cycles: ride for africycle day eight (part one)

niagara falls, ontario to bronte creek provincial park, oakville

120 km (part one)

in case you've forgotten what i look like,

here's an action pic taken at speed.

total concentration.

nothing escapes my eyes.

lots on the plate today - rain, rounding hamilton harbour and through burlington, press taking pics and doing interviews and then of course bronte creek provincial park advertised by bike buddy michael as "a potential gong show of a park" placed as it is squarely in the centre of suburbia surrounded by major expressways.

for now though we had the rain to contend with. there are those of you who would draw attention to the fact that until this point we had experienced mind-numbing and damaging heat and might be glad of rain.

for a little while we were glad of the rain.

it was a welcome change.

but the wind that came with it soon reduced many of us to shivering wrecks who craved warmth, dry clothes, fingers that weren't all pruny and especially warmth - did i say that twice? yep i did.

it was cold!

here we are in saint catherines standing in front of bike buddy michael's childhood home.

i wonder what the little boy version of michael would have thought had he looked out the window

and seen this motley crew of rain-soaked cyclists gathered for a pic?

we rode on through orchards of unripened fruit.

i was so hungry i thought i kept smelling fresh pastry being baked - can you have food hallucinations? -

until i checked with bike buddy ben who agreed that there was a distinct scent of pastry every so often.

man is there anything more tantalizing than the possibility of fruit pie when you're hungry?!

this is what you see when you look down on a rainy ride.

look up and you see a rooster tail of dirty road spray comin' right at ya.

here we are stopped at a little lookout near a hotel/restaurant in grimsby

that i knew from my childhood as "the lighthouse".

i think it burned down at some point.

we're busy snaffling back granola bars, fruitbars, whatever can get into our mouths quickly.

a little further on and we reaching a sort of breaking point as we looked for the africycle bus and our lunch when we came across bike buddy greta who had left the ride a few days earlier for personal reasons. there she was in a sweet mercedes convertible with a bag filled with dry towels and a special arrangement with a nearby church to take us in and allow us to warm up and dry off. cooler than cool! the church really did take us in and gave us coffee and allowed us to set up our lunch in their foyer and were amazingly accomodating.

big thanks to bike buddy greta!!!

here are some of us looking forlorn in the front of the church.