Bala has two claims to fame, and both are good ones. In October it holds the Cranberry Festival, built around the bogs that surround the village, where the berries are harvested by flooding the beds so they float to the surface in a red carpet. And in the middle of the twentieth century it was one of the places in Ontario where you went to dance: the Kee to Bala, a lakeside hall, hosted big bands and then rock acts for generations, and a lot of grandparents in southern Ontario met each other there.
The village sits where Lake Muskoka drains into the Moon River over a set of falls, in the granite country of the Canadian Shield. The rock is pink and grey, scrubbed by ice, and the lakes are dark, clear and cold. Lucy Maud Montgomery, who wrote Anne of Green Gables, visited Bala in the 1920s and drew on the district for her novel The Blue Castle, and there is a small museum in the village that makes much of it. The falls in the centre of town are a pleasant surprise for a place that seems built mostly for boats and cottages.
The roads that bring you here, mostly the Muskoka district roads that thread between the lakes, are twisting, rolling and quite narrow. The bedrock forces the engineers to build around outcrops, which means a constant series of short rises and bends, with pine and birch pressing in on both sides. They are best on a weekday, because the cottage traffic arrives on Friday evening and leaves on Sunday afternoon, and then the lakes road becomes a slow line of trailers carrying boats. Watch for deer at dusk and for gravel washed onto the tarmac in spring.
Bala is small enough that fuel is hit and miss in the off season, so plan to top up in Gravenhurst or Bracebridge, each about twenty-odd kilometres away, both of them real towns with all services. The village itself is good for ice cream, a sit-down lunch and a walk at the falls. Autumn colour comes in the first half of October, usually just in time for the festival, and the crowds follow it.