SWOdyssey – Day 4 -Windsor to Leamington

We agreed to be ready to leave the residence at St. Clair college by 8 o’clock. The Tim Hortons on campus doesn’t open on weekends, but there was fruit and coffee provided in the lobby so we took advantage of that.

We took our morning usie and were off along the Herb Gray Parkway section of the Trans Canada Trail. It was a joy to ride. Wide, smooth, well signed, high quality cycling infrastructure.

I have been impressed by the amount of bike lanes in Leamington and Windsor. This one took us from the trail to the Ambassador bridge and Windsor Waterfront.

This is our first sighting of the Ambassador bridge which connects Windsor to Detroit, which is interestingly north of Windsor.

The Waterfront trail in Windsor was the highlight of the day and well worth visiting. There was an incredible amount of artwork along the trail, beautiful views of the Ambassador bridge and of Detroit on the north side of the river.

Look at what this chicken sculpture is made from. Imagine the size of the bike that that bike chain came from!

Views of Detroit:

After leaving the waterfront trail we went in search of second breakfast and ended up at McDonald’s. At the McDonald’s we annoyed a group of old people by sitting in the section of the restaurant that they consider theirs on a Saturday morning for socializing and playing music!

We left the McDonald’s through an alley and Wayne, for the second year in a row, found and posed on a discarded toilet. This year in the first picture and last year in the second.

We planned today’s ride on my iPad last night and relied on Ride with GPS to do a lot of the routing for us. Unfortunately, for some bizarre reason, Ride with GPS thought it would be OK to route us along an old concession on airport property that hasn’t been accessible to the public, according to a local cyclist we spoke to, for 30 years. The red line is how the route was planned, the green line is how we should have gone, and the blue line is how we ended up going.

We have been expecting thundershowers pretty much every day that we have been here but this is the first day that they actually materialized. David’s red and yellow jersey looked great against the threatening sky in this image.

Here we are at the start of the Chrysler Greenway, which is supposed to take us most of the way back to Leamington. It was singletrack for a while, quite narrow, but hard packed dirt, so fairly smooth, but soon turned into a groomed trail with gravel, rather than stone dust or limestone screenings like on the Caledon rail trail. I found the conditions incredibly jarring and had had enough long before we reached our lunch stop.

After a little more than 20 km, which felt like much more to me, we reached Harrow and stopped for lunch at Subway. Fortunately there was a place for us to park our bikes under cover, because shortly after entering the restaurant the skies opened up and we had a heavy rain. We waited until the worst of it was over and then prepared ourselves to ride in the rain which stopped shortly there after (of course).

After lunch Dayle and I decided to return to Leamington on the roads and David and Wayne continued along the trail. We agreed that last person to return would buy drinks.

This was an interesting church we saw along the way. You can also see in this picture how incredibly flat this area of Ontario is. We have been shocked at how little elevation we have encountered for the distances we have been riding.

There are a lot of green houses in the Leamington area, and a lot of migrant workers from Mexico that work in them and ride bikes to get to around, which is probably why there is so much cycling infrastructure around here.

This is the only hill I have seen in four days.

Back in Leamington we found a bike corral on Talbot Street.

I was the last one to return because when we got to the hotel I had 96 km and decided to do 4 km more to get a grand Fondo for the month of July.

We decided to have dinner at a Mexican restaurant which was economical and had delicious food, but somewhat slow service.

Tomorrow we will be driving to Sarnia, leaving the car, and riding to Forest. We are going to have a short day with only about 40km of riding. The place we are staying has a pool and we are looking forward to spending some time there to recuperate for two longer days of riding on Monday and Tuesday.