Cycling Journal: Day 1 (July 31)

CYCLING JOURNAL: Day 1 (July 31)

First day on the road!

I decided cheat past the Iron Curtain of big box stores, bitterness, and depression that forms the outskirts of Toronto by catching a Go bus to Georgetown. Was planning on hooking up with Friendly Rich for coffee there before setting out. But missed the early bus while buying cigarettes and got to Georgetown too late to hang out: Rich was getting ready for his CD-release show that night and I wanted to be off anyway.

The early part of this day’s ride set me straight on the question of whether it’d be better to stick to fairly major (but sometimes too busy) roads or go for tiny country roads that are seldom travelled: those roads are seldom travelled for a good reason. They’re terrible.

My first move was to get hopelessly lost, picking through a ziz-zag sequence of country roads – each one more lonely, narrow, and decrepit than the last – until the road became a dirt track winding up a densely wooded hillside. The road sloped up and up and I couldn’t get any traction in the deep dry dirt. So I had to get off and push my bike for a long ways. My heavy panniers pushed back. But the rise finally leveled off a bit and I found myself in a lovely spot with many thin waterfalls running off the escarpment to my left and a beautiful forest sloping down to my right. When I began running into groups of Quebecois tourists I suspected I’d blundered into a provincial park.

I reached a paved road (with a sign marking the place I’d been as a nature preserve) and found I’d wasted a great deal of time and only reached the town of Erin. It began to dawn on me that although the way I’d come was quite beautiful I had 2800 kilometers ahead of me and beauty of this sort was a deadly enemy to be avoided at all costs.

But I wasn’t wholly decided on taking major roads yet, so after a quick lunch in Erin I set out to repeat the morning’s stupidity once again. Soon I was on RR25 going north towards the 89 highway, along the edge of the Luther Marsh Provincial Park. I spontaneously decided that by taking RR15 west I’d have the same distance to travel (on smaller roads), could stay on the edge of the park, and have the additional benefit of passing through the village of Monck. It was Monck that compelled me to try that way.

It was another stupid move. This sideroad was to go about 12k before rejoining a major road. But only the first 3k were paved. Then – when I’d already committed myself to that route – it abruptly turned to loose gravel. I gave it my best, but again had to walk through a fair bit of it where riding was impossible. It soon became worse when I found that the only people who use this wretched road are the drivers of dumptrucks full of debris from a quarry near Monck: they know nobody else would be stupid enough to come this way so they fly down the road at breakneck speed, surrounded by comet-like trails of dust and spewing bits of rubble at every bump.

That made up my mind: the beautiful places can come to me if they want, but I’m not going to go looking for them.

So I reached highway 89 and turned west. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, 89 was a landmark point on the journey: it’s the Yuppie Cyclist Line. Several days later the realization came to me that I hadn’t seen a Yuppie Cyclist (i.e. a 35-50 year old riding a spotless $3000 bike and full Tour De France cycling kit) north of Highway 89. It must be like the bridge at Sleepy Hollow for YCs.

By early evening the fact that I’d left Toronto’s sophisticated and ironic sensibilities behind was made clear when I reached the town of Mount Forest and saw this amazing sign:

I also suffered a rough blow to my ego when, on the long hill leading up to the plateau Mount Forest is located on, I was so tired that I was passed by an Amish girl on a bike. So I decided to stop at a pub there for a restorative.

My first day ended with a 40k ride to Durham, where I stopped at the Provincial Park northeast of the town. This provincial park, some nice party-campers from Brampton told me, had been destroyed by a tornado last year and a child was killed when the washroom collapsed on him. You could see the path the tornado had taken by a swath of downed trees leading straight toward the newly-rebuilt washroom. Where’s your ‘God’ now, Durham?