Hamilton 2025 – Day 2

I woke with a headache and backache this morning, so we changed our plans from, biking to Brantford, to a lazy morning, and a ride to Hamilton Beach in the afternoon.

I’ve written about Statshunters.com before, which I use to create a personal heat map of all the places I have ridden my bike since 2013, when I started recording my rides, and also to see what tiles I have ridden my bike through. The tiles divide the world 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. 

One has to go farther and farther afield to continue collecting level 14 tiles, so I started collecting level 17 tiles. There are 64 level 17 tiles, called Squadrathinos, in each level 14 tile. You can track them on a site called squadrats.com.

Because I have the level 14 tiles around here, I planned some routes to collect some of the level 17 micro tiles that I don’t have. Normally, I ride down Cannon Street, which has a bidirectional cycle track, but chose to ride down Barton Avenue today to collect the micro tiles along there. The asphalt was terrible and really shook us up, and the neighbourhood is very rundown, and ripe for redevelopment.  The province is pressuring Hamilton to expand urban boundaries, but streets like Barton can be redeveloped more densely, to provide a huge number of new homes and commercial facilities without touching the Greenbelt. Fortunately, as of last month, Hamilton council continues to resist expanding the urban boundary, with plans to grow up, rather than grow out.

This supportive housing, McQuesten Lofts, was built to look like shipping containers as an homage to Hamilton’s industrial north end. It contains 51 bedroom apartments, and has a public library branch on the main level.

The Hamilton Museum of Steam & Technology, also known as the “Steam Museum”, is a national historic site and is located on the site of the 1859 Hamilton waterworks complex. The museum preserves two steam powered beam engines which pumped water in Hamilton from 1859 to 1910, in addition to artifacts relating to Hamilton’s industrial past. There are guided tours of the facility, and I can recommend them based on visiting in the past.

The Golden Horseshoe Live Streamers, collaborate with the Hamilton Museum of Steam and Technology, to provide railway experiences with its miniature ride on/ride behind locomotives at the museum site.

Whenever I’ve been at Hamilton Beach I have wondered about this platform in the distance. I looked it up today, and discovered that it is the Canada Centre for Inland Waters Research Tower. Built in 1976, it is positioned in 12 m of water, 1.1 km off the beach at the west end of Lake Ontario near Hamilton, Ontario and is used for wave and air-water interaction research. This picture is significantly cropped, after taking it with the 5x lens on my phone. 

Once we got to the Beach Park, we rode south as far as the path went. It’s a very wide path with lots of room for people to walk, bike, push strollers, rollerblade, etc.

After riding back to Hutch’s on the Beach, we ate ice cream, and dipped our feet in the lake.

It was very clear today and we could see Burlington, and Toronto’s skyline.

We re-crossed the QEW on the Red Bridge, a pedestrian and cycling bridge, which led us to Brampton Street.

This is the location of the first Tim Horton’s at Ottawa Street North and Dunsmuir. Apparently, there is a mini museum of Tim’s history on the second floor.

We then stopped briefly at New Hope Bikes, a Community Bike hub like Different Spokes in Brampton, but they are closed Mondays. We will visit again later in the week.

Victoria Street has a bidirectional cycle track with raised bus loading platforms, so the bus doesn’t have to pull into the bike lane.

On the bidirectional cycle track on Cannon Street, they had some beautiful planters.

They also have separate signals for cars and bikes,  to avoid left turn conflict,  between bikes and motor vehicles.

Cindy barbecued us cheddar smokies, and prepared a bean salad, for our dinner. It was delicious. The dining room like rotates through the colours of the rainbow.