A walk in December

The other day I thought I would take a long walk out on Toronto Islands. The forecast was for +2°C, so, not terrible. Maybe?

Clearly no-one else thought going to the islands was a good idea. The ferry terminal, with its blasted concrete plaza, livened up with colourful chairs, was virtually empty.

This is a new condo building, in the style "when people liked things not to line up." I am not a fan of this style and think that we will soon start lining things up again, but this decade will apparently be immortalized this way.

I have an app on my phone that can keep track of my distance and time, but this time I decided I would just use the stopwatch feature to see how long it took me; I planned to walk the 5 km to the opposite end of the island and back again.

If you click this photo, you can probably see the heron on the left side. I was actually taking a picture of the out-of-season yacht club. I walked along the lefthand shore here and disturbed the heron into flight again later. Beautiful!

After a short time I remembered that all weather reports add, "cooler by the lake," and decided it was just too frigging cold to walk to the end, so I took a detour towards the park in the centre.

And then I looked at my stopwatch: I had been on the move for 29 minutes. If I turned back now I could just catch the ferry and make my way back to warm civilization!

It was pretty bleak out there, but these red twigs make everything a tiny bit better.

The ferries run every hour and half-hour from the city, and on the quarter and three-quarters from the island. I got to the terminal at just the right time, except that it was the lunch hour and the ferries take a break!

My cousin lives on the islands, maybe a 7-minute walk from the ferry. My phone had died, taking this last picture of grey clouds and blustery water, so I couldn't call her, didn't know if she was home, was no longer sure what time it was...

There was a Waiting Shed, with heat, so I took the opportunity to just go inside and knit and warm up for half an hour before the boat came.

I remembered much later that I do own a pair of fleece-lined jeans, so I might try this again sometime soon. With a flask of hot chocolate or tea. And some sort of light scarf wrapped around my whole head.