One thing Vanessa and I have truly come to love over the course of the last two years is the GO Transit system that circles a good portion of southern Ontario. It's cheap, frequent and every bus carries at least two bikes on each run (more if you ask really, really, nicely).

Out of Toronto you can catch the Lake shore east train to Oshawa and then grab a connecting bus to Newcastle. It's a short ride, but full of nice ups and downs. Overall the ride into Port hope is pretty much an uphill slog that pays off with a nice glide into town. You also have the option of riding the waterfront trail, but as Vanessa and I have found, far too often "trail" translates into highways and thin curbs. King's highway doesn't have as clear a view of the water, but because of the 401 that traverses the same route it's basically traffic free and full of small communities and farmland.

Vanessa and I tend to ride with a fair bit of equipment. More often that not we like our rides to have a destination, which usually means spending the night. In this case Vanessa has family in Cobourg and we generally use the ride as an excuse to see her two nephews, niece and sister then we bike back the next day.

Our only complaint about this ride occurs roughly five kilometers before Kings Highway turns south into Port Hope. Farmland often has farm dogs and there were two particularly vicious ones just outside of town who seem to have a taste for the blood of bicyclists. We were doing the ride about a year ago when these two came tearing out onto the road and the black lab (who knew you could make a black lab vicious?) took a good shot at dragging me down by my leg. However, we now know that our over-sized panniers aren't just great for storage but also act as a pretty effective shield against two lunging dogs. I love dogs and grew up around farms, but this spooked me enough that I've considered bringing something to club them off with every time we've done the ride since. This said we've done this ride two or three times post doggies with no sign of them and I sadly think they may have bit onto something bigger than they could chew and moved onto chasing cars in the next life.