The Tobogganing Around the Hills of Guelph Ontario

Guelph, Ontario has hills.

Lots and lots of hills.

Some would say Guelph, Ontario has too many hills, but that's for some to say, and you know what 'some' is like...he's always saying something !

When God made Guelph he must have come from just making the praries, perhaps the endless expanse of 'flatness' in Saskatchewan, I don't know, but He certainly had some fun with hills and slopes and inclines when he assembled the parts of our city, or perhaps he just let one of the hired-help do it while he went out for a Tim Horton's coffee-break, and they went to town so to speak, with the up-and-down building blocks of Creation...who knows?

When you live in Guelph you soon come to realize it is like living on a roller-coaster track, but without the screaming.

You might find a few downhills here and there, but believe me, they are far and few between. Most of our fair city is UPHILL. You want to go to the deli? You want to go to the hospital? Walk way way up--hill. You want to go to the Riverrun Centre? Fine, then you walk downhill--but you will have to walk uphill to get home!

See what I mean? You cannot escape the hills of Guelph, and further, I believe they are getting bigger everyday--but that may be my lack of exercise--still, they are too big and that's that.

Now let me outline just how irritating it is to live in a city where the hills outnumber the inhabitants two-to-one (I got these figures from Statistics Canada and just try and prove I didn't).

Now, if you are standing, say, at the top of Gordon Street (and I'd rather it was YOU standing there and not me anyday) and find yourself aimed in the direction of the Speed River, your journey to the Speed River will, make no doubt about it, be a speedy one. The incline of the street is something akin to that of straight up and down--with more up than down.

Students on their way from the University of Guelph to the Downtown area of Guelph, must traverse the Gordon Street Incline (or decline--the 'cline' being a matter of perspective) and that is why so many U.of G. students are so bent--at the waist that is. They acquire, by the end of four years, and grappling with the hills of Guelph, a certain posture that marks them for life as students of The Royal City, where they took the high road to learning and are now leaning.

Certainly the most attractive and fantastic feature, when viewed from afar, and not walked to from a-close, is the Disneyesque,Church of Our Lady, that sits perched atop Norfolk Street (just another name for the afore-mentioned and inclinous Gordon Street.)

There She roosts, like something from out the middle ages--a time when the higher you had to climb to have your sins forgiven, the more sins you dropped on the way-- like a penance-diet of sorts, I suppose.  If so, Our Lady was put in just the right place to make the point that the wages of sin and of over-eating--are ONE.

To be fair, there are horizontally unchallenged, level, and even surprisingly supine streets in Guelph, where nae a bump or extrusion dares to raise it's head, but these are, to put it flatly, few.

And that's the way it is. If you don't like it, you can always move to Saskatchewan. I'm told they actually have a horizon there.

http://www.get.on.ca/parks-and-sports-facilities.aspx