Day Two, Sun., July 8: Skirting Toronto and Hamilton
Orangeville to Ancaster
We made a 7:15 start on the Sunday. The clear dry air was a blessed relief after weeks of high humidity, and the forecast high was a wholly manageable 27. With no independent cafés open so early on a Sunday morning, we ate breakfast at a Tim Horton’s. I was a bit apprehensive: When our son played a very good level of minor hockey 15 to 20 years ago, I visited a lot of Tim Horton’s coffee shops in Eastern Ontario. I’m old enough to remember Tim Horton as a fine defenceman on the last Leafs team to win anything; repeated visits as a hockey dad to the chain he founded led me to wonder if as a young man he’d imbibed far too much arena coffee. (I did learn, and remembered, that Timmy’s offers a good deal on chili and a bagel.) Graham and Bob, unburdened by my baggage, ordered breakfast wraps, juice and coffee, and seemed none the worse for having done so. I was chuffed to see that oatmeal with berries, unsweetened, was available, so ordered that. The cashier reckoned that my buddies would be jealous of my choice; heartened, I cautiously ordered a cappuccino, after she assured me that it would have only whatever sugar I chose to add. To my pleasant surprise my oatmeal was quite OK—if anything, it could have been bigger. The coffee was undistinguished, but against my baggage of hockey memories, undistinguished was OK too.
Our ride south of Orangeville mirrored that of the day before, with both modest and prosperous farms:
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“It doesn’t get much better than this,” said Graham, delighted by his applied geography lesson. We reached the small village of Belfountain around 10:30, and stopped for coffee and snacks at “The Higher Ground”. It’s an excellent café in an old wooden store. Both staff and customers were cheerful, and I chatted with a woman originally from Nottinghamshire, about to take a holiday at home to visit old friends, haunts and family.
Bob, Graham, and I were not alone: The café and its parking lot was chock-full of cyclists and motorcyclists from the Toronto area, awash in waves of colour-coordinated spandex and high-end trick plastic bikes. (Those were the cyclists. The dozen or so motorcyclists were mostly Harley riders, though there were a couple of mid-60s Britbikes. Tucked away in the shade was a splendid big Guzzi sports machine, essentially a collection of expensive components anchored to that enormous transverse V-twin.) With our touring rigs and bright-but-logoless clothing—Graham was wearing sandals, for heaven’s sake!—we looked positively retro, maybe nudging the borders of retro-chic. Our Rohloffs gained nary a look or question; I took that as confirmation of the wisdom my approach to spec’ing my Raven so as to attract as little attention as possible. (Who’d want to pinch something that looked like an Amsterdam single-speed with drop bars?)
We checked our onward direction with a couple of the roadies, saying we were going towards Glen Williams and the village of Campbellville, aiming at the latter for lunch. They assured us that it was no more than a couple of hours. We were optimistic, not least because Bob’s wrist had improved considerably, with less swelling and pain.
Welllll, we passed a farm with a café about one o’clock, and decided to continue on to Campbellville, which we reckoned was maybe half an hour along. On and on we went, and on some more, our progress waylaid by a detour and interrupted by my need to inhale an energy bar and an orange, and then another. I nearly bonked, saved only by at last reaching Campbellville (at 3 PM!), and by a cannelloni and salad at “The Trail Eatery”.
Campbellville lies within the Halton Hills region, folds of the earth east of the Niagara Escarpment. The village itself is situated in a notch in the Escarpment, through which runs Ontario’s major east-west rail and road corridor. As we ate, I thought to myself, “Aha! Maybe we won’t be climbing the Escarpment…”
Fortified by our very late lunch, we carried on towards Ancaster via the northwest corner of the Greater Hamilton metropolitan area. Our route ran through the old village of Dundas, once a separate settlement, since gobbled up by Hamilton. To get to Dundas, we plunged down the Valley Road, and down, and down, reaching Cootes Paradise, a big marsh west of Hamilton Harbour. “Ah jeez,” sez I to myself, “now we’re at the level of Lake Ontario…the only way to Ancaster is up.” And so it came to pass, after covering 100 kms, and in the late afternoon, we had another 20 kms which included some very tough hills around the Escarpment, on the order of 15% and more.
Still, we were getting close to our B & B for the night, the Serenity Ranch just west of Ancaster. Or were we? We found Wilson Rd., the big arterial road heading west out of Ancaster all right, but just where was Serenity? For that matter, where was Bob? Riding with Graham, I had to pause to scoff down the remnants of my energy bar and to empty my water bottle, and then a few hundred metres along, there was Bob at a roundabout, chatting with … another touring cyclist, who had happened to drive past us in his car, and had stopped Bob to say hello. And—lo!—he knew where Serenity was, 2 kms past the roundabout on our right.
We finally rolled in at 6:25, after 11-plus hours on the road … and one of our hosts, Alan, bless him, was ready with 3 cold bottles of beer. Serenity is a sprawling old farmhouse with a modern kitchen and a couple of additions in keeping with the original building, the lot full of comfortable old furniture. Our large bedrooms had modern bathrooms, quiet aircon, and no highway noise–perhaps we’d died atop the Escarpment, and found ourselves in heaven? Once we had showered and recovered some equilibrium, Shane, the owner, principal cook, and project manager for the restoration, told us about an excellent Lebanese restaurant nearby, The Golden Pita. And, he very kindly drove us there for supper. Of course there was far too much food, but my untouched falafel wrap would serve me well for lunch the next day.
Today's ride: 122 km (76 miles)
Total: 224 km (139 miles)
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