Hillsburgh- Day 1

Fresh from dog sitting for Cindy‘s sister in Whitby last week, and after only a few days at home, Cindy and I headed to Hillsburgh to watch her other sister’s two dogs and two cats for three days. We decided to drive so that we could maximize our time riding in a new area, northwest of Hillsburgh, rather than riding to, and from, as we have cycled between Brampton and Hillsburgh for day trips multiple times.

We were staying on a beautiful country property with a pond and woods.

We had lunch, and then took the two dogs, Maple, and Olin, for a walk. The two cats, Willy and Rusty, chose to come along. The dogs were quite funny as they could have taken themselves for a walk, but in the three days that we were there, they stayed close to the house, other than when we took them for a walk around the property.

Once we returned from the walk, we put the dogs in their kennel, left the cats to roam, and headed out to explore the rural and mostly gravel roads of the area.

We rode down the tree lined, driveway to the road, and straight across to visit the alpacas on the farm on the other side of the road.

Knowing that we would have a lot of gravel roads, we took bikes more suited to them than the road bikes we took on our trip last week. Despite that, the sand and gravel on Sideroad 27 was so loose and deep on the slope up this hill that we ended up having to walk the bikes. It was an inauspicious start.

We rode along the Cataract to Elora Trailway, for a short distance, before returning to the road. We did the full trailway, in spring 2020, so we were riding in other places, to pick up other tiles, with the intention of filling out my square.

The world is divided into a grid of 16,384 by 16,384 squares; each one is about 2 km wide. It’s a fun pursuit to try to visit as many tiles as you can using only human power. Statshunters shows you all the tiles you have visited, and also the largest square of tiles you have, and the largest cluster of tiles. A tile is in the cluster if you have all the tiles that connect to it.

When I first started looking at my map I had a 9 x 9 square, a cluster of 256, and 1721 total tiles. Last fall I got my max square up to 27 x 27. This morning it was still 27 x 27, with 1779 in my cluster, and 4374 total tiles visited. The tiles that I need to expand it are in the area where we were staying. So I carefully planned three rides for picking up tiles that are challenging to get out distance-wise if I’m riding from home. Some of the rides that I have done to collect tiles have been in places where I wouldn’t bother riding again, but much more often than not, the rides in the pursuit of tiles have takien me to new, interesting, and beautiful places.

It was perfect riding weather – cool, but not cold, not too much wind, and slightly overcast, but no rain. Fortunately, most of the roads had not been graded lately, so were mostly packed dirt, which wasn’t too difficult to ride on, although obviously harder than asphalt. Some, like this one with more gravel, were definitely jarring.

We were relieved to get on a paved road for a while, even one without a good shoulder, and with more traffic.

This farm had donkeys which we pulled over to visit.

This property has definitely seen better days.

There were many intersections like this where were gravel as far as the eye could see.

We saw lots of farms, and rarely had cars passing us. We also saw many “Keep your hands off the Greenbelt, Doug “ signs.

Some of the packed dirt roads were actually easier to ride then the cracked asphalt along this road. But this road had few cars so we rode on the smoother section in the middle.

This is a Orton, a small village, that the trailway runs through, which apparently was a much larger place 100 years ago.

We got back on the trail here, which you can see is not as well kept as the Caledon Trailway, but, surprisingly, after such a wet summer, was less overgrown than when we were on it three years ago. Perhaps it has been cut recently.

We only rode 35 km, and got 15 new tiles, but it felt like more given the higher effort it takes to ride on rough surfaces. We had a BikeBrampton meeting on Zoom which we joined while cooking and eating dinner.

Cindy took the dogs for another walk, and then we finished the day with a soak in the hot tub, which was an absolutely perfect activity for our gravel road-shaken bodies before bed.