Cycling - Bike to City Hall and Niagara River Trip

My favorite school event of the year was this past Monday: our school-wide Bike to City Hall event, to support Mississauga's Annual Bike to Work Day.  Hundreds of students from schools around Mississauga participated. This yearly event is a great opportunity to promote bike safety, road safety, the sport of cycling and sustainability. Bike to Work Day is part of Bike Month. Bike Month is a community celebration of cycling that happens across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. Bike Month 2013 begins on Monday, May 27 and continues until the end of June with hundreds of events in the community.

Students arrived early at school last Monday in the cool and pleasant May Morning, with their bicycles and helmets in tow, for the Bike to City Hall event. I, with the other teacher advisors, were the tour guide sweeps, fixing chains, adjusting seats, pumping tires and checking helmets. Nothing that I'm not used to, I help out as a tour guide for Toronto Bicycle Tours. (that's me in the orange, at 57 seconds). That company is owned by my good friend, Terrence Eta.

In teams of 10, we cycled the 10 kilometers from the school to City Hall, where students enjoyed a free breakfast, bike safety check-ups, fun prizes, cycling vendors and a BMX demonstration. The students especially enjoy hanging out with students from other schools, running through the fountains in Celebration Square, thoroughly soaking themselves.

Cycling is a passion of mine, I also helped out guiding a special Educator's Bike Ride to Niagara Falls last weekend.

The Niagara River Recreation Trail meanders through some of the most beautiful countryside in the world. This area is Ontario's only Carolinian forest,  ash, birch, chestnut, hickory, oak and walnut trees abound, a wonderful complement to the pine trees, lakes and rocks of Northern Ontario, which I also dearly love.

The Niagara Recreation Trail, a wide paved trail, runs parallel to the Niagara River from Historic Fort Erie in the south to Fort George in the north.

We made our way through:

• Niagara on the Lake
• Fort George
• Lewiston (stopping by Laura Secord's house)
• the Botanical Gardens
• past the hydroelectric dam, before
• Sampling ice-cream from the famous Reg's Candy Kitchen under the Rainbow Bridge

Not only beautiful, I managed to snap some pictures which I will use in the electricity unit in Grade 9 science. Electricity, and especially electric generation is a focus of this Grade 9 Science unit. These photos will complement the other pictures of solar panel projects I near Peterborough that I took a few weeks ago. It is also entertaining and educational by stopping to read the markers and memorials along the way commemorating events from the war of 1812.

I highly recommend this Niagara Recreation Trail Tour for educators of history, law, geography and science. And here's our team:

This coming weekend, I'll participate in Ride for Heart, cycling the Don Valley Parkway, raising money for the Heart and Stroke Foundation.  Around 13,000 cyclists take part in the event yearly, which raises millions of dollars for the Heart and Stroke Foundation.