Hillsburgh 2024 – Day 4

We drove about 15 minutes to save 30 km of riding for a planned 46 km ride.

The scenery continued to be rural and pastoral.

Within a kilometre or so of leaving the car, we encountered this newly surfaced road that was very wet, very uncomfortable to ride on, and made our bikes filthy.

I have disc brakes, and both Cindy and I have a fair bit of clearance between our front forks and front tire, but Barry’s clearance is very tight, and he has rim brakes, so the top of the forks, and the brakes were completely caked in mud after a kilometre on this surface.

It drives me crazy when I see brand new single-family home developments going up on farm fields far from jobs, shopping, transit, and schools. Every single trip that people who live in this subdivision take will have to be by car. 

Charles Marohn of strongtowns.com wrote in his book Thoughts on Building Strong Towns that “suburban growth… has been effectively a Ponzi scheme in which each round of unsustainable investment creates a long-term cash flow liability that is only prevented from tanking the city’s finances by the development fees generated by the next round of unsustainable investment”.  In his book, he presents a case study for a typical suburban road. Repaving the road cost the city $354,000. That is equivalent to all the property taxes collected from residents along that road for 79 years, but the road is likely to need repaving again in 20 years”, and the city provides many other services to the residents on that road, other than paving.

At Waldemar we crossed the Grand River. Barry decided to stop and get some drone images and video.  He’ll post it in his YouTube channel when he gets home.

We also noticed the Upper Grand Trailway, which runs from Woldemar to Concession 24/25. From there, you can get to Luther Marsh, or continue on the trail to East/West Luther Townline, where it meets the West Luther Trailway that continues to Arthur. 

The route was 13km paved and 33 unpaved.

When we got to the other side of the tile where the bridge was out, we found the road under construction, but we were able to ride far enough down to snag the tile.

We stopped at the Perked Perogi in Grand Valley for coffee.

It has a one block Main Street which is easily accessible from the Upper Grand Trailway.

After lunch and coffee, we carried on and passed even more wind turbines than yesterday.

We stopped at this one, and Barry flew his drone. I rode up to the base of the turbine. It was enormous from such a close position.

As we cycled down this hill, the next direction was to make a left turn. Cindy said, “I’m glad we don’t have to go up that hill ahead”, and I said, “The left is an out and back, we will be going up the hill afterward”. It was not as bad as it looked. 

We had another stretch of very rough road.

As we rode down this road, we realized that it overlapped with our route from yesterday.

I like that the adjoining  fields are different colours in this picture.

This was the final very narrow road that we were on to get back to the car. It was another day that ended up being quite tiring due to the amount of riding on gravel, but was very enjoyable, nonetheless. We have had amazing weather this week.

I was delighted to discover that today’s ride increased my max square of tiles to 31×31.

We went to The Tipsy Fox, in Erin, for dinner, with a friend of Cindy‘s, and Cindy’s husband, Mark, who drove up from Brampton for the evening.

As usual, we ended the evening in the hot tub.