Arrival

Utopia, ON, CA – Toronto, ON, CA

The day we’ve all been waiting for!

Okay, the day that Diana and I have been waiting for.

Arrival!

In Toronto!

With a hot shower, a real bed, and a restaurant around the corner.

Well that was easy.

NOT!

It was fun though. Super fun. And – when we can stop thinking about tired legs – we’re feeling pretty good about ourselves right about now . . .

The actual last-day journey into Toronto seems kind of trivial now that we’re here. And the thing is, it seems like when there are 6 million people around, you meet none of them. Our only real human interaction was meeting David, an AirBnB “Superhost” – and a very nice guy.

(Kind of a fun moment when we arrived at David’s place. Diana did an amazing job finding an AirBnB that was in a great location, had a place to stow our bikes, and is otherwise very nice. But, uncharacteristically for her – with her generally top-notch planning skills – what she didn’t realize is that David would be there and that this was a shared space. So when we opened the door – looking forward to collapsing instantly – and David was there: “Suprise!” – there was a brief moment of confusion until David realized that we were, indeed, surprised, and told us that it was a shared space.)

David told us all about Toronto and the good spots to go. He told us about the little “cabin” he owns in Craigleith – a beautiful town on Lake Huron that we just went through. And, most important, he told us where our bedroom was.

More than most days, we were tired – or at least I was. The day was objectively difficult – or at least it was a day that Wahoo deemed difficult. We set a new record with, I think, thirteen Summits. Wahoo tells us when it thinks we have a Summit coming up by giving us a cheery little da-da-ding – as if we’re supposed to be happy that we’re heading up a giant hill – and as if we wouldn’t otherwise notice – what with our bikes loaded to probably 60 pounds or so. (One of these days we should try to figure out just how heavy they are when they’re fully loaded . . .)

But most of the Wahoo Summits happened in the first half of the day. At some point we reached a “summit” and saw the tops of Toronto skyscrapers off in the distance (that was a good moment after, at that point, about 930 miles of riding!) – and it was mostly downhill from there . . .

As it turned out, though, downhill didn’t necessarily mean easy. As we rode along, the largely pastoral scenes of our last fifteen days eroded into industrial and suburbia world. Where we might have ridden through maybe seven stoplights on all our whole trip to date, we probably went through 100 on the trip into the City.

And let me just tell you – we obviously don’t know Toronto well at this point – but based on our trip into the city, Toronto is an urban planner’s nightmare. Endless sprawl with no apparent logic.

But it is not only the population density that is different. The population here looks much different from the rest of Ontario. Super diverse. It’s pretty obvious that Toronto is a magnet for people from all over the world. Mexican, Indian, Thai, African – there are people from all over the world – complete with Chinatown and Little Italy.

Okay, that’s enough on that. You can read a Toronto guidebook that will do a better job than I can based on our nearly three hour (three hour!!!!) bike ride through the labyrinth of the City.

One other thought before we leave off. After riding through all of this unexplored territory they call Ontario I can’t help thinking that we should consider annexing the part of Ontario that is below the 49th parallel. I mean, you have all these English speaking people being oppressed by the French Canadians; they even have to print their street signs in two languages – the indignity of it all! And all these poor Ontario-ians are culturally American anyway. I mean, there are McDonalds and everything. And some of our other great American corporations already have a foothold. For instance, as we biked in we saw that Walmart is building what equates to the Walmart-gon in suburban Toronto.

And the reality is that when you look at a map of the U.S. it is pretty obvious that all this land was supposed to be part of America anyway – just the cartographer – who was drawing a nice straight line from the Pacific east must have had the shakes from too much coffee and the line went all haywire after he or she reached Lake of the Woods.

But I have two secret ulterior motivations for this as well . . . First, Lake Huron and the area around it are amazing. It’s got all the vast amazing-ness of Lake Superior – but it’s actually warm enough to swim in. It has the rocky shores and the topography of the North Shore. And it has some islands and such that give the shortes a Bayfield-like feel. Seems a shame to have Lake Huron in another country . . .

And then, the truly big one. You know how we are all worried about technology around computer chips and that worries us in our relations with China. Well, I just think in a similar way that it is important that we capture the secrets of Tim Horton’s. How do they make their honey crullers so good? What is the recipe for that coffee? Can we, as a nation, really afford to sit by and let Canada just completely own Tim Horton’s while we do nothing? It’s a matter of patriotism. It is time to act . . . 🙂

So I have included a map of our journey – complete with the new proposed annexation line.

Thanks for reading and for the comments along the way. It’s pretty cool to feel like your community is right there with you on these journeys.

Until next time.

John and Diana