Straight to Bowen Island

I flew out of Toronto on August 1st and landed in Vancouver that night. By 9am the next morning, I was in the family car leaving Vancouver en route to Bowen Island, the subject of many past blog posts. It was the birthday of my oldest brother, Dan, and we had decided to go to our extended family's place on Bowen for the occasion. Somehow I never get tired of taking photos at Bowen, and hopefully never will. Here are a few of my favourites from the week I spent there:

Crossing the Lion's Gate Bridge to leave Vancouver:




I always check for mice and things when I get to our place on Bowen, and this time I found two long-dead bats in different places. They must have come down the chimney, then become confused and not found their way back out. One time I caught a bat in the middle of the night in my granny's room at Bowen, and let it out her window.






There are loads of deer on Bowen Island, and we enjoy having them in the yard. Sometimes we even feed them. This one is eating ripe plums that have fallen from the tree:








Josephine and Lisa enjoying swimming in the ocean:




My brother Dan takes some really good photos with his camera, but he didn't bring it with him to Bowen so I lent him mine to take some shots, and I really like this one he took:




I also like taking photos of old stuff, like these medicine bottles:




We spent some of our time setting this contraption up. What were we using it for? To catch plums!






Dad made a tasty birthday cake for Dan:




This is the view from the patio dining room where we ate the cake:




Out in the woodshed, there was a bird's nest:




On August 3rd I went out rowing across the bay to Sandy Beach with Jos and Lisa, and on the way I managed to get a quick photo of two seals getting some air:




While Jos and Lisa swam at Sandy Beach, I sat on a log and admired these neat fungi:




Later that evening, as the sun was going down, I went out for another row and took this shot:




The next day, my cousin Jasper caught a fish while a few of us were hanging on the float, then let it back into the water:






More deer:






And some ducks at Killarney Lake too:






On the 6th, the highlight of my day was eating a tasty sandwich and winning a game of hearts against my sisters and parents:






On August 7th, Josephine swam across the bay and back while Lisa rowed alongside and I sat back and relaxed:




A couple hours later, I drove the girls back to Vancouver as we all had things we had to do in the city. My parents stayed at Bowen a bit longer. Lisa insisted on taking a photo of me on the ferry:

A Week in Toronto

After 378km of cycling over 4 days, I arrived in Toronto on July 25th. I stayed with my friend Jackie, who somehow managed to put up with me for a whole week! Then I flew to Vancouver.

I spent my time in Toronto walking around a lot, meeting up with a few old friends like Bill, who was my roommate in England in our first year of university, Alvin who used to climb rooftops with me, and Amanda with whom I inflated a bunch of balloons and half-filled a phone booth in Edinburgh one time.

I didn't take very many photos in Toronna, but here are a few:


The Ontario College of Art and Design, which is not to my taste at all, but is at least quite creative and intriguing:




A building more to my liking, University College, on the University of Toronto campus as the sun was going down a little after 8pm:




On the 28th, I was hanging out with my friend Amanda when we chanced upon a free open-air performance of King Lear in a park near her work. We ended up watching it, and it was really good!

This bench was in the same park:




And a blurry no-flash shot of the play:




On the 30th of July, I bought a cheap ukulele which required a ridiculously long walk west down Bloor Street, past Ossington (if you're familiar with Toronto, you'll know how far that is from College and McCaul). On the long walk there, I passed this famous store but didn't go inside:




On the 31st, I boxed up my bicycle and sent it by Greyhound to Vancouver, and on August 1st Jackie and I went to the Caribana festival down by the water. It was terribly organised, just a whole bunch of people wandering around, uncoordinated. It was fun to people-watch, but the parade was quite disappointing and didn't yield any good photos.






After leaving Caribana, Jackie and I returned to her apartment where I picked up my bags to head to the airport, and flew to Vancouver for a four week family visit.

Cycling 378km from Prescott to Toronto

After having sufficiently relaxed in Gatineau and Ottawa, on July 23 we loaded my bike into Matt's car again.




Matt, Jos, and I headed to Prescott, near the US border, where we had a Tim Horton's lunch and coffee before I loaded my bags onto the bike and cycled off in the direction of Kingston. I started off on Highway 401, having been told that it had a wide shoulder all along. This is the nice wide shoulder on Hwy 401:




After a couple of minutes, however, the nice wide shoulder turned into a 1-foot-wide (30cm-wide) shoulder which was entirely rumble strip. Seeing as how this is a ridiculously busy and fast highway with many, many huge trucks on it, and it began raining like crazy, I wasn't particularly happy about this change. However, after a few more minutes, I came across a car parked on the gravel shoulder and two people waving me down. Turns out they've done lots of cycle touring, and had stopped to tell me how to get to the nearby old highway which is much safer for cyclists. I managed to get off Hwy 401 within about half an hour, after being run off the road several times by semi-trailers blasting their air horns right as they came up on me instead of with a bit of warning. Luckily, my Schwalbe Marathon Plus tires were able to handle the gravel quite well at 30+ km/h and I was always able to regain the asphalt relatively quickly.

Once on Old Highway 2, cycling was much more enjoyable, even though my destination was 104km from my starting point. I have no idea what this tower is, but it's old and strange so I took a photo:




Progress toward Kingston - only 77km to go:




I saw a lot of hay fields during my cycling adventures in Eastern Canada, and took photos of many of them for some reason:




Supposedly entering Kingston... in fact, I was quite some distance from the city itself, but at least I had something to look forward to:




I reached Kingston in the late afternoon, managed to arrange a place to stay at the very last minute through CouchSurfing.com with a super nice guy named Will. After a shower and some great conversation, I went to bed (went to couch?) and slept like a baby. Up in the morning again, I refilled my three water bottles and cycled out of Kingston, stopping at Tim Horton's for breakfast just outside town. I ended up eating at Tim's very, very frequently while cycling in the Maritimes and Ontario, and highly recommend it.

My destination on day 2 was a town called Belleville, 83km away. En route, as usual, I took a few photos. Some were from my onboard camera and others from the one in my pocket which I pulled out while moving or stopped, depending on the shot:






Canada's oldest furniture store, in Napanee, where Avril Lavigne grew up:







More hay:




I took this photo specifically for my friend Sarina, who will understand why it's funny:




As I was cycling up one straight stretch of the highway, I noticed something in the distance slowly crossing the road. As I neared, I tried to decide what it could be. When I got close enough to see, I realised it was a turtle! By the time I reached it, it had tucked itself into its shell because of several trucks and cars going by, which all just narrowly missed crushing it. I took this photo while still cycling. In Canada, a double-yellow line is the centre line dividing opposing directions of traffic (double means no crossing to overtake). My British friends might otherwise think this is taken curbside, but it's the middle of the highway:




I pulled off the road and jumped off my bike, let one more truck pass by, then quickly picked the turtle up and carried it to the other side in the direction it had been walking, and put it down a good distance from the road, not far from a small brook. Having shown these photos to more knowledgeable people, it turns out to be a Blanding's Turtle, a threatened/endangered species! Neat!




Continuing on my journey, more random photos:






I had to sleep in a motel in Belleville, as I couldn't find any free accommodation, but I did have a nice chat with the girl working at the Pita Pit, so it wasn't an entirely antisocial evening. In the morning, I set my sights on Cobourg, about 78km away. On the way there I saw a few trains, like this one:




As I was passing CFB Trenton and admiring the huge military aircraft through the fence while cycling alongside, I noticed something in the distance and immediately stopped to take a photo. It's a groundhog! I tried to get up to the fence to take a better photo but even from a huge distance, the groundhog got scared and shot into its hole almost instantly:




Crossing a bridge:




On the way from Belleville to Cobourg, I had to pass through Colborne, which involved a ridiculous uphill I never want to see again. After conquering said hill, I was on my way out of town toward Cobourg when I noticed this fancy old car parked on the side of the road, so I grabbed my pocket camera and took a quick shot as I cycled past:




Not much further on, another fancy old car! I stopped to take this one:




45 minutes later, a bunch of these old cars passed me by (at very slow speeds, mind you), so I again grabbed my pocket camera and took a few shots while trying to keep up with them a bit. This is the back of the second car I saw parked earlier:




And a different one:




I made it to Cobourg before 5pm, found a wireless connection outside near the marina area to check email and find accommodation, but then it began to rain. I quickly zipped everything up and headed to a restaurant with wireless where I had a tasty lunch and found the cheapest motel online. Outside, the rain started coming down in buckets, and hadn't stopped doing so by the time I finally left. This is the fancy town hall building in 'downtown' Cobourg, before the rain got into full swing:




I slept fairly well at the motel, and in the morning was back on the road after another Tim Horton's breakfast for my fourth and final day of Ontario cycling, heading for Toronto. My tires were a bit low so I got the car mechanics at Canadian Tire to put some air in, as I couldn't find a petrol station anywhere and my hand-pump only inflates my tires to the bare minimum level.




The trip from Cobourg to Toronto isn't particularly short - it's about 113km on the route I took.




You may think this village has erected this sign to welcome people to their area, but in fact the name of the village is Welcome, Ontario. You can find it on any detailed Ontario map, or Google Maps.




I have no idea how/why this double decker bus got into some guy's field in the middle of nowhere in Ontario, but it's painted in gold-coloured paint and has Big Ben painted on it.




Car and business nearly colour-coordinated:




I finally entered the outskirts of Toronto after a physically tough day of cycling, and the smell hit me much harder than it has in a couple of past visits to Canada's biggest city. I often joke about how bad Toronto air is, and I still stand by that, but this last summer there was something making it even worse than normal: a garbage strike.

You think this is a lot of garbage?




Let's zoom out a bit, now it's clear that there's a LOT of garbage:




But if we zoom out even further, it's possible to see that it's a REEEEALLY big pile of garbage, and there's another one to the left!




Aside from the air, the garbage strike (which ended while I was in town), and the terrible condition of many of the city's roads, I had a great time spending a week in Toronto just looking around and catching up with old friends. More on that in the next post.