If you ride, I know you will agree: a great way to meet a new city is on a bike. These photos are from our most recent city tour: Toronto. 
We choose to stay at the DoubleTree in Toronto because it is within walking distance from the train station and to all sorts of good stuff, including the starting point for bike tours. To save time, we eat in the hotel dining room, and find their scrambled egg frittata big enough for two, and so delicious we eat it every day we’re there.
Bike meet-up place. We’re a small group: leaders Ken from Rochester, NY and Buzz from Australia, plus a friend of Buzz’s visiting from Australia, the two of us, and a family of five from Ecuador who’ve lived all over the world. The father Alfonso tells us he is in Securities, but when he says Colombia, where they now live, is safer since his organization is there, I realize he means Security, not financials. Big difference. I make a mental note that maybe our next South American trip should include Colombia.
The tour company provides the bikes as well as helmets and water; we elevator down, down, down to get our bikes, then gear up and test our rides on the lower level of a parking garage.
We are surprised to be in street traffic as much as we are, but the tour guides use alleys, paths, parks and other non-auto areas, too.
The weather is beautiful, cloudy with no rain, so we stay mostly above ground and see very little of the PATH’s 16 miles of shopping arcades (the world’s largest underground shopping complex).
Our half-day, ten-mile ride takes us through public areas.
We ride through parks.
We wheel our bikes into Union Station for a restroom break, and eat our granola bars.
The tour includes frequent picture stops and we make mental notes of places we want to come back to.
The Toronto sign reminds us of the Amsterdam sign. We did a bike tour of Amsterdam four years ago––Toronto is an equally good experience (maybe better, because in Amsterdam you must put up with grumpy old men on bikes who don’t like tourists).
Maybe next time we will rent bikes and take a public art tour public art tour in this bike-friendly city, or plan our own tour of sorts: Toronto trails.
Date of Travel: July 2018
Hotel: Doubletree by Hilton
Tour: Toronto Bicycle Tours ; on Facebook
Travel Tales amongst my Ramblings 
Evelyn, all I can say is WOW. Betty
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Thanks, Betty. It was more fun that we expected – and that is saying a lot.
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Nice tour. Love all the pictures.
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