100k

This isn't a post about a recipe or a food. It's about smells. One of those beautiful fall days last week, I packed some snacks, dressed up in some bike gear, oiled my chain and headed out on a long bike ride - from the beaches out to Port Credit.

I was trying to accomplish a century - and not even a real century at that. Riding a century is biking 100 miles in one day, but I decided on the easier metric version for a start.

 Instead of a day of delicious food, this was a day of delicious and not so delicious smells: coffee beans at Mercury where I stopped to say hello to a friend, bread from the Weston bakery all along Queen East, barbecue from a school picnic in the beaches, sewage from Ashbridges Bay, burning sugar from the Redpath factory, seaweed and fish by the waters edge, and underneath it all, the crisp fall smell that says you're soon going to need more than a sweater.

I came home in one piece. It really wasn't that hard. Four and a half hours later, all I really wanted was a bath. Oh, and, I forgot to put my odometer back on after a stop at the library, but I swear, it was 100 kilometres.