TBN “Tour of Toronto”

Today’s TBN Urban Roller ride was titled “Tour of Toronto”.  Since it went through a couple of parts of town that I haven’t been, I decided to ride along. With the great weather, we had a pretty large turnout at the start point in High Park.

And off we go. Nice to see the park not so crowded after the sakura madness.

Along Davenport.

First major stop was Casa Loma.

Just had to take one shot of the Brompton.

Regroup before we enter the trail system near Sunnybrook Park.

We have to walk this bit before a bridge.

Sunnybrook Park.

Now into the Don Valley trails.

Regroup in front of the elephants.

Crossing Pottery Rd.

One more regroup at the foot of the Lower Don Trail.

At this point, the main group went east towards the Portlands. I decided to peel off at Corktown Commons, and through downtown back to the High Park area.

Here’s what my abbreviated ride looked like. The section in Sunnybrook Park was new to me.

Thanks to Dave, our ride leader for the day.  Looking forward to a longer ride tomorrow.

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TBN Weekend

This past weekend was the kickoff for the Toronto Bicycling Network, where there was a brunch gathering before a full slate of rides at various levels. Last week was also the first week when all their ride programs were in full swing. Things have been late this year because of the lingering cold weather.

Saturday morning at Etienne Brule Park. One of these days I’ll show up early enough to listen to the various announcements, but as per usual, I only managed to get there shortly before the rides started.

Of course it’s fun to wander around to see all the hardware. Here are two orange bikes; I like the Kogswell in the background.

I’ve seen this beautiful Mariposa before.

One only recumbent: a tandem trike.

Joey announces the start of the tourist ride. Me thinks the megaphone is not necessary.

They had a 60 km ride on the books. Because I didn’t have much free time, I elected to ride out as far as Port Credit before turning back. Here we are on the new bidirectional lane on Lakeshore, which was still not officially open.

On my solitary ride on the way back I see this:

Also this signage is new since the last time I rode out here.

Sunday dawned clear and bright, and it was time for a tourist ride from the new subway station at Vaughan Metropolitan Centre.

Ed is fiddling with his electronics.

Joey makes the pre ride announcements.

And off we go. The start is further north than Finch Station, and so we reached Major Mac in about 20 minutes.

Almost all the riders elected to do the short 68 km route today. Here is the lead group for 68km, just after the turn off.

Since this was the fast group, it wasn’t long before I was dropped.

I eventually caught up to them in Bolton, and here we are at a regroup in Kleinburg.

Always time for ice cream.

Here is one of two major subdivisions going in on Teston Rd, just east of Kleinburg.

Teston Rd was closed for construction, but Sam had said that a bike should be able to get through, especially on a Sunday. He was right. Avoiding the detour cut about 5 km from my ride. Thanks Sam!

Not in love with the long southbound stretch along Jane with lots of car and bus traffic. I’m not smiling; that is a grimace.

Remind me how these sharrows are supposed to make me feel safer.

Look: a bike lane for the last 50 m of my ride.

Ride complete. 65 km at an average of 24.4 kph, which for me is pretty good.

On the subway home, I encounter this gentleman.

I usually don’t have an issue with giving buskers money, but I didn’t want to encourage busking on the subway itself, which is also against TTC rules.

 

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Good Friday ride with TBN, and learning a bit more about Strava, etc.

Yesterday was my first ride of the year with TBN. With Easter being earlier than last year, the Good Friday ride was a bit earlier than my first TBN ride last year. On a sunny but blustery day, we had 11 riders at the start.

There was a fairly strong and steady wind out of the north the whole ride which made the first part of the ride a bit of a grind. Just like last year’s Good Friday ride, I elect to go for the shortest (60km) route that turns right at 19th Ave. Joey and the faster riders are going straight ahead.

Every year, development inches further north. This sign on 19th Ave. was one of many new ones I saw in the area.

Headed back south with the benefit of going downhill with a tailwind, you can see the effect on my speed.

Given that I was first to Unionville, I chose to skip the brunch stop, and rode back to Finch. Joey’s ride report is here.

Just to vary things a bit, I elected to ride partway back to downtown along the Finch hydro corridor, incidentally collecting a few tiles along the way, and also connecting the Finch start point to some of my previous rides on my personal heat map.

This section west of Yonge St. has crossings of major streets with lights.

Not that this made any difference to Edouard Le Blanc who was killed at a very similar crossing on the Gatineau trail at Warden by a driver who ran the red light.

This section of trail branches north and south at a dam in G Ross Lord Park. I elect to take the southbound branch that leads to some streets that make it easy to bike down to Wilson, at which point I took the subway the rest of the way downtown.

I tracked this ride with both the Cyclemeter App, and my Garmin. I had seen before that Cyclemeter is much more generous is assessing average speed than the Garmin. Cyclemeter says:

However, the curious thing was that when I uploaded both the Cyclemeter and the Garmin data to Strava, the stats were much closer:

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You can see that the average speeds now almost agree, which means that Cyclemeter interprets the GPS data differently than what Strava does. I think from this point, whenever I use the Garmin, I’ll use that data for Strava, rather than the Cyclemeter upload.

Two other geeky points on gear. One thing was that my right shoe wasn’t clipping in for the entire ride. A quick look afterwards reveals that my cleat was broken. I found one last spare in the garage, but since Bebops are no longer made, I might have to switch to another type of clipless pedal.

The other thing is cycling caps. I always thought that they were a bit of an affectation, especially when you wear one under a helmet. However, after using a kayak visor and having the velcro come unstuck from my helmet, and then trying and failing to use epoxy to stick the velcro onto my helmet (polycarbonate is not easy to glue to, and using a solvent based adhesive seemed like a bad idea), I finally broke down and tried out the hat under helmet thing.

Voila, I find that the cap visor is perfectly shaped to shade my eyes from several angles while not blocking forward vision, even when I’m leaning forward on the drops. And note that my helmet has a raised bottom edge just wide enough to clear the visor.

You learn something new every day…..

 

 

 

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Collecting tiles, part 2

So I’ve been collecting some more tiles with Veloviewer and it is definitely addictive. For example, this morning, my rides looked like this:

and you can see the annoying little gap in South Etobicoke. Thus, with a little more time on hand this afternoon, I took a somewhat circuitous route home.

(normal route purple, this afternoon, blue).

Now my tiles look like this:

and to add to the fun, I got to discover some new territory like this bridge.

I’ve added a few rides from the last couple of years to my Strava account, and now if I zoom out on my personal heat map, the tiles look like this.

Most of my riding is downtown, and some of the rides further afield are with TBN. You can clearly see one or two rides starting from Finch station going north that are not connected to downtown. Sadly, the longer rides that come from downtown are all ghost bike rides from the past year or two.

One more note: I’ve given up on the Strava phone app. Many people were reporting problems with iPhones not recording properly from about the middle of February. I’ve switched back to tracking rides with the Cyclemeter App, and then uploading to my free Strava account, which seems to work out fine. I’ll be tracking rides with my Garmin as well when I get back to doing those longer rides.

 

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A bit of fall colours with TBN

The TBN tourist ride for today was Six Points to Peel. Five of us showed up on a glorious Sunday morning.

I’m partial to steel bikes, especially purple ones, and so I had to take some pictures of Leonard’s Bertrand.

Off we go. Crossing the 427.

Fall colours in the middle of a Mississauga subdivision. Ironically, these would be the best that we’d see on the entire ride.

At Steeles. Joey is headed to punch the button.

Headed north on Heritage Rd.

At this point, we turn right for the shorter 78 km route. Joey, of course, heads further north.

Almost immediately after the turn, we are back into subdivisions. Every year, it takes a little longer to get out of the city.

Lots of sidewalk riding in the suburbs.

Brief lunch stop at Tim’s. I think Ted is objecting to me taking this picture.

I thought this fancy station was an LRT, but I was told it was a BRT.

Deji leads us back to Kipling station.

Thanks to Joey for organizing the ride. I hope that Leonard made it back OK. We lost him somewhere on Tomken Rd.

 

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Thursday night TBN ride

Tonight was another Thursday night ride with TBN. I like these rides because rider leader Adam keeps things at a fairly sprightly pace.

Here we are at the starting point in High Park.

Regroup in motion at the first of two promised Cemeteries.

Down a bit of the belt line. It’s getting dark, so lots of motion blur.

And the second Cemetery.

Adam usually doesn’t look this sleepy as he rides.

A refreshing, quick ride on a Thursday night. I can already feel the days getting shorter.

 

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Ride to Oakville with TBN

Today was an Urban Roller TBN ride out to Oakville. Since I had not been on the Waterfront Trail west of Marie Curtis Park, I decided to ride along.  It was a pretty good turnout at the start point, the south parking lot of Kipling station.

Chris gives us the low down on the ride. He tells us to be especially cautious on the many sections of the ride that are along multi use trails. Apparently there was a bad accident on a TBN ride yesterday.

and off we go

Going south on Kipling, stopped at Queen.

Port Credit.

First rest stop somewhere in Mississauga.

Here we are in beautiful “downtown Oakville”.

Lunch stop at Tim’s.

Now riding back. This is what passes for a bike lane in Oakville.

At least Mississauga has these signs.

The lead group makes a left from Meadow Wood Rd.

I elected to pass up the last rest stop, and rode on for the rest of the ride. Most of it retraced our ride along the Waterfront Trail.  Watch out for Coyotes!

Back in TO.

End of the line.

Ride summary:

• total ride time was just under 5 hours.
• GPS says 72 km with about 18 kph average moving speed.
• Cyclemeter says 74 km with 22 kph average speed, which is a bit optimistic.

Thanks to Chris, and everyone else that rode today!

 

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