Cycling Adventure: The McMichael Gallery

Before moving to Canada I’d never heard of the Group of Seven, let alone the McMichael gallery. 20 years later, Daegan and I headed out on our bikes to see both.

The Group of Seven were a collective of Canadian landscape painters who worked together from 1920-1933. The original seven (Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Frederick Varley) were joined later by A.J. Cosson, Edwin Holgate and Lionel LeMoine Fitzgerald. As much as one thinks of Norman Rockwell as “Americana”, I’d say the Group of Seven represent “Canadiana” in art. You can see some of their work here.

In 1954, Robert and Signe McMichael built a home near Kleinburg, Ontario and began collecting Group of Seven art. Within just a few years hundreds of people were visiting the gallery. Just over ten years after building their house, they donated the collection including their home and land to the province of Ontario. Today it shows work by many different Canadian artists including current exhibitions of the work of James Wilson Morrice, photographs of tree planters by Rita Leistner, Sandra Brewster’s “Fish” installation and what ended up being my favourite when we visited, two exhibits from artists in Canada’s far north, Worlds on Paper: Drawings from Kinngait and Dreaming Forward: Contemporary Drawings from Kinngait.

I’d actually wanted to go there for years, however, it’s next to impossible to get to by transit, taking anywhere from 2.5 to 3 hours including a 30 min walk from the nearest bus stop. This gets further tricky for the return trip as remote transit stops such as this have very infrequent service – sometimes as little as every hour – and often shut down entirely for part of the day. It just was not worth the trouble.

However, after our recent bike trip was cancelled, we decided it might be worth figuring out how to cycle there. My first attempts at routing gave few useful options. All of them put us for some time on busy arterial roads that seemed to be the only way there. Roads like this:

Drivers tend to pass close and fast on roads like this. After an hour of this I begin to hate cycling.

However, searching through others routes I was able to find a way that might just work. It was over twice as long as any route I’d previously considered but for the most part it was peaceful.

And so off we went heading north on quiet streets in York region. We didn’t get more than 12 kilometres before we had to stop. Cycling uses carbohydrates for fuel, and what better place to get carbohydrates than a pasta-filled Italian hot table.

For the uninitiated, the hot table concept is simple: Choose a protein (e.g. sausage, meatballs, fish) and then choose what else you like from a steam table. Add a bit of fresh bread and butter to the top and you end up with this:

We both had sausage, grilled sweet peppers, ziti in meat sauce, roasted potatoes, and greens. All of it was absolutely delicious. While I normally avoid having sugary cold drinks, a Brio was just the thing to give me some quick energy to push the pedals the remaining 30 km. Do you know what else improves energy?

We ended our meal with two delicious double espressos. Despite that, after a big meal like that I could probably have easily gone to sleep for two hours. However, we had road to cover. Onward and northward we headed. For most of the way I was really pleased to find that York Region has added loads of bike lanes/paths. Yes, sometimes they’re just wide sidewalks now marked as “Shared pathway” but I’ll take that. It was all good until 3-4 km before the end we had to ride a bit on Teston Road. That road looked like this:

No more bike lane, not even a safe verge to ride in and even a few hills to climb made it a little stressful. On the other hand, thanks to our lunch, our legs were strong and we were able to make quick time over the rolling hills.

The museum itself was enjoyable and the grounds lovely. That said, it was a little small relative to the $20 admission price (I’m spoiled by having an Art Gallery of Ontario membership which cost a little more than that but gets me in for a year to a much larger collection). I’m glad I didn’t take a three hour bus ride and long walk to get there – or to have spent a bunch of money to rent a car.

Before leaving we both talked about our experience on Teston Road and agreed that we would try to find something a bit less stressful to get home. I didn’t see many options but there was one last trick up my sleeve: I told the Garmin app to route or “Gravel” and not “Road”. And that did the trick.

The route took us south along a stretch of Islington that had a bike lane before cutting through some suburban residential streets and dropping us on the main road through Woodbridge. This one was so busy that as it turned out, we could just take the lane and move as fast as the cars in the stop and go traffic. Then, we turned south on Kipling road which was a little bit busy before one intersection where it was marked “No Outlet”

“No Outlet” is one of those roads that like “Road Closed” can mean something different on a bike than on a car. A closed road might still be passable on foot for the short stretch it’s closed, or in rare cases it can be completely passable but just not yet open for traffic. For a bike, often “No Outlet” means that cars must stop but a bike path will continue. And as expected, the route took us down a nice piece of single-track trail through a forest.

It looked easy until it wasn’t. Eventually the forest trail opened into a field. And here the path became a big rut for a bit – so big that I got a tire caught in it and fell, leaping comically from my bike in an attempt to avoid falling completely. I did not succeed. But I also did not suffer any injuries. But from here on we would walk. The rut went away soon after – however, this didn’t mean we could ride, because now the trail was effectively gone.

You can sort of see the suggestion of a trail but it was a bit rough to ride on so we walked through the field. After all, this isn’t the first time we’d been routed wrong. Back in 2017, when we were biking from Montreal to Plattsburgh, NY we found ourselves on this “trail”

And that led us to this space:

If we learned anything from this experience it was: Follow the GPS track. There was a reason it routed us here and eventually, since it must lead to our destination it will get us back to a normal road. Today was no exception. However, it did get worse before it got better, first leading us through a really dense patch of burrs that stuck to our shoes and socks and then almost down to Highway 407 before dropping us on a nice dirt road.

The road continually improved from this point on. It wasn’t without challenges, though. The road widened and took us up a hill, but it was so gravelly and washed out we had to walk up it.

Even after all of this, including a few more stops to remove a few more burrs, it beat riding on Teston. And there were a number of really lovely aspects.

The route home grew increasingly easy from here on out. A few hundred metres after this bridge, the path became paved. That took us to a dedicated bike lane on Finch Ave. This lane was closed at one point but so, too, was the right traffic lane with no cars or construction equipment or debris so we just used that. In other words we had nothing but dedicated, mostly physically separated infrastructure from Woodbridge until we got around a kilometre from home. And that last km was calm and easy too.