My Brush With The Law (Oh...And A New Trail...)

    Ah, the weekend again and I was off to explore Kilally Meadows, the last remaining ESA (environmentally significant area) in London whose trails I had not visited.

    Kilally is in the northeast part of London so this requires a cross-town trip for me. I took Oxford Street, one of London's main east-west thoroughfares and about half way there I realized there was a police vehicle with flashing lights right behind me. My assumption was that he was headed somewhere on an emergency so, as soon as I could safely pull over and stop, I did.
   Well, he pulled over and stopped right behind me. This is never a good sign. And right up until he got to my window, I had no idea why I'd been stopped. As it turns out, I was driving with an invalid licence plate sticker. My jaw dropped. In Ontario, you need to renew your plate sticker every year as they expire on your birthday. My birthday was last week and for the first time ever I had forgotten to get a new sticker. I have occasionally been late by a couple of days but I have never just totally forgotten. I have stuck this one on my burgeoning "Old Man" file and, needless to say, it put a bit of a damper on my run day. Not to mention the $110 hit to the bank account...

Hmm...which way to go?

   I arrived at the eastern end of Kilally Meadows shortly after and parked in the lot. Once again, I was about to be running in new territory and needed to do a little scouting first. There was a small trail headed north and a concrete path running sort of parallel to it but neither of them was really clearly marked. I vaguely remembered the map showing that the first part of the trail began along multi-use path and so I headed down the concrete path. About fifty yards down the path, there was clearly a marked trail headed off to the right and I happily took it.

   It's been above freezing for the last little while and the trails were pretty muddy in quite a few spots. New trails mean second-guessing at junctions and then the pre-requisite backtracking and a fair amount of this went on today. Eventually I made it all the way to Highbury Ave., which brings you out almost in the middle of a subdivision. The last hundred and fifty yards or so of the trail takes you what feels like right through people's backyards. There are no real fences at this point and it is clear that homeowners have done work on both sides of the trail---a little surreal, actually.

Wind damage

   It was around this point that I decided to check my Garmin. I had purposely been avoiding looking at it because the miles seem to go by faster when you just concentrate on the landscape. Well, I wish I had looked at it a little earlier because it had stopped for some reason. I could remember fooling with it near the beginning and I guess I had paused it, unknowingly. I made sure it was running on the way back and more or less followed the trail exactly and it appears as though I might have run about 5K. This was way shorter than I had originally planned but the alternative was to run back and forth, over and over and today I just didn't feel like it.
   We had one of our worst windstorms ever about a week and a half ago and there was a fair amount of damage done to the forest. This and the fact that at this time of year there is no greenery and very little sun makes the running a little depressing and I had no real urge to formulate mileage today. All I had really been trying to do was cross Kilally Meadows off my list and now I can say I have run in all seven of London's ESAs. I have done some of them the disservice of only having run them in the winter. My plan is to get back to them in the summer and see how the experience changes. Maybe then I'll rate them all! 

P.S. I had way more pictures than this to post but for some reason Blogger's not quite up to snuff today---lots of pics were fine til I uploaded them but many were then only partial pics! Annoying!