[URBAN NOTE] "Walking the edge of Toronto in five days and 175,000 steps"

[rfmcdonald]

The Toronto Star's Tess Kalinowski shared the story of how Toronto lawyer and activist Albert Koehl walked around the periphery of Toronto to see what was to be seen.

On a wickedly frigid November morning, Toronto lawyer Albert Koehl laced up his new hiking shoes, zipped his yellow jacket over a carefully layered wardrobe and set out in search of adventure.

Although he had travelled extensively — crossing the Atlantic by freighter, journeying by bus to Guatemala, and crossing Africa by barge, bush taxi and bus — this time he wanted to explore new ground closer to home, and he wanted to do it on foot.

“With driving you don’t get the smells, the sounds. You remember things when you walk. It’s a pace at which you can absorb things,” he explains.

His self-imposed mission was to visit all four corners of Toronto to test his downtowner’s perspectives against the city’s true size and varied landscapes.

He expected it would take three to four days to trace a path around Toronto’s borders, about 120 km. In the end it took five, walking seven to eight hours a day — 175,000 steps, according to the pedometer he carried.