Tommy Thompson Park Saturday

Last Saturday during the heat wave we headed out to Tommy Thompson Park, 'Toronto's Urban Wilderness', for an afternoon of exploring and admiring the views.

View from Tommy Thompson Park

Tommy Thompson Park is located on the Toronto waterfront on a man-made peninsula that stretches five km into Lake Ontario.

Although it isn't far from downtown, unfortunately it wasn't overly convenient to get there on public transit. It seems like every option involves a decent amount of walking, which would have been fine on a normal September day, but during this heat wave it was HOT. In saying that, we didn't let that deter us and we opted to take the street car down Queen St. and then walked for a while into the park.

Starting in 1959, the Toronto Port Authority began construction of port related facilities and this area became the site for the disposal of dredged material from the Outer Harbour and surplus fill from development sites within Toronto. Over time the land area expanded with lagoons and sand peninsulas. In the early 1970s, it was determined that this site would not be required for port facilities and in the years since then, the area has turned into an accidental urban wilderness in the heart of Toronto. 

By the time we arrived at the park, we were starving so we went on the hunt for a location to have our picnic. We were at the point where our criteria for picking a spot only involved somewhere we could sit down, but we found a quiet rocky beach and ended up with quite the view. 

Once we had regained our strength and cooled off a little, we wandered back through the park, to an information center and then continued on with our exploring. Heading to the west side of the park, we had an amazing view back towards the city while enjoying some custard tarts. 

We then kept walking onto smaller and smaller trails and happened upon a number of monarch butterflies. So beautiful and fascinating to follow around for a while. 

By this point, the heat was getting to us and we had run out of water so we decided to head back to the city. Taking the long way, we walked west along the bike path behind Cherry Beach all the way to the Cherry Beach bus. We immediately purchased (and consumed) 2 bottles of water and 2 bottles of Gatorade before waiting half an hour for the bus. We were happy to head home and felt like we made the most of what we expect will be one of the last summer-like weekends of the year. 

Here are a few more photos (note there are no photos of Cherry Beach. We were beyond exhausted):

(SLIDESHOW)