Cindy and I tried to put together a trip along the Waterfront Trail from Brampton to Cornwall that would have been a mix of staying with a friend of Cindy’s, a cousin of mine, and some hotels. But it was too long a return trip and we couldn’t find a reasonable way to transport our bikes ones way. Via Rail doesn’t carry bikes right now in the Windsor – Quebec City corridor, and won’t until they have replaced their rolling stock.
Greyhound is gone. Megabus won’t transport bikes. A one way car rental started at $400 for the day, and shipping the bikes was hundreds of dollars each and required them to be dismantled.
Then Cindy found out that her sister, who lives in Whitby, was going south for a week. I joked that we could “explore the crap out of Whitby” and get lots of new Statshunter tiles. Cindy liked the idea, so we went with it.

We rode our bikes to Bramalea GO, and took the train to Guildwood, with a transfer at Union.

There’s some great graffiti on the way into Union but I didn’t get up fast enough to capture the best of it.

Each GO train has space for bikes at each end of the car, but only during non peak periods.

It was spitting a bit as we emerged from the station, but we had only a 5 minute ride to Guildwood park where we found a covered patio to eat our lunches. The rain stopped and we explored the grounds situated on the Scarborough Bluffs. It is a sculpture sanctuary, has preserved architectural fragments from demolished buildings, and beautiful gardens. The grounds also contain the oldest building in Scarborough, built in the 1790s.


I asked Ride with GPS to plan a route for us and I didn’t check it over. There were a couple questionable sections, but it’s all part of the adventure. We followed this desire line and had to dismount a couple times to skirt around wet mud for fear that we might get stuck and tip over with our heavily weighted bikes with panniers.


The path improved considerably after less than a kilometre, although it was washed out at one point near the lake,



Rouge Hill GO station has direct access to the Waterfront Trail and a bike share station so would make a nice trip out of Toronto and ride back in.

I really don’t know what someone is thinking when they decide to drop a bunch in Jersey walls in the middle of the path to try to force cyclists to walk their bikes. None of the bridges before or after had this set up. We just carefully negotiated our way out around the blocks and continued riding. Had we seen any pedestrians we would have given them the right away, as we did on bridges before and after this, as was signed.

It was nice to see this upgrade along Bayly Street where the waterfront trail jogs north to get around Frenchman’s Bay in Pickering. The second picture is from my trip in 2017 on the way home from Ottawa in the same location.


There’s a cute community at Pickering Beach. At this point we realized that we hadn’t had a coffee yet, but it was getting rather late in the afternoon, and the coffee shop at the beach had closed for the day. We decided not to ride up to the Tim Hortons on Bayly Street.


Weirdly, the boardwalk has disappeared from Pickering beach since I was there in 2017, as you can see in the second picture, but it was a long way to go back up to the Waterfront Trail so we pushed our bikes across the beach, which was hard going with the bike tires weighted so heavily with the panniers.


That’s the nuclear plant ahead and we are almost to the paved path. Whew!

There were lots of bridges to get across inlets and marshes along this section of the waterfront Trail. There were also clouds of midges from Petticoat Creek Conservation Area to where we left the Waterfront in Whitby. They got in our mouths and noses, and hitched a ride on our clothing. I was surprised to see so many this time of year.


This section of the trail through Ajax was twinned, with slower moving people expected to be on the right, and faster moving on the left. It must get pretty busy in the summer, but both paths were fairly empty today.

And here we are at our destination, extra hungry because it’s dinner time and we missed our coffee and cookie this afternoon.
Cindy’s sister left lots of food in the fridge for us and told us to help ourselves. It was a very comfortable end to another fun day of exploring on the bike.

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