Touring Leslie Street Spit ... almost

Gord and I have been wanting to hike around the Leslie Street Spit ... we thought it would be nice to walk to the lighthouse and back.

The Leslie Street Spit is North America's most remarkable public urban wilderness. It is a 5-kilometre long peninsula, built by lakefilling, that juts into Lake Ontario close to downtown Toronto. Started 40 years ago, it was intended to be a breakwater for harbour expansion, which was not needed due to a decrease in lake shipping. Now, the Spit - as it is lovingly called by the people of Toronto - has been transformed by nature into an extraordinary wildlife reserve, where humans can find a car-free refuge from the hustle and bustle of the city and enjoy a quiet time amid unmanicured vegetation.

Since today is going to be cooler (high of 20C), we figured it would be a good day for it.

So we packed a lunch for a picnic and transited over to the east end (about 30 minutes). Then it's a 1.5km walk to get to the park.

At that point, we came to this sign ...

No way!

But we kept going and came to the gatehouse ...

It never dawned us that the park wouldn't be open! Apparently it's only open on weekends.

So we went down a path to get to the water so we could at least have our picnic.

We sat on some rocks and ate ...

Not how we had expected to be picnicking but it was still nice to be near the water.

We'll be back on a weekend to check it out sometime.

Since we don't get to the east end very often, we walked back to Queen E and wandered around Leslieville.

We ended up walking just over 9km and checked out:

• The Roy Public House
• The Ceili Cottage
• Dominion on Queen