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This was originally posted September 2, 2019.
So, I’m in Toronto over the Labor Day weekend, or at least Vaughan, which is a suburb of Toronto. I’m staying at a hotel right next to the Vaughan Mills shopping mall and the mall was crazy today. If you pay attention to the media, malls apparently have had their day and won’t be around in ten years. No one told the good people of Vaughan this.
I walked from the hotel to Montana’s for dinner. Montana’s is an odd restaurant chain where their claim to fame is barbecue but you can’t actually buy a meal that’s just bbq meat. All the brisket, pulled pork and whatnot comes in the form of a sandwich and there is nothing to indicate any meat is ever smoked onsite. So I had a Cobb salad, and it was good.
The point of that story though is that Montana’s is directly on the other side of the mall from the hotel and walking was probably faster than driving. Walking, however, played out like some sort of Frogger game, dodging cars from one side of the mall to the other, and dodging hoards of people in the mall itself. It wasn’t really that dangerous because the vast majority of the cars were stopped dead in their tracks. Sitting in gridlock trying to get in or out of a mall doesn’t seem like the best way to spend a holiday from my point of view, but then my point of view is a bit different from most. All this to say, why spend a perfectly good wandering aimlessly through a mall when you could be outside?
Coming back from our bakery plant yesterday (the point of my visit to the area) I had noticed what appeared to be a green belt with a parking lot. Trailhead!!! A little research shows this to be the Boyd Conservation Park on the southern end of the trail. The trail itself is the William Granger Greenway and it extends north for some distance.
We spent a couple of hours in the plant this morning and then had nothing to do until later in the evening so I thought I would go for a walk on the trail. Driving back from the plant I saw that the trailhead lot was full so I went back to the hotel and worked out first.
After working out I thought I would go to the Boyd Conservation Park because from the map it looked like it had lots of parking. When I got there though they wanted $6.50 to get in the park. That seemed unreasonable since I literally just wanted a place to park so I went back to the other trailhead and by that time there was plenty of parking. For free!
The first thing you see is a big sign warning of ticks in the area. That’s not something we normally have to worry about in the Pacific Northwest. I saw no ticks so here’s a picture of a bee instead.
In total I walked five miles and it was a nice walk. There were quite a few other people out enjoying a nice fall day. Canadians are the nicest people and almost everyone you meet gives you a “hello”.
Being a city kind of area brings city kinds of solutions to what seem to be non-problems. For example the trail for the most part is just a lightly graveled road but you can tell when you’re coming to a hill because they’ve paved the hills. I assume this is for the safety of bicyclists who never mastered the art of braking on a dirt surface, since one particularly steep (not really) hill had a sign advising bicyclists to walk their bikes down the hill. This seemed funny but on the way back up the hill there was a girl who actually was walking her bike down the hill. Down what was effectively a paved road. I am going to trust she made it safely down the hill!
Anyway, a nice walk and I got my steps in for the day. And said hello to some nice Canadians who chose to not be at the mall! No views or anything but there were still some flowers here and there so I took some pictures of flowers.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/MbzfTNGodrHVZzoj6
Interesting article