The background and our route
Bob Ormerod suggested this tour, and planned and led it. Graham Rush and I joined Bob. We have thanked Bob in person, and on behalf of Graham and myself I'm thanking him publicly here.
[A short note on the three of us: The making of our troika has been a roundabout affair, although all the threads run through Bob in Orillia. Bob and I met near the end a ride he made from Orillia to Ottawa in the fall of 2016. He had read some of my older journals on mini-tours in the Madawaska Highlands, and asked my advice on route options between Bancroft and Ottawa. We arranged to meet at The Swan, a pub in the village of Carp on the northwestern outskirts of Ottawa. I helped Bob to navigate the suburban shoals of Ottawa, and we and have stayed in touch since. (See the companion journal to this one, “Cycling The Land Between”.)
Graham and Bob met courtesy of Graham's journal of his three-part coast-to-coast tour, 2015-16-17. In 2017, Graham returned to Orillia to resume his ride to Newfoundland, after he had had to abandon his ride the previous year after losing a wheel in deep sand near Bob's home, the mishap resulting in a hospital visit. Bob then joined Graham on the first day of the 3rd leg of the trip, Orillia to St John's.
Lastly, Graham and I met in person for the first time on Bob’s back deck on July 6, on the eve of our ride to the Erie Shore.]
Bob lives near Orillia, a small city of 30,000 people at the junction of Lakes Simcoe and Couchiching, due north of Toronto. It’s moderately famous as the home of Gordon Lightfoot and site of the Mariposa Folk Festival, where Lightfoot used to hang out back in the day, along with the likes of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, and occasionally Bob Dylan. Even further back in the day, the Orillia of a century ago provided the setting for the gentle humour of Stephen Leacock.
After several decades of riding in Canada since he left Lancashire in the mid-60’s, Bob knows the terrain west and north of Toronto well. Earlier this year, he suggested to me and to Graham that we do a week’s ride west of Orillia to the eastern shore of Lake Huron, circling through Alice Munro’s countryside south of the Bruce Peninsula. Bob doesn’t do cycle-camping, preferring light loads and accommodation in B & B’s and small motels. The initial idea of riding to the Huron shore proved difficult to turn into a plan, however – the prospective route offers plenty of quiet rural roads over relaxed terrain, but not so many roadside cafés, modest motels or B & B's.
As Plan B, Bob worked out a route bearing south-west from Orillia towards the north shore of Lake Erie. We’d follow rural roads skirting the metropolitan areas of Toronto and Hamilton, with the Niagara Escarpment on our west. The return journey would take us from Port Colborne, the southern terminus of the Welland Canal, along the Lake Ontario shore through Hamilton to Burlington, and north again to Orillia.
This was not unknown country for me, although I had not cycled through it, but for Graham, originally from Vancouver, it was wholly new terrain. Near the end of our tour, he said, “This ride has been a lesson in the geography of Southern Ontario – I didn’t really know about the Niagara Escarpment.” The Escarpment, a ridge of limestone and shale, was a constant on our ride, sometimes as a visual marker, sometimes as a forceful physical reminder – the gradient beneath our wheels.
Beginning in upstate New York just east of the southern shore of Lake Ontario, the Escarpment runs through Ontario for about a thousand kilometres. It makes its most famous appearance at Niagara Falls, continues along the southwestern shore of Lake Ontario, then bends northwards to the Bruce Peninsula, which divides Lake Huron from Georgian Bay. (The Bruce Trail, a long-distance hiking path, accompanies it along this section, 890 kilometres in all.) At Tobermory, on the tip of the Bruce, it plunges into the clear deep waters between Georgian and Huron, and re-emerges on Manitoulin Island. Manitoulin is a fabulous place in the old sense of that word, a land of fable. (It’s also an ace fact for Trivial Pursuit & crossword puzzles: Manitoulin is the largest freshwater island in the world.) From Manitoulin, the Escarpment continues northwest to Sault Ste. Marie and crosses over to Michigan, eventually reaching Wisconsin.
Wikipedia offers a useful map of the Escarpment:
Routes for our six days on the road appear below at the beginning of the notes for that day.
The bikes: I rode “Osi”, my Thorn Raven. Graham’s bike is “Ol’ Blue”, built for him by Hugh Black of True North Cycles in Guelph. Bob rode his elegant light green Mercian, a light touring bike now nearly 20 years old. Graham and I are both Rohloffistas, Bob the old-school guy with all the cogs, derailleurs and narrow tires. Graham and I were able to observe the workings of All That as we pottered along in Bob’s wake, [unable to keep up with him -- imagine a strikethrough -- Ed. Note] deferring to his local knowledge and his role as ride leader.
Here are the bikes:
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See “Notes on Gear” at the end of the journal for my comments on my gear for the ride.
And lastly, at the end of the beginning, a note on the title: This is "Touring the extended neighbourhood #2". #1 happened in 2017, and that story will be posted shortly.
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