Ask ten people who live in the Town of Ontario what to do on a July Saturday and nine of them will say Casey Park. They are not wrong. The park at 6551 Knickerbocker Road is the town's front porch: swimming beach, playgrounds, hiking trails around the old ore beds, the Community Center, and a lodge and pavilions you can rent for a party. It is also, by a long stretch, the thing every neighbor already knows about.
The interesting question is what the other nine-tenths of a Wayne County summer looks like when you already own the house, already have the lawn chairs in the trunk, and already know where the good shade is. Almost all of it, it turns out, runs through the water. Not the beach at Casey. The harbor at Lake Road, a July concert most residents forget is free, and a 1953 riverboat that came back to Sodus Bay last year and started its first real season in May.
The harbor on Lake Road that most residents drive past
Bear Creek/Thompson Park is the town's other lakeshore parcel, and it does something Casey does not: it puts you on Lake Ontario with a trailer. The park sits at the harbor on Lake Road between Knickerbocker and Furnace, offers a boat-launching facility, and includes a large grassy strip along the shoreline for picnics or watching the lake without doing anything else. The Town of Ontario Parks & Recreation page lists the launch fee structure, and it is the number worth writing down before you spend anything on a kayak trailer this summer.
- Town resident annual permit: $25.00
- Town resident two-year permit: $40.00
- Non-resident annual permit: $100.00
- One-day launch permit: $5.00
Read those together. A resident who buys the two-year permit for $40 is paying $1.67 per month for the right to put a boat on Lake Ontario from their own town's harbor. A non-resident pays four times the annual rate. If you have lived in Ontario for a decade and never bought the permit, you have been leaving the single most price-efficient piece of infrastructure the town owns sitting unused. Permits are sold at the Town Clerk's Office and at Parks and Recreation, and a one-day pass is also available at the Ontario Community Center for the Saturday you decide, half an hour before leaving the house, that the paddleboard is coming with you.
What Casey Park does that the harbor does not
The two lakeshore parcels are complements, not substitutes, and it is worth being precise about which one to pick.
Casey Park is the swim-and-stay parcel. The beach is only open to swimming when lifeguards are on duty, the trail loop around the former iron ore beds is one of the flatter walks in the county, and canoe rentals from the boathouse have historically been cheap enough that a family can spend an afternoon on the interior water without owning any equipment. The park is open year-round, 9:00 AM to dusk, and the two pavilions and the Casey Park Lodge take reservations through Parks and Recreation with at least two weeks' notice.
Bear Creek/Thompson Park is the get-on-the-big-water parcel. There is no lifeguarded beach. There is a ramp, a permit, and a view. If your summer plan involves fishing before work, sailing after dinner, or a small motorboat trailered from home, the harbor is the address. If it involves toddlers, a cooler, and a swim, Casey is the address. A household that uses both parcels the same summer is a household that has fully absorbed what the town's $25 buys.
The July 7 concert that is not at the amphitheater
Music in the Park at Casey Park runs as a free summer series, and the mid-summer date on the 2026 calendar is one of the more resident-shaped shows on it. On July 7, the Finger Lakes Symphony Orchestra is performing a program of show tunes, jazz, and patriotic songs, and the town is running an ice cream social alongside it. Lawn chair, no ticket, walk in.
The reason to flag this specific concert rather than the series in general is that "orchestra plus ice cream" is the kind of pairing that only makes sense if you already live within a short drive. A Rochester family is not going to build a Tuesday evening around it. A family on Ridge Road, Knickerbocker, or Ontario Center can decide at 6:30 PM and be sitting on the grass at 6:45. That is what the concert is for and who it is priced for, which is to say free.
The riverboat that came back
The most under-the-radar addition to a Wayne County summer in twenty years is not in the Town of Ontario proper, but it is close enough that a resident should treat it as part of the local summer. About a half-hour east, at Oak Park Marina on the east side of Sodus Bay, a fully restored 1953 riverboat named the Rose Lummis is running its first full season of public cruises.
The Rose Lummis was originally built in 1953 as a Mississippi River boat, was purchased by a local Sodus Bay resident in 1985, was named by a 6th grader for a beloved community member, and was later sold and renamed several times, traversing waters in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Wisconsin before returning under the Save Our Sodus nonprofit after a $450,000 restoration.
The 2026 season runs from May 8 through September 27, and each cruise is roughly 90 minutes to two hours out of Oak Park Marina. The programming is themed by day of the week: a family morning adventure focused on the bay's osprey, heron, and bald eagle populations, an eco-history tour on the bay's natural and cultural past, a Friday evening sunset cruise with live music, and a Saturday sunset cruise that hosts a rotating local brewery, cidery, or winery for tastings. Food comes from the Boatyard Pub & Grill at the marina, which posted its 2026 menu in a downloadable PDF that also functions as a scouting document for the pre-cruise dinner.
Two operational details matter for planning. Cruises require a ten-person minimum to depart and are weather-dependent, which means booking with a friend or two is a courtesy to the boat and not just to yourself. And per reporting in Life in the Finger Lakes, tickets have been selling out early enough this season that Save Our Sodus is recommending advance purchase rather than walk-up. For a resident of Ontario, the calibration is this: the Rose Lummis is not a drop-in on the way home from the beach. It is a plan you make on Monday for Friday. It also, at 49 passengers, is a small enough vessel that a private charter for a milestone birthday or a graduation party is a real option for a household group.
The one Ridge Road Saturday most residents miss
The last piece of a Town of Ontario summer that rewards a locals-only reading of the calendar is on August 8. Ridge Road is not usually thought of as a shopping district, and for most of the year it is not one, but that particular Saturday layers two events at 2001 Ridge Road: the Ontario Shop Hop, running from 10:00 AM, and the SCB Sidewalk Sale Series, running from 11:00 AM. If you have a Saturday errand pattern that already sends you down Ridge Road for coffee and gas, the mid-morning window is a low-friction way to walk into the day.
The anchor that makes the Ridge Road corridor worth a slower walk any weekend is the LW Emporium Co-op, housed in a three-story barn originally built in the 1800s, home to more than sixty local artisans and vendors, and one of the few places in the county where you can pick up Keuka Lake Coffee and Ol' Factory Homemade Soaps under the same roof. It is not a Saturday-only stop, but on August 8 it is embedded in a larger foot-traffic event, which is the day to bring an out-of-town guest who thinks the town is only Casey Park.
If you are looking for a shorter evening version of the same block, a Friends Night Out event is scheduled at the same 2001 Ridge Road address on Friday, July 24 from 5:00 PM.
Putting the summer together
Read the calendar this way and the shape of an Ontario summer for a resident is not "go to Casey Park." It is "buy the $40 two-year launch permit, put July 7 on the calendar with a lawn chair and an ice cream cone in mind, book a Rose Lummis cruise for a Friday sunset, and hold August 8 for the Ridge Road walk." Four decisions, none of them requiring a trip out of Wayne County, all of them running on infrastructure and events that already exist and that the town is quietly subsidizing on behalf of the people who live here.
The households who move into Ontario and figure this out in their first summer tend to be the ones who stay for a decade. The households who spend three summers driving past Bear Creek and only stopping at Casey tend to eventually decide the town is fine and start looking elsewhere. The difference between those two experiences is a $25 permit and a habit of reading the town calendar in July instead of September.
If you are thinking about what your next chapter in the Rochester and Wayne County market looks like, whether that means a first Lake Ontario home, a move closer to the water, or a downsize that finally puts a boat on Great Sodus Bay within reach, Lalla Fitzpatrick would be glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.
