Frenchman's Bay & the Nautical Village
A sheltered bay, a marina, and a short strip of cafés and patios behind it. The prettiest twenty minutes in Durham.
Pickering
Where Durham begins and the Rouge ends. A bay full of sailing boats, a nuclear station everybody is entirely relaxed about, a casino, and the first exit east where the house prices stop looking like Toronto's.
Stock photograph. Not Pickering.
A lakeside commuter town
Feels like
35 min by GO
To Union Station
The shortest 905 commute on the east side
Go for
How to say it
Pickering. The waterfront is the Nautical Village, the water is Frenchman's Bay, and “the plant” means the nuclear station, which is a landmark here rather than a worry.
Heads up
The GO train is genuinely quick and everything else is a drive. North Pickering is still farmland with a great deal of proposed development on it: find out what is planned next door before you buy.
Who to go and watch
The clubs, and which ones you can actually get in to see.
OJHL junior hockey
Pickering Panthers
Junior A hockey attached to the town's main rec complex, so you can swim, skate and watch a game in the same building.
Where to actually go
5 things worth knowing about Pickering.
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.
Petticoat Creek
Bluffs, a creek and lake access at the western edge of town, joined to the Waterfront Trail. Busy in July, empty in October and better then.
Millennium Square & the pier
A long pier straight out into the lake with the skyline off to the west. Free, open, and the best sunset in Durham.
Pickering Museum Village
Durham's largest living-history museum: twenty historic buildings on one site at Greenwood, with costumed programming through the year.
Kingston Road & Liverpool
Where Pickering actually eats: plazas full of South Asian, Caribbean and Middle Eastern kitchens, most of them family-run.
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”.
June
Rotary Ribfest
Esplanade Park, a long weekend, free entry. Durham opens its summer with this one.
July
Canada Day at Esplanade Park
The whole town in the park behind the civic complex, with fireworks at dark.
December
Christmas in the Village
Pickering Museum Village by lantern light, with wagon rides and a lot of woodsmoke. Book: it sells out every year.
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.