We’d had a kind of busy weekend, helping with a fundraiser and getting everything ready for this bike trip. Then we got up early Monday morning and left the house on a 13 hour drive to Toronto.

It was a long day but actually not a bad drive – across Wisconsin, around the south end of Lake Michigan and the greater Chicago/Indiana suburbia and then north across Michigan, crossing the border at Sarnia into Ontario – a total of five states and one province.

I felt so stressed as we backed out of the garage – still feeling the troubling events of the spring and the whole year – and yet, as each mile east passed, I relaxed more. The troubles faded as we sped east.

The border crossing was quick and pleasant – the agent was the first of the Canadians we have met on this trip, all of whom have been lovely . More later on this.

And then we checked ourselves and our bikes into a downtown hotel (the Doubletree) and parked our car for two weeks at a long term parking ramp nearby. As people keep telling us, the FIFA World Cup is happening here next weekend, so we were lucky to get in a bit early.

We had a lovely late night meal at Joeys in this hip part of Toronto – a city we will definitely be coming back to!

OK: Canadians are SO FRIENDLY

We woke up this morning, packed the bikes and rode through the city, which reminded us of riding through Manhattan though with better bike lanes. Our goal was to find the “Waterfront Trail” and almost immediately had trouble with the signage and the route. I’ll skip over the details, but riding out of downtown Toronto (the largest city in Canada) and along the beach was complicated by harbors and big public works complexes and sudden trail endings requiring us to get on local streets to keep moving east.

It was so beautiful to be by the lake when we were, but we also spent plenty of time on crowded (Kingston Road) and residential streets, riding by amazing homes overlooking Lake Ontario and schools letting out for the day and sharing bus lanes with busy public transit on a weekday in the city.

Usually when we travel by bike, we use maps created by Adventure Cycling Association. They have not mapped Canadian rides (though are just stating a project in this region) and so we relied on online resources from a variety of sources, and were largely be following the Waterfront Trail today and then several routes on the Route Verte in Quebec to get us from Toronto to Quebec City. We knew the maps on the website for the Waterfront Trail were last updated in 2017 and that we would likely find some things had changed, but trusted we would figure it out. And we did, with thanks to other cyclists in the city and a woman walking by to the shops in Scarborough who gave us some tips and several construction and maintenance crews, mostly.

We made a few mistakes, including one that as Yogi Berra once said “was the wrong mistake.”

There was some very ambiguous signage that included arrows off of Kingston Road to Bike Route 4 and the Waterfront Trail, so after some tense moments with cars passing too close to our bikes on their way to the freeway, we decided to try to get back to the waterfront. So we followed the signs and headed down an incredibly steep gravel trail through the woods that had a strongly worded sign telling cyclists to disembark and walk their bikes. It turned out to dead end at some big rocks on the shore so we had to turn around, pushing our very heavy loaded bikes back up the hill, costing us about an extra hour in what was an already long day.

The rest of the day riding on the Waterfront trail ended up being very pleasant as we passed through Rouge and Pickering and Ajax (which had the very best navigational signage and trail maintenance) and Whitby and Oshawa, where we took a break to get some water … and realized we were unlikely to get to our destination, Port Hope, until 8:30 pm. We were hot and tired and ready for a break.

So after 55 slow miles, and with three hours yet to go, I asked myself “what would Carlos do?”

Carlos is our dear friend from our trip to NOLA in 2018, The answer was “call a taxi”….and as I was on the phone trying to do that, a Blue Line cab came up the street. I waved the driver over and he caught my eye and came over. After a little thinking, we decided that we could get the bikes in the back of his Toyota Camry after I took off the front wheels and we loaded the car with bikes, bags and persons. Our driver, Ali, was wonderful, kind, smart and generous. We send him our deepest thanks!

Lisa was stuck in the back with the bikes, but still fell asleep almost immediately – it convinced me we’d made the right decision.

It is late and while I have lots of more to say about today, I think I’ll retire.

We are not trying to prove anything and don’t care what anybody would say about how our first day went. Was planning a 75 mile ride on the first day of our first long tour in a few years a mistake? Yes.

We are also very happy to have another marathon day of biking under our belts.

More pics from today – see you tomorrow