Sheppard's Bush & the Nokiidaa Trail
Woods and a sugar bush right beside the town, joined to a trail that runs all the way to Newmarket and East Gwillimbury.
Aurora
Newmarket's older, quieter neighbour. A Victorian downtown at Yonge and Wellington, a great deal of protected forest, and one of the best-run junior hockey clubs in the province.
Stock photograph. Not Aurora.
Old town, new houses
Feels like
55 min by GO
To Union Station
Trails, and a quiet street near a train
Go for
How to say it
Aurora, and the downtown is “Yonge and Wellington”: that intersection is how everybody gives directions here. It is not part of Newmarket, whatever the bus map implies, and locals are gently firm about it.
Heads up
Almost everything east of Bayview was built after 2000 and is priced as new. The character (and the premium) is west of Yonge, in the older streets around the arboretum.
Who to go and watch
The clubs, and which ones you can actually get in to see.
OJHL junior hockey
Aurora Tigers
One of the most successful junior A clubs in Ontario, and a genuinely good Friday night for about the price of a cinema ticket. This is how the 905 does hockey.
Where to actually go
5 things worth knowing about Aurora.
Public places, parks, markets and the streets the independents are actually on. Nothing here is invented, and nothing here is a photograph of somewhere else.
Aurora Cultural Centre
An 1886 schoolhouse turned into galleries and a concert room. Small, cheap, and the programme is better than the building's size suggests.
Yonge & Wellington
The old downtown: independents, a bakery or two, and enough patio in summer that the corner behaves like a square.
Aurora Farmers' Market
Saturday mornings on Wells Street through the warm months, with an artisan side that has grown as big as the produce side.
Hillary House
A national historic site on Yonge: a Gothic Revival doctor's house with the medical collection still in it. Odd, small and genuinely interesting.
The year
What comes round every year.
Keyed to a month, never to a date. Dates move, and a page that prints last year's is worse than one that says “September”.
May–October
Aurora Farmers' Market & Artisan Fair
Saturdays on Wells Street. Long-running, and the social event of the week for a good part of the town.
Summer
Concerts in the Park
Free evening concerts in Town Park through July and August. Bring a chair: everybody else does.
July
Canada Day at Lambert Willson Park
A parade down Yonge in the morning, a park full of the whole town in the afternoon, fireworks at dark.
HelloGTA.com
The GTA is enormous and most of it is unknown to everybody.
Including the people who have lived here twenty-five years. That is the whole brief: twenty-nine guides, and a question a week put to the region.