we were able to escape the confines of our boat.

We were in B-Town a beautiful town with the canal running right through the centre. A ghost town in the winter but bustling in the summer with cottagers from the city, day trippers to the beach, and boaters who come and dock just to enjoy the famous ice cream. The unique thing about this Stars Hollow like town is its shoe Empire that has overtaken it with several buildings and thousands of shoes. Our passengers leave forehead and finger marks on the windows as we cruise past the shoe monopoly. I am certain some only book this cruise for the chance to enter the doors with eagerly waiting sales people in their hideous red, white and blue stripped uniforms. They smile happy to have joined the ranks and have made it big in this small town but I question their knowledge of the world outside of this cottage community.

I was approached by a sales girl who liked my necklace. She asked where I got it from and I told her Nicaragua. “Wow,” she said “I haven’t travelled much but once I went to Niagara Falls!” (which is about 3 hours away)

I decided to ask a local guy where we could go for a drink while I was waiting for the swing bridge to return to the main intersection after letting boats go by. The friendly local guy with a red rash up and down his legs told me there was a sports bar down the road with an outdoor patio. He then proceeded to comment on how hot it was. “It's so hot my sandals are going to melt,” He told me. Which I thought to be just a saying but then he went on to tell me his previous sandals melted right off his feet.

Later on we got to the sports bar and were a bit disappointed, it seemed it would be an uneventful evening. How could we really top M-Town anyway? Soon enough though, we were joined by three local guys at our table. They were as country as you could get and were quite confused by the fact that we work on a boat.

Now I’m not from a big city by any means but by the way they were talking to me you would have thought I was a foreigner from New York. My co-worker is from Northern Ontario so she was accepted a bit more but she had them really stumped when she told them she doesn’t listen to country music. Confused the one guy said to her, “So what do you listen to then.” I think they had a sigh of relief when she said she had been hunting. They invited us to go Muddin several times. The one had a brand new Dodge pickup truck parked in front of the bar with a 12” lift kit in it. You would need a step ladder just to get in. He had it just 24 hours when he scratched the entire sides of it from “Muddin” in the bush. He looked half proud half devastated as he recalled this tragedy to us. We refused their numerous muddin offers and as they revved the engine and ripped off down the main street I wondered where they would find mud, it hadn’t rained in over a month.