DAY 1 - Ready, going, gone
"Crawling through the urban sprawl"

Well, I'm alive, and I've learned some things.
By the way, I'm still experimenting with the format I want to log this trip in. As it stands, I want to put bike-related things at the start, and then follow it up with a short "what I did today." If you're interested in anything I'm doing, or want me to post about an aspect of the bike ride that I haven't mentioned yet, just PM me on Facebook, e-mail, etc..

I've spent day 0 thinking a lot about what to pack and how to pack it, and today I made some optimizations, and test-ran some ideas. My current setup (see photo gallery below) has four bags: a front pack, two paniers (side bags), and a big blue back pack.
The black front bag has random bike-related gibberish like wrenches, a spare inner tube, and some small things I might need to pull out at random, like copies of zines I've made.
The big blue bag has spare clothes and my tent, which may or may not see use in the next few days.
One of the side bags has my laptop (padded with a blow-up air mattress) and other chargers and chords. This bag also contains my passports, wallet, keys, and is the bag of things I really don't want to lose . Whenever I leave the bike locked somewhere, like when I went to the Royal Botanical Gardens today, I only take this bag, and leave the rest on the bike.
The other side bag is for everything else: pack towel, sunscreen, spare (full) water bottle, bike lock, food, etc.. So far, this set-up has been working ok, but my bags are very full, and this worries me. I'd rather have some empty space in my bags as buffer. Plus, I'd hate having to spend half an hour each morning playing packing games with the too much gear I've brought.

Tomorrow it's supposed to be cloudy, cold, and wet. Upon suggestion from my dad, I'm taking a hotel tonight to make the first day, and the transition to savagery a little less abrupt. I don't think I'll be able to bike as much tomorrow as I did today, but this is ok, as I have enough buffer in my plans for a few shorter days. I'm actually pleased with the total plan. I started off with a relatively familiar region, and a route that I've done before. In the US, I'll be going through upstate New York, which is a region I have driven through many times, and I know to be beautiful. This is mainly the reason I chose to do the Niagra Falls route as opposed to the Kingston route, as some people suggested.

Today I biked from Toronto to Hamilton, which ended up being about 80km with all of the detours and getting lost that I ran into. The entire way was along the expansive Greater Toronto Area (GTA). It amazes me that I just biked all day in one direction, and was never more than 10 meters away from some suburbanite's back yard.
You can see this sprawling metropolitan area on the map of today's route:


I started at my house, and had to stop by my parents' place to pick up a few things and to say goodbye:


I then made my way to the waterfront trail.
The Great Lakes Waterfront Tail is truly something extraordinary. It's an enormous bike path going from around Cornwall along the Great Lakes, with planned expansions all the way to Sault-Ste-Marie. The entire trail is marked by these little signs that Sarah remarked were a genius bit of design. The bird, leaf, fish logo guided me most of the day today, and will guide me all of tomorrow.


This is the last time I am going to see the Toronto skyline.


Along the trail, I ate breakfast on a pier, and saw some tautological signs:

Unfortunately, signage is sometimes missing or misleading. This is where I got lost:

Though I did stumble across a nice little nature reserve, and took a walk around it, so maybe getting lost wasn't such a bad thing.

Anyway, after a looooooong straight road to Oakville, a looooong nap in a park, and a loooooong well-paved road out of Oakville, I made it to:


I also stopped to smell the flowers at the Royal Botanical Gardens:

After eating dinner with a friend in Hamilton, and learning that the Presto card also works here, I am ready to go to bed, and see what tomorrow brings. Previous Day
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