Day 7 (Aug 20)

Terrible eggs at Homewood Suites. They've somehow managed to make jalapenos bland.

Supposed to be some hard rain this evening and all night long. Clean, dry, and wimpy, we decide to make a quick run to the next available lodging as soon as the rain stops.

Back up the metal stairs and into the steep no-mans-land of Hamilton. Muggy and sweaty. The mosquitos are delighted with us. The trail is littered and foul-smelling. Something died here, or lived very poorly.

Leaving the city, we find ourselves in the King's Woods, feels more like a jungle though. Here the stairs that cross our path are older:

We dodge out of the magic sweaty woods on a side trail, heading along a bike path to Carmen's Hotel. Albion Falls is a bonus sight:

Carmen knows how to run a joint. This bizarre Italian-themed hotel (we're in the Fellini Room) on the border of wilderness and suburban mall-land really has it all. A great pool:

A great restaurant with a great pepper grinder:

And a business center with real computers and an espresso machine! Nice! A fella could get used to this.

Sadly, the pounding rain that we were supposed to be dodging turns out be a light 5-minute sprinkle. Not used to weather reports being this pessimistic; maybe it's a Canadian thing?

Day 6 (Aug 19)

Good breakfast and slow start from Dundas Glen. Scooting out the back end of town, the trail winds past a golf course and a farm and into the Dundas Valley Conservation Area. It's lovely and serene, and easy hiking on wide dirt paths, with many handy benches. The cliffs are more gentle and green, with the occasional jagged boulder.

Here the Escarpment turns from southwest to southeast as we round Hamilton Harbor the westernmost point of Lake Ontario, so we're finally heading in the right direction!


There's an official campsite here for Bruce Trail hikers, with drinking water even, but we're here too early in the day so we decide to see what lies ahead.
Our first sighting of a fellow thru-hiker: a very fast and lean Canadian doing the entire Bruce Trail in 3 weeks...wow.
On the way out, two nice falls Canterbury Falls and Sherman Falls. Technically we're in the city limits of Hamilton, which claims to have more waterfalls than any city in the world. This is because the Escarpment runs right through the town: old Hamilton lies between the cliffs and the lake, and newer neighborhoods are on the topside. The land between, too steep to be developed, is home to hundreds of little connecting paths, which in some spots have been supplemented with long metal stairways.

Deeper into Hamilton, Bruce Trail takes on a much more urban feel. Locals use parts of the trail (and the stairs that it crosses) for commuting and exercise.  Other parts are strung along desolate bits of thick scrub between the winding cliff roads. But there's no campable land to speak of, so we take a staircase down to downtown and check into the closest hotel, the Homewood Suites, enjoy a little time in the little pool, and off to bed.

PS: The Homewood Suites computers are really annoying. They try to get you to use Bing for everything and they even disable Google Maps, arg! Bing's maps don't show trails or anything, a real disaster. Homewood is owned by Hilton so it could be all Hilton hotels have these awful kiosk-mode computers. Anyway, a workaround to get Google Maps working is to use a direct link to a user-created map like this:
Gowanus Canoe Trips
That should bypass the block. Other than that, and the incessant piped music, Homewood Suites is not a bad place.

Day 5 (Aug 18)

Our evening's labors at mosquito eradication seem to have worked. A really pleasant hike through fields and forest, keeping high. Apples and flowers and snakes and frogs cheer us on. Landowners here are more generous with their boundries:

These guys have the trail right through their front yard, and a nice scarecrow with a pancho. 

A little weirder are these plaque-on-pole contraptions that begin to appear:

Looks suspiciously like trailside advertising. Creepy.

This is nice though, a delightful sun-dappled streamside spot down from Great Falls:

(Great Falls was pretty good, but the picture wasn't.)

After three days in the tent we're running a little low on jerky and have planned a short day into the first cute trailside town, called Waterdown. There's a motel there, plus a laundromat, lots of shops and restaurants, should be nice. We take a short side trail into town and spot a lovely fox staring at us from the bushes. What a fine day.

Here's the motel:

 Can't see it? We had some trouble finding it at first too. Here's a zoom:

Ah yes, there it is... torn to pieces, in the dumpster. We've arrived a couple months too late. Don''t take it too hard, the locals tell us, you wouldn't have wanted to stay there anyway. Nobody else is offering though. Sure, we could go back and camp, but it's hard to be disappointed after dreams of shower and clean clothes. We even try the one AirB&B in town, but no, it's too last-minute. We console ourselves with excellent iced coffee at the Brown Dog.

Ultimately we do get our shower and laundry. We just suck it up, go back to the trail, and happily hike another 10 kilometers (so much for our easy day...) to the next even-cuter town, Dundas, where we're lucky enough to get a room in a nice little B&B called Dundas Glen. The host here is nice, the soap is effective, the food is good, and it's close to the laundromat.

Day 4 (Aug 17)

Mosquitos! We have many counter-measures: Before leaving the tent, we slather in repellant cream. The moment we're packed up, we drown in my custom cocktail of half-deet half-all-natural-blah-blah spray. D swears by a sort of dermal patch (made in Canada!) that is suppose to release vitamins into your skin and make mosquitos avoid you. And my phone has this silly app that clicks at them to scare them. Well none of it works. Darn if we aren't sucked dry and left as piles of bones and welts.

The trail takes us off the Escapment and onto roads, through the little village of Kilbride. This place is a bust though - the public park turns out to be a private tennis club, and the bridge that leads to the only store in town is out. Ah well. We're surviving on a good supply of jerky that I got for my birthday from my folks. Thanks, Folks!

We march along. Road walking seems long and hard and hot. I'd think it an honor, but I guess the local landowners don't want to have the trail through their property. The exception here is the Nelson Quarry, which routes the trail off the road alongside their lot. Thanks, Nelson!

Finally back up onto the ridge at Mount Nemo. Lots of families here for a day out, and rock climbers scaling the Escarpment. Here's the view from the top:

What joy to be up top, and what sorrow to be once again cast down onto the roads. The Escarpment heads off southeast right toward where we're headed, but there's no right-of-way, so we're routed onto Walkers Line... which sounds nice but ain't. (A lot of the county roads here are called "lines" and they are, in fact, very rectilinear - you can see a bit of the grid in the picture. All the drearier to have to trudge along the legs instead of partying on the hypotenuse.)

When we're finally allowed back into the woods, we're exhausted, nearly bonking, and we make camp as soon as we find water. The mosquitos are waiting for us again. From inside the tent we can see the clouds of them waiting to pounce. Woe betide those that venture between the mesh and the fly, for they are done in with a quick swat. It's nice to have the upper hand for once. I know I should be gentle to all living things, and not judge a creature by the actions of its brethren, but for these beasts I simply have no love.

Day 3 (Aug 16)

Quick breakfast and goodbye to our Canadian pals. We're eager to join the Bruce Trail and get up on the Niagara Escarpment...

The Niagara Escarpment (folks around here just call it "the Escarpment") is a huge cliffy formation that stretches from Wisconsin, through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, across southern Ontario, back into the USA at Niagara Falls, and eastward past Rochester to Watertown. It's made of tough dolomite that stood pat as everything else around eroded away, long ago. Now it's a great set of cliffs. The Bruce Trail pretty much follows the path of the Escarpment from Lake Huron down to Niagara. We'll only be enjoying the southern end of this.

We scoot past a maze of derelict winter sports machinery to join the Bruce Trail at the west end of Kelso Park, and slowly ascend the back edge of the cliffs.

Here's Lake Kelso from atop the Escarpment - nice! Our campsite is out of frame to the right. You can see noisy Highway 401 in the distance.

The top is full of trails, including mountain bike trails. Lots of bikes up here. Some have numbers on the front, maybe it's a race? The bikers are very polite in the mountains (much more so than in Toronto.)

Following the Escarpment south, after a brief road walk, we come to Rattlesnake Point. Nice pleasant hiking and fine weather. No rattlers to be seen but some thoughtful person left us a paper cup full of gummy worms.

We're a little weary after our first real up-and-down day of hiking without a bus, and a bit of rain is sneaking up on us, so we find a cosy bed of needles in a pine plantation and sit out the weather in the tent reading a battered copy of Anna Karenina we got on Bloor for only one Canadian dollar (a.k.a. Loonie.) Long, dilapidated books are best for this sort of trip -- they're going to fall apart anyway so we're not shy about ripping out a few chapters so we can both read at once.

Good night!

P.S. - It looks like the posts that I've written from my phone are all messed up... I'm trying to fix them now that I'm at a semi-decent computer in Hamilton.

Day 2 (Aug 15)

Cheating can be addictive, and in light of yesterday's spell on the bus we can't help gazing at the map and considering alternatives to today's roadwalk-heavy 20-mile plan from Glenerin to Kelso. We elect to try a daring train ride to the village of Milton, putting us just a few miles from our goal. Even better, there's a really pleasant trail along the Credit River that will lead us right to the train station.

What joy when the Erindale Go station appears through the trees! Alas, this is a commuter rail service and there will be no more outbound trains to Milton until the evening rush. So it's another bus for us, not fun like a train but takes us more or less in the right direction, cutting out a good chunk of our roadwalk.

Agriculture and industry begin to compete with the housing and commercial sprawl as we tread the outer suburbs. There's a prison here too. And next to it, a park named for Commander Chris Hadfield of the International Space Station. Was he once a prisoner here?

(Canadians are proud of their contributions to the ISS and even have the Canadian Robot Arm on their new five-dollar bills... they have not, as far as I know, taken to calling these bills "Armies".)

Finally at Kelso, we make our way to our very large campsite, pleasant other than the constant roar from the highway.

Plenty of room for friends, so some of our Canadian crew, another D and J, plus a C, join us, bringing gifts of great food and fire. Thanks guys!

Tomorrow we join the Bruce Trail and our hike begins in earnest... no more cheating, pinkie-swear!

P.S. All messed up.. wow, I need to go back to blogger school. Fixed now.

Day 1 (Aug 14)

Chilly for mid-August, but a great day to set out. We depart Toronto westbound on Bloor Street. Goodbye to landmark beleaguered department store Honest Ed's ("Still open until December 2016!")

Google car passed us a few blocks later, so look for us with packs and stick on your next "streetview" tour of Bloor.

Down through High Park. Many friendly dogs - our route goes through the leash-free zone. Hook up with the Waterfront Trail along Lake Ontario. Nice views of boats rocking but nowhere to get a glass of wine!

Private lakefront property begins to win out over the public space, and gradually we're routed over small neighbourhood roads more than trail. Still pleasant but hard on the knees and toes. I'd planned about 20 miles for today but at around 13 we're ready to make camp. We're still very much in the 'burbs though, without any good camping prospects. Plus we have hotel reservations at the end... so when the trail spits us out onto busy Lakefront Road in Mississauga, we opt for a little cheat by hopping the bus to Port Credit. A little sad but a much easier walk to the hotel.

The Glenerin Inn is a grand old country house whose once-idyllic setting is now hemmed in by condos and fancy subdivisions. It's a disappointing spot, airs of luxury without true hospitality. At dinner, a snooty maitre'd slings day-old wedding food. But the bed is nice, the shower works, so there's some joy to be had.

P.S. This entry was messed up and is now fixed... and I really gotta watch my thumb over the lens, wow...

Hi, we're walking back to New York from Toronto! The map above shows the first few legs of our journey -- a walk across the western side of Toronto and surrounding lakeside places then west to Kelso Park (in blue), the southern end of the Bruce Trail (in red), and a short walk through Niagara Falls to the USA (in green.) From there we'll pick up the Conservation Trail southward to the Finger Lakes Trail and east from there towards the Catskills and hopefully on to NYC.

If you'd like to track our progress, try this Google+ page:
https://plus.google.com/117486075640039254150
If it's working it should share our last known location. If you hover the mouse over the "currently in" description, it should even show a little map (in place of the route map.) Sorry this is a little complicated. Maybe I can figure out something better somewhere along the line. (Suggestions welcome!)

Today we set off westward down Bloor Street, through High Park, and along Lake Ontario to Mississauga... so long Toronto!