July 30th 2008, 5 pm. I am here in Cobourg, Ontario. A beautiful country town maybe with about 16,000 residents, just about an hour east of Toronto and I have just made my way south from this building here, Victoria Hall on the main street which is called King Street and then we stopped off at a place called the King George Inn which is now a beautiful restaurant and hotel and we walked down and actually it was a jail until about 10 years ago. And we are now walking down to the water front, there are some gorgeous looking condominiums around here that are pretty much brand new.
And over here we have now the Cobourg Marina which is very renowned around here, there is a beautiful space by the water. And I am just going to give you a little walk around here, Heritage Harbor of Cobourg, you can see these condominiums, I mean, some of them still have stickers on the windows actually, so they are just being offered for sale right now and only -- it says here, only a few suites remain.
But lets see, what we have got here, Cobourg and Peterborough railway from 1852-1898, largely financed by the citizens in town. Cobourg's railway to Peterborough was started in 1852 and opened in 1854. Like many others of this period, it's suffered from excessive optimism in land speculation and faulty engineering. They used to make three mile long Rice Lake bridge unsafe and finally destroyed it, 1860-61 ending the use of the Northern section, reorganized in 1866, the remaining part carried considerable iron ore from Marmora. The land was acquired by the Grand Trunk in 1893 and closed in 1898.
So this is a nice little walk now around the Cobourg water front, to give you a view of the actual marina here, there is a bunch of ducks there in relatively dirty water. It was another reception of condominiums right here, it's actually nice to see nice water front towns in Ontario. I don't think we have enough of them, quite often originally water fronts were used for industrial operations and they never really were developed as tourist destinations. But Cobourg has done extremely well, you can see the lake house up there, I don't know if you can see it here. Obviously, the white building in the center of the picture right now and yes originally many times the water front was used for transportation of industrial goods and big opportunities were missed.
And I think, we still have a lot more opportunities here in Ontario particularly because we are situated on the great lakes. And those are a few really cute water front towns obviously Niagara, Niagara on the lake is very beautiful, Cobourg is very beautiful. Kingston in Ontario which is maybe another hour and a half east of here is also a gorgeous town. And just -- these people here and so these are towns that have got some really nice things, water fronts. But I think there is a lot more that can actually be done to turn some of these places into nice places -- another town that I forgot to mention was actually St. Catharines on Lake Ontario on the western side of Lake Ontario. Port Dalhousie is the section of St. Catharines that has a whole bunch of restaurants and entertainment areas, bistros, bars, pubs, all sorts of hospitality establishments and well these are big sailboats, very, very big.
And -- yeah so we give you a look out to this side of the harbor here. Our plan now is that we are going to hop in the car and we are going to into a town that's maybe -- I have no idea what the distance is, somewhere between 50 and 80 kilometers, I can't really estimate it but Peterborough, Ontario on the Otonabee river which is also a fairly major regional center and we are going to stay in the Bed & Breakfast tonight in the little town of Lakefield. So we are going to do a nice little day and a half tour of eastern Ontario basically, this looks like campground of some sort. And here at the front is Victoria Park which I will show you in just a second.
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