Ride Report June 11th

Friday last we decided to spend some time on the Toronto Islands, generally this means hauling the bikes along the subway, downtown and then riding from Union Station to the Ferry Docks. This was a little tricker then normal due to all the fencing being erected for the G20, not sure why they need to have all these leaders together and why they can't just group Skype for the meetings, it will cost a lot of money and inconvenience many folks. You can still access the ferry docks, but it's a very narrow access.

You want the ferry that is capable of taking cars, while a person can cross for $6.50 return, it costs $100 for a car to cross, and very few motor vehicles make the journey, some to deliver to the restaurants and businesses on the Island, but there isn't that many. It was unusual today in that we had a truck crossing over, and it was very large and heavy, considering how low the ferry was sitting in the water. You want this one for bicycles because it can accommodate about 50 bicycles.

Sometimes you get interesting things on the lake, like this thing, I have no idea what it's doing out there. We saw a tall ship as well, and I managed to get the new machinery on the barge along with the older tall ship, this is taken with a 300mm lens, and it's a little hazy, so it needs more manipulation then normal, to get the photo. With B&W you often use filters to cut glare, which is what I did in the conversion step here, there is some kind of reflection in the photo, that looks like a half circle, not sure what causes this, seems to happen more with smaller apertures though.

We rode all the way from Hanlan's Point to the far end of Wards Island, stopped at the Island Cafe for lunch, I wasn't impressed, neither was Pamela...... We went to the far end of Wards to where the old boat mooring point is, the concrete walkway here is in terrible shape, the top layer has spalled off in many places, usually we turn around from the walkway, today we went down to the end. You will notice a lot of graffiti in behind, which is in some ways ugly and beautiful at the same time.

There is a marsh at one end, the rocks are to keep the waves from boats from destroying the shoreline and the marsh. You often find marshes like this on the ocean, and there are literally hundreds of kilometres of marsh that are now in danger on the US gulf coast from the oil disaster going on down there.

We then returned, roughly the way we had come, total distance 22km..... I notice one thing with such rides, you often go fast and furious from one end to the other, and then meander taking breaks on the way back.