Tag: #Cyclesimcoe

Considering a cycling tour in Ontario? Consider fully supported and guided!

Posted sara m

I have been an active tourism industry consumer essentially my whole life, starting in the 70s, bouncing around untethered in the very back of a fake-wood-paneled station wagon on Ontario’s Highway 401, with thousands of other eastbound families planning to spend March Break skiing in the mountains of Quebec or Vermont. Cycling tours started later, about 1992, when I went on a bike-packing trip to Denmark. It was a self-guided tour. We planned our trip around where we wanted to go in Denmark, not where the cycling would be best. I learned that Denmark is mostly, but not entirely, flat, and that the winds off the North Sea are, well, windy. Since then, I have had the joy of many cycling trips and tours, including road biking in the Netherlands and France; seeing Berlin on a cruiser bike on a […]

Summer Summary 2018 and Next Season Sneak Preview

Posted sara m

Happy Labour Day!  This unofficial end of summer seems like a good time to reflect on our very first season. It started off with a bang in June when an enthusiastic group tackled the Haliburton Pedal, Pints, and Pubs (PPP) tour head-on. The three day tour started off with a fairly gentle ride on Day 1, with, admittedly, a couple of “slopes” that provided a nice challenge to kick things off. The group rode hard and caroused even harder for three days, enjoying beer tastings and great food, and providing Humdinger with a fantastic, formal launch.  PPP ran again in July, and despite persistent pleas to the Universe for fair weather, Day 1 came with heavy rain. We had a number of indoor back-up plans in place, but this game group of women wanted to ride, and ride they did. […]

The devil is in the details: Building the Georgian Bay-Muskoka 6 day tour

Posted sara m

The short version of this post? The Georgian Bay-Muskoka 6 day trip is cool. The last couple of weeks I have been making phone calls, sending emails, and going on field trips to finalize various details, and can confirm that this trip is a humdinger. It visits not one but two UNESCO biosphere reserves (Georgian Bay’s 30,000 Islands and the Niagara Escarpment), the oft-National-Geographic-featured Muskoka, and the world’s longest freshwater beach, Wasaga (part of Cycle Simcoe’s 7 Beaches Route). It has over 400 kilometres of cycling on scenic, mostly low-traffic roads, boutique accommodations, boat cruises, delicious food, and so much more! The trip has a soft start with a meet-up in Orillia and a van ride to Parry Sound. Then things get busy. We have to fit in a trip to the very cool Parry Sound Bikes (and a visit with the […]

Beyond setting goals…

Posted sara m

Ah, the New Year, and its barrage of advice on resolutions, self-improvement, and goals… I apologize for jumping on the New Year’s goal-setting bandwagon, but it is as good a time as any to get some things off my chest on this subject, particularly about some the more nuanced concepts of mastery goals versus performance goals (aka ego goals), and a perhaps more important piece about using metacognition (planning, monitoring, and evaluating) to ensure you actually attain your goals. Mastery versus performance goals An example of a performance goal or an ego goal is “I want to be the fastest rider at our club” or “I want to win this race” or “I want to get an A in calculus”. By contrast, mastery goals would be “I want to ride the Rosseau Lake loop 5 minutes faster this week” or […]