I grew up in Scarborough, and the forests of the Rouge Valley were my playground for a quite a few years. It’s where I started to mountain bike off road, where I started to turn my lenses in the direction of nature, and where I went when I just wanted to touch the earth.

In Vancouver, I’m surrounded by an astonishing amount of natural beauty every day of my life, but sometimes there’s no place like home.

Twyn Rivers drive is short and crazy steep. The best way I used to describe it was by describing what it was like to go up on a bicycle. Mountain bikes weren’t so bad, but when I climbed it on my road bike my front wheel would regularly pop up about a half inch off the ground as I put downward pressure on the pedals and pulled slightly upwards on the handlebars.

I don’t think I ever ran up it, although I’m pretty sure I would if I lived out here today. This guy was impressive, nonetheless.

Toronto has grown, in some extremely interesting and shocking ways. My friend had told me he lived in Woodbridge, which when I last lived here was an Italian enclave north of the city. No big deal, I thought

I managed to visit him yesterday for the first time in this house and it turns out that Woodbridge now means five minutes away from Kleinburg. Roads I used to cycle on just to get out of the city — long, winding, slightly hilly but stop light free roads — now have strip malls and subdivisions along their entire length. These roads used to have fields and farms, and maybe the occasional golf course.

Kleinburg was a nice country drive to go visit the McMichael gallery — not anymore.

I’m torn between whether to call this sprawl, or growth. I think it may be a little from column A, and a little from column B.

Posted by skooter at 7:38 AM This entry is filed under Camera, Travel.
This entry is tagged: Friends, Toronto, Travel