Toronto to Whitby, return. 118 km.

I spent my Simcoe Day doubling up a previous ride I'd made along the lakefront east to Whitby.

Last time (a few weeks ago) the intention had just been to see the Waterfront Trail, spurred on by the GO-by-Bike people. That time I was even going to follow their directions, take the train to Ajax then ride back into Toronto from the east, until I missed the train by about two minutes (if I include the time it would have taken to purchase a ticket). Instead, I rode eastbound, found the trail head in Scarborough, and ended up pushing on to Whitby when Ajax appeared too soon. Getting thoroughly soaked by repeated bursts of heavy rain had, rather than dampening my spirits, made me feel entitled to a longer, more challenging ride. When I hopped off my bike to carry it through the tunnel from the south parking lot of the Whitby GO Station, I'd run the Victoria Street gauntlet for the first time, survived ravenous ants living at the base of Ajax's big Waterfront Trail map board, and somehow picked up a male praying mantis (uninjured) on my front wheel rim. Really it wasn't that epic, but this medium seems to demand effusive narration. It was wet, and it was good.

So fast forward to yesterday's rain-free holiday Monday. This time I had plans, with lunch scheduled with a friend for noon at the (bicycle rack-free) Whitby Entertainment Centrium. [I tried to convince said friend that a non-big box location would be preferable; she assured me that all the places along Brock St. in downtown Whitby were "bars and probably not even open today." I wasn't convinced, but didn't feel like arguing.] I rode the subway east to Kennedy, managed to find a gas bar on Eglinton Avenue that had a working air pump (no mean feat) to reinflate my front tube (apparently I need a better hand pump for my new tubes), and then was on my way for real. [If all the brackets are bothering you, don't worry, they're bothering me too.]

I've yet to discover a really comfortable route from the Bloor-Danforth subway to Guildwood. My first, unplanned eastbound ride had taken me from Main Street station across Gerrard and Danforth to Kingston Road and out to the winding residential streets that I was assured stood in for the Waterfront Trail until you passed the Guild. It married the medium stress of riding Kingston Road on a weekend early afternoon with a lot of wasted effort and confusion navigating hilly residential streets inconsistently signed for the trail.

This time I set out to do better, and while definitely superior I still wouldn't call it the ideal route. From Kennedy station I rode east on Eglinton Ave in very light, early holiday morning traffic to Kingston Road. From here, it was only a very brief jaunt up Kingston to the Guildwood Parkway, with its lovely, curved but bomb-worthy descent. This was pretty stress-free in the morning, but coming back on Kingston Road in the afternoon was all sorts of bad. We'll get to that later. (I also skipped climbing the Guildwood wall on the return leg, and just went north on Manse Rd. to Lawrence and a convenience store selling liquid sugar.)

Guildwood Parkway leads, via a looping residential road and hidden goat track, to the real start of the Waterfront Trail east of the city. A quasi-private road runs past Random Isolated Industrial Complex #1 and the F.J. Horgan Filtration Plant to East Point Park and my favourite moment of the whole ride. The true trail head is at the end of this road, and here you take this amazing loping descent past tall grasses right next to the shore, with the whole Eastern waterfront laid out in front of you all the way to Pickering. This first bit of trail also tends to be nearly deserted at most hours of the day, owing to its inconvenience and remoteness, a situation the rarely holds true as you push east.

Multi-use trails are a difficult issue to sort out. I feel bad complaining about the endless parades of dog-walkers and roller bladers and families who get in my way when I'm traveling routes like the WT, or the Martin Goodman trail on Toronto's western waterfront. It's fantastic that so many people are able to enjoy the lakeshore thanks to this parkland, and as someone constantly confronted with the tyranny of the automobile I have no interest in imposing my own "tyranny of the bicycle" on other trail users of lower velocity and no fixed destination. At the same time, when my only other choices are winding residential mazes or 401-alternates like Kingston Road and Bayly/Victoria Street, I can't help but use the trail as a through-way, and I can't help get a bit frustrated with people strolling along en-masse and otherwise making travel difficult for me on the most popular sections of the WT.

Part of the problem here lies in the fact the WT has been entirely subordinate to existing landholdings and the desires and will of the individual municipalities along its length. The best sections of trail in the GTA are in the east, but unfortunately they've mostly been laid as part of larger, leisure-destination parks. It's understandable that this is how the various municipalities would choose to proceed (and probably the only way the WT could have gotten built in even today's fragmented form), but it leads to a significant amount of conflict between what we can call destination trail-users and resident park users. In some cases, it would have been arguably better if the trail had been run outside of these parks as a signed and, where appropriate, bike-laned road. Trail users would have lost a couple of nice views of the lake (though it's difficult to enjoy them when you're walking your bike up a rise because you had to stop when you were unable to pass the group of walkers in front of you), but we would have gained a fair bit of otherwise wasted time and frustration (I like to save my stores of the latter for road traffic).

Anyway, Scarborough's portion of the trail is fun to ride on, apart from the closed road that's being reconstructed, complete with locked gate at the eastern end, on the south side of the Port Union GO Station. You can scoot around the gate, but along with the very coarse gravel it's a bit of a hassle. A sign directing trail users to use the underpass to the GO parking lot as a temporary detour would be appropriate here. The ride continues to be nice though from Port Union to the mouth of the Rouge River.

Pickering, however, is a bit of a let-down until you get to the nuclear plant. Lots of aimless residential streets, well-signed but no less discouraging, coupled with a couple of random dives through forest fragments where the trail is a narrow line of sidewalk panels barely wide enough for two people to pass each other without calamity. Suddenly you get ejected off the second of these trails onto the broken sidewalk beside Bayly St. While Bayly isn't quite as hairy in West Pickering as it is in Eastern Ajax and Whitby, I can imagine most trail users being forced to use the sidewalk here. Add to this the fact that a bunch of the residential streets that the trail signs out are currently torn up with construction (including one spot where the whole street is closed and you have to portage across residents' lawns), yet no attempt has been made by City of Pickering to sign out a detour route for trail traffic. Weak. On the return leg, I just took Liverpool Road straight up from the Frenchman's Bay Marina to Bayly, and then that west to where the trail spat me out earlier beside a nursery school.

East of Frenchman's Bay, and the child-choked boardwalk that delivers trail riders past a marsh to the Pickering Nuclear Station, the WT gets fun again, and stays that way until Whitby (if you don't do what I did, and get lost in the new "Lakeside" subdivision in eastern Ajax when you jump off the trail for a minute to skip the pointlessly winding bends of the subdivision "park" it runs through). I even came within fifteen feet of a grazing deer.

Having upgraded in the last week or so to new tyres, replacing the old threadbare and mismatched rubber (the rear was 27x1.25, the front was a narrower racing tyre) to thicker-looking 27x1.25 both front and back, I kept joking on this ride that my new "cyclo-cross" tyres were coming in handy. From the Guildwood goat track to several sections of dirt and farmland trails, the WT does provide more than just a consistent, paved surface with green and blue lane dividers. The trek through field lands west of the Lynde Shores Conservation Area is particularly fun. Good thing too because, since the sensitive lands of the C.A. are bike-free, next up is a sixteen wheel death trap gauntlet run down a single lane stretch of Victoria Street (Bayly Street's Whitby continuation).

That the Town of Whitby has failed to do anything to improve this stretch of road to recognize the fact that it is part of the trail should qualify as criminal negligence if a cyclist is ever killed on it (assuming it hasn't already happened). A single narrow lane in each direction funnels speeding SUVs and massive trucks past Lynde Shores before the road widens to four lanes (and loses most of its truck traffic, which is largely coming from a Sobeys distribution centre and a couple of other large warehouses) just before Jeffrey Street. There is no paved shoulder, thick debris-strewn gravel passes for an honest alternative to hugging the faded marker denoting the outside edge of travellable lane, and a several inch drop off the broken edge of the asphalt complicates any last-ditch escapes from uncaring truckers. The road is signed as 70, and most of the traffic is pretending that this is the undocumented eastern extension of the 401 Collectors, so there is unfortunately no possibility to just take the lane. While I'm up for just about anything, this is easily the scariest 1200 metres of pavement I've ridden in the GTA. Live in Whitby? Please harass your council. Something needs to be done.

And then yeah, unscathed by the grace of asphalt gods, I cross to the north side of the 401 to follow the aptly named Consumers Road to the Palace of Consumption. A lovely lunch was had listening to the highway and the questionable music piped out to the restaurant's fenced-in patio, and then I did it all in reverse. Another desperate 35 kph dive down Victoria Street to the untraveled turnoff to freedom, three times the amount of people as in the morning now choking the trail at its most park-like in Ajax and Port Union, occasional headwinds, and cloudy skies allowing me to escape significant sunburn except on the backs of my calves. Tired, but most things were still beautiful.

An energy crash coming back into Toronto combined with fast, disrespectful traffic on Kingston Road nearly caused me to abandon my intention to pedal all the way home and just head back to Kennedy station, but then the ice tea and Gatorade kicked in. The westbound traffic on Kingston seems worse than my experiences of it eastbound, which I imagine is a product of its being basically an aborted highway spur for the 401. Even at Lawrence, nearly everyone coming west on Kingston has probably just ejected from the 120 kph "freedom" that is the "Highway of Heroes" and still wants to believe that they can drive at its traffic-lights-and-strip-malls scale equivalent. Cyclists get little or no quarter. When I escape onto Eglinton and then Danforth Road, things improve considerably, although there are still assholes in pickup trucks who refuse to move over to pass you until you get down onto the parking-controlled avenue where Danforth gets its "The."

That said, "Biggest Asshole of the Day Award" goes to the guy in the sedan somewhere near Pape who honks at me because I've taken the lane at a stoplight before he drove up, and am now blocking his right hand turn. When I shake my head and move left, he comes up alongside me and growls "You're a cyclist, the law says you have to stay to the right," then initiates his turn and drives off before I can establish for him the several dimensions in which he is wrong (1. The law says cyclists can and should take the lane whenever they need to do so. 2. If I had been on the right and he had made his turn around me, he would have been making an illegal turn. 3. I'm moving over for you anyway, asshole, but to a point where I'm not putting myself in danger when I'm forced to the left side of the lane just after these lights by the next column of parked SUVs that can't see where the curb is, let alone fit their steel-and-plastic corpulence into a reasonable pocket of space adjacent to it.) If I hadn't at that point ridden 110 km already I would have given chase and done my best to dispel his imaginary, common wisdom "rules" of the road, instead I yelled as long a (somewhat incoherent) rebuttal to his exhaust and the random onlookers as I could before the light changed ten seconds later and he'd have been able to make his turn anyway.

Alright, venting complete. I must admit I returned the favour to the motoring world in general a few minutes later though, when a couple in an SUV were stopped two and a half feet off the curb beside Christie Pits trying to decipher their street map, forcing me into the other crowded lane on Bloor in front of a red compact full of student-looking people who were travelling too fast and should have known better than to pass me at speed the last time I'd had to deek into their lane to go around a delivery truck a few moments earlier. I yelled at the SUV couple to close their distance to the curb, and added in my head the suggestion that the western Annex is a hell of a lot easier on transit/foot, where you don't have to worry about orphaned one-way streets (like Shaw north of the pits) and the irate residents whose "personal" parking space you've just "stolen". And, you know, that way you can stand in the park to read your map, rather than endangering cyclists by completely blocking the curb lane.

But then, a few minutes later, I was home, having just ridden twice my previous single-day record. These things happen.

Box Score
Distance: 118 km (two stages of ~60 km each)
Ride Time: 5 hours 9 minutes
Average Speed: 22.76 kph
Distance this year: 697 km

travels and concepts

Where to start? The genesis of this blog is that I've had so much fun reading bicycling blogs over the last few weeks that I feel the need to give something back to the electronic aether. I don't think I'll be as clever or as informative or as compelling as the authors who have provided the cultural backdrop for my readoption of cycling over the past couple months, but maybe a purpose to this thing will rattle out eventually.

So yes, two months. But first, three years ago. Growing up, cycling was always something I dabbled with but never thoroughly conquered. Strength, pacing, and timing (of the bad variety) all let me down repeatedly. This culminated three years ago when I crashed my bike after slicing at speed against the inside edge of a two-inch-deep cut-out in the asphalt, scene of a series of water main breaks in the previous months, while changing lanes on my ride home from the university campus. Cracked my collarbone and my helmet, and beat up my bicycle just enough to make it inconvenient to start riding again. It sat rusting for three years in a garage and then a twenty-third floor balcony and then through our recent snowy winter at ground level outside my current home.

Finally this June I got it retuned and de-oxidized, intent on, well, I'm not sure. Riding in some sort of sense again. No delusions of grandeur, no dreams of greatness. But to my great surprise, suddenly, I could actually ride. Distances. And I was in no great shape at the beginning of this, but in the past two months I've gone from riding not at all to this past weekend's 118 km epic (which didn't even feel that epic).

So what are my present wheels? A 1970s-era Nishiki road bike with SunTour components. Maybe I'll take a photograph at some point. Anyway, on with the show.