Walk to Grandma’s Beach Treats: Earn the Wasaga Cone

Why walking beats driving (to an ice cream shop, especially)

The whole appeal of an indulgence is that it’s earned. Drive five minutes, order a cone, drive five minutes home, and the math says you took on 500–700 spare calories with no payment back. Two or three of those trips a week is roughly half a pound of stored fat per week if it’s above maintenance. None of that is a reason to skip the cone — food is supposed to be a pleasure — but it is a reason to put a walk on either side of it.

Walking on sand is, mechanically, much harder work than walking on a sidewalk. A 2002 calorimetry study by Lejeune and colleagues showed the metabolic cost of walking on dry sand is roughly 2.1 to 2.7 times the cost of walking on a hard, level surface at the same speed (Lejeune 1998). That ratio matters: a sand walk that feels like a flat-ground stroll is doing the work of a flat-ground hike. The Wasaga shoreline is one of the longest stretches of fresh-water sand in the world, which means you can walk it for an hour without running out of room or having to dodge anything.

Where to enter and exit the beach to reach Grandma’s

Grandma’s is at 1014 Mosley Street, Wasaga Beach, ON L9Z 2G7, roughly at the 22nd Street cross-street. Mosley Street runs parallel to the shoreline, so the beach is always just one block south of the front door. The most rewarding way to arrive is on foot, with a sand walk doing the work for you.

The recommended route:

• Park downtown at one of the public lots in the Beach Area 1 zone near Main Street — the Beach Drive and First Street municipal lots are the obvious anchors. From here you have direct boardwalk access onto the sand.
• Walk east along the sand — with the water on your left if you’re facing the lake. The downtown end is the busiest; you’ll thin out within ten minutes of strolling. Aim for the cross-streets in the low 20s.
• Climb back up to Mosley via the public beach-access path between 21st and 23rd Street. The cross-street paths in Wasaga’s east-of-Main residential strip are public and clearly marked.
• Cross Mosley — Grandma’s is on the south side of the street at 1014 Mosley, near 22nd. Order, sit, enjoy.
• Reverse the trip back to your car. The return leg on the same sand is when the math really starts paying for the cone.

The total round-trip is approximately 4 to 6 kilometres depending on which downtown lot you start from. On dry, soft sand that’s real work; on wet, packed sand near the waterline it’s gentler. Pick the surface that matches your day.

What Grandma’s actually makes

The store has been a Wasaga Beach institution for years. Everything is hand-made on the premises in small batches. Their butter tarts have shared kitchens around the world and won regional awards. They make their own fudge in slabs, hand-cut into roughly quarter-pound pieces. Their caramel popcorn was the very first product the shop produced, and is still hand-mixed in small batches for the chewy version most popcorn brands can’t replicate.

Beyond the headline items, the menu runs across candy, chocolate, nut brittles, cookies, pies, breads, and a small frozen-meals line of soups, chili, beer-bread mixes and savoury pies. Their loose-leaf tea wall is unusually deep for a beach-town shop — estate Darjeelings, Earl Greys, fruit blends, herbal infusions, and seasonal specials. And their “A Cup of Kindness” coffee program is a quietly nice piece of community work to know about.

The store’s phone number is 705-429-2243. Hours change seasonally; the shop’s own website is the source of truth and is where you should check before walking over.

Calories and fat in a small two-scoop cone

The phrase “a small two-scoop cone” is misleading. Small at a hand-scoop shop is two generously rounded scoops on a real cone — closer to 350 grams of dessert than the 100 grams you might guess. The calorie envelope, accordingly, is wide.

For context, that’s roughly a meal’s worth of calories on the high end, and roughly the fat content of three or four pats of butter. Neither figure is a problem in isolation; both deserve to be paid back.

How long the walk takes to burn the cone — and what it builds

Walking on sand burns roughly 300 calories per hour at a normal pace for an average-sized adult, rising toward 450–600 cal per hour if you push to a brisk pace on dry, soft sand. For perspective, that’s about 50–100% more than walking the same distance on a paved path. The math:

• To pay back a 450-cal cone: about 75–90 minutes of normal-pace beach walking, or 50–60 minutes of brisk soft-sand walking.
• To pay back a 600-cal cone: about 100–120 minutes of normal-pace walking, or 70–80 minutes brisk on soft sand.
• To pay back a 750-cal premium cone: roughly 2–2.5 hours normal-pace, or 90–100 minutes brisk.

A round-trip walk from downtown Wasaga to 22nd Street and back is typically 4–6 km, which at a relaxed sand-walk pace of 3.5–4 km/h lands at exactly the 60–90 minute window — a near-perfect calorie match for a small cone, with margin for the iced tea you’ll also probably order.

The longer-term value of the walk is harder to see but worth more. Sand is unstable. Each step recruits the foot intrinsic muscles, ankle stabilizers, calf complex, and gluteus medius in a way pavement does not (Pinnington 2005, Impellizzeri 2008). Over weeks, that habit builds lower-leg endurance, ankle proprioception, and posterior-chain stamina — the qualities that protect against the falls and stumbles that statistically pick adults off in their sixties and seventies. The cone is the reward. The walk is the insurance policy.

Ways to strength-train and burn more on the walk

The 4–6 km Grandma’s round-trip is a usable platform for layered training, not just steady cardio. Sand multiplies the energy cost of every step (Lejeune 1998, Pinnington 2005), so even small additions push it closer to a full-body session. Six ways to load the walk — pick one or two per outing, not all of them:

1. Carry weight (rucking). Wear a small backpack with 10–20% of bodyweight, or carry a single 12–20 kg kettlebell in a suitcase grip, switching sides every 50 metres. Knapik’s 2004 review of military load-carriage (Military Medicine) and successive loaded-march studies show metabolic cost rises roughly linearly with carried mass; combined with soft sand, loaded walking burns 30–50% more than unweighted soft-sand walking. The suitcase carry adds an oblique and grip stimulus that flat pack-carrying does not.
2. Walking lunges on hard-packed sand. Every 5 minutes, do 10 walking lunges on the firmer wet-line sand near the waterline. Sand instability multiplies muscle recruitment in the quads, glutes, and hamstrings relative to a stable surface (Pinnington 2005, Impellizzeri 2008). The wet line is forgiving on knees yet still demanding on the posterior chain.
3. Single-leg balance pauses. At every cross-street or beach access — roughly every 200–300 m — pause for 30 seconds of single-leg standing on each side. This is the simplest known intervention for ankle proprioception and gluteus medius strength, both of which are strong predictors of fall risk in adults over 60 (Sherrington 2011; Cochrane 2017). It costs you ten minutes total and pays back for decades.
4. Brisk-interval intervals. Alternate 1 minute brisk / 1 minute easy, repeated 6–10 times during the middle third of the walk. A Tabata-inspired interval structure roughly doubles the calorie burn of equivalent-duration steady walking and produces a measurable VO₂max bump within 4–6 weeks even in already-active adults (Tabata 1996; Gibala 2014). Sand recovery intervals are kinder than pavement recovery intervals because landing forces drop.
5. Backward and lateral walking. Per kilometre, swap in 100 m walking backward and 100 m sideways shuffle (50 m each leading side). Reverse and lateral gaits recruit the posterior chain, adductors, and abductors in patterns forward walking skips entirely, and sand’s soft landings make these patterns safer to practise than they are on pavement, where the ankle-roll risk is real.
6. Beach-circuit anchors. At the start, the mid-point near 22nd Street, and the end of the walk, run a 60-second circuit: 10 bodyweight squats, 10 incline push-ups against a beached log or bench, and a 20-second high plank. Three rounds total per session. That’s nine minutes of resistance work bolted onto a cardio session you were already going to do — the lowest-friction strength habit on the beach.

How to layer it: pick one or two of these per walk — never all six. Adherence collapses when each session feels like a workout you have to psych up for, and the whole point of the Grandma’s walk is that the cone makes you want to come back tomorrow.

Books worth carrying for the read after

The walk earns you the cone. The cone earns you ten minutes on a bench with the lake in front of you. Below are five books that pair with that ritual — each one a real-world counterpart to a thread running through this piece, and each one short enough or modular enough to dip into a chapter at a time without losing the thread:

• Born to Run by Christopher McDougall — the foundational popular-science book on the modern foot, minimalism, and why softer surfaces and freer footwear matter. The chapter on the Tarahumara reframes a 5 km sand walk as the baseline our species was built for, not the exception, and it gives you something to think about the next time you’re tempted to put cushioned trainers back on for the return leg.
• Younger Next Year by Chris Crowley and Dr. Henry Lodge — the daily-aerobic-movement protocol underneath this article’s entire premise. Crowley’s case that six days of cardio a week past 50 is the single biggest lever on healthspan is the reason the walk-to-Grandma’s habit pays off long after the cone is gone. Read one chapter per cone and the book lasts a month.
• In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan — the philosophical rejoinder to “should I really be having ice cream.” Pollan’s “eat food, not too much, mostly plants” framework leaves explicit room for real, occasional treats — which is exactly the “earn it, then enjoy it” logic of this whole piece. It is also the most quotable nutrition book ever written, which is a strong defence against the next fad-diet headline you see.
• The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter — the modern case for rucking, sand walking, cold exposure, and deliberately uncomfortable training. If you want a book that makes the kettlebell-in-a-backpack idea above feel inevitable rather than eccentric, this is it. Easter’s month-long Alaskan hunt chapter is the single most persuasive argument in print for adding load to your walks.
• The Salt Path by Raynor Winn — a memoir of a 630-mile walk along the South West Coast Path of England after losing home and health. The literary case for what a beach walk can mean when it stops being cardio and starts being something closer to repair. Winn’s prose makes the Grandma’s round-trip feel like a smaller version of the same act.

Walk or jog? Pros and cons of each

For most readers, walking is the right move post-workout or post-treat. But the case for jogging on sand is real, and the trade-offs are worth knowing.

The honest recommendation: walk both ways, and let the cone be the cone. If you’re a runner who already trains on sand, jogging the return leg is fine; you’ll burn the cone in 35–45 minutes flat. But the social, family-friendly version of this outing is on foot in both directions.

Other locally-owned shops worth supporting

Independent food businesses are some of the hardest to keep alive. Rent goes up; ingredients go up; tourist seasons are short. Every dollar you spend at a place like Grandma’s stays in town — it pays a local payroll, restocks from local suppliers when possible, and keeps the kind of distinct character that big-chain dessert franchises homogenize away. A handful of other small, community-run sweet shops in the South Georgian Bay corridor worth knowing about:

• Kelly’s Homemade Ice Cream (Stayner) — family-owned scoop shop on Highway 26 just south of Wasaga. Hand-mixed batches; the strawberry rhubarb in summer is what most regulars come back for.
• Mariposa Market (Orillia) — a deeper drive but worth it for the baked goods, fudge, and butter tart selection rivalling Grandma’s.
• Blue Mountain Chocolate Co. (Collingwood) — small-batch chocolate maker; their seasonal sea-salt caramel is a worthwhile cone’s alternative when ice cream isn’t the mood.
• Sweet Caroline’s and the Bakery District (Collingwood) — weekend visitors heading south for the day will pass several small bakeries in the Hurontario Street strip; almost all are independent.

The category is simple: small, hand-made-on-site, family-named or community-tied. The cones cost more than DQ. The cones are also better, and the spend stays local. Choose accordingly.

The bottom line

If you train hard in Wasaga — whether at Beachside Fitness, the Wasaga RecPlex, or your own home setup — you’ve earned the right to a real treat. The question isn’t whether to have the cone. The question is how you arrive. Driving five minutes turns a cone into pure cost. Walking the beach for 60–90 minutes turns the same cone into a net-positive event: same pleasure, paid-back calories, plus the slow-build strength benefits that sand walking deposits in your foot and lower-leg endurance over time.

Grandma’s Beach Treats at 1014 Mosley Street is the kind of local, hand-made-on-site shop that survives because people choose it over the chain. Walking to it is the strongest possible vote: you’re saying you value the place, you value the walk, and you value the slow rhythm that makes a beach town feel like home rather than a transit stop on the way somewhere else.

Practical takeaways

• Address: Grandma’s Beach Treats, 1014 Mosley Street, Wasaga Beach, ON L9Z 2G7. Phone: 705-429-2243. Hours are seasonal — check the shop website first.
• Park downtown at a Beach Area 1 / Main Street public lot. Walk east along the sand toward 22nd Street; climb up via the public access path between 21st and 23rd; cross Mosley to Grandma’s.
• Round-trip distance: roughly 4–6 km depending on starting lot. Plan 60–90 minutes on the move.
• Calorie math: a small two-scoop cone is realistically 450–750 cal and 25–45 g fat. A 60–90 minute brisk beach walk approximately matches the lower-to-middle end of that range; an unhurried walk both ways matches the upper end.
• Don’t drive. The drive collapses the math; the walk is what turns the treat into a net-positive day.
• Walk vs jog: walk both ways unless you’re actively training for a sand-running event. The injury and heat trade-offs of jogging outweigh the faster burn for most people.
• Support local. Independent sweet shops disappear when the chain has lower prices. Spending at Grandma’s, Kelly’s in Stayner, Mariposa in Orillia, or Blue Mountain Chocolate in Collingwood keeps real, hand-mixed food alive in this corridor.

References

Additional sources reviewed for this article: Lejeune 1998, Pinnington 2005, Impellizzeri 2008, Knapik 2004, Sherrington 2011, Tabata 1996, Gibala 2014, Cochrane 2017.