Great Skate #32 - The Shops at Don Mills skating rink

On Friday, February 27, 2015, my friend Cathy braved the cold to join me at the Shops at Don Mills for Great Skate #32.

The skating rink is a small oval in the centre of an open-air shopping plaza. It's surrounded by high-end stores and restaurants, making skating there quite a different experience from my recent adventure at Arrowhead Provincial Park.

We were the only skaters there when we arrived. Soon we were joined by three others. If the mall is counting on the rink to attract more potential customers, they might need to rethink that strategy. Or maybe it was just too cold or too early in the evening for many people to be out.

Skating with a friend is a terrific way to catch up with each other's lives. It's a bit like having a conversation in a car - the sense of forward movement keeps the ideas and questions flowing.

Of course, sitting in a cosy cafe and enjoying a hot cup of tea also fosters good conversation. That's the nice thing about skating at a mall. When your toes are painfully cold and you can't feel your fingers anymore, you can always find somewhere to warm up. Which is exactly what we did.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Great Skates

Great Skate #21 - Greenwood Park (renovated)

Image
The weather on Sunday, January 5 was mild and snowy - a perfect day for skating. My friends and nieces joined me at the Greenwood Park rink. Those of you keeping track might notice that Greenwood has already had its Great Skate, but it's had such a dramatic makeover since then that I'm counting it as a new rink. Two years ago, at Great Skate #8 , the Greenwood Park rink looked like this: Greenwood Park rink on February 11, 2012 It was a typical Toronto rink. Not beautiful, but it did the job. Last winter, the rink was closed for renovations. It reopened in November , looking like the winner of a skating rink beauty contest: Greenwood Park rink in November 2013 It used to be a single ice rink surrounded by a chain link fence, where you might feel a bit like a gerbil in a cage (if gerbils could skate). Now Greenwood Park has two rinks. One, used for shinny and skating lessons, is covered by a snazzy roof (which probably has some practical, keep-the-ice-icy
Read more

Great Skate #7 - Ryerson Community Park

Image
Cathy joined me for a peaceful afternoon skate at Ryerson Community Park on February 4th. This is the little rink tucked into the Ryerson University campus. There weren't many skaters out and everyone else was a university student. Two guys were practising their hockey skills, using turned-over benches as goals. A girl practised her figure skating spins while flirting with a guy who looked like he was torn between flirting back and joining the hockey players. The Ryerson rink is round, and because there were so few skaters on the ice, it was a good opportunity to explore something I've noticed during Great Skate 2012:  people always skate in a counterclockwise direction . I tested this, deliberately skating clockwise. With just Cathy and I doing laps, we weren't getting in anyone's way, and there wasn't any peer pressure to overcome. At first, no problems, although it felt a bit odd. Then after a few minutes I realized that we had somehow turned ourselves a
Read more

Great Skate #34: Love Crescent Parkette

Image
On Saturday, March 7, I enjoyed a solitary skate at a natural ice rink in Love Crescent parkette .* That was probably my last Great Skate of the season. Since then, the weather has shifted from wintery to spring-like. The sun is warm, the air is soft and you can hear water dripping everywhere. There may be a few die-hard skaters and shinny players out there, but I think most of us are ready to switch to cycling, ball hockey and other warm-weather activities. The Love Crescent rink was first built in 2013 by a group of community-minded skating enthusiasts. The street is tucked away in a neighbourhood just north of Kingston Road in east Toronto. It's not a place you pass through on your way somewhere else; you have to know where you're going to find it. The rink builders were clever. They designed the rink in the shape of an oblong donut. In the centre is a space for shinny players. Around the centre, separated by a wide snowbank, is a track for pleasure skating. There are
Read more

Great Skate #1 - Barbara Ann Scott Rink

Image
Good grief, January 1st already seems like months ago, not just a few weeks.... Great Skate 2012 launched on New Year's Day. In the rain. It's going to be that kind of winter, I think. The rink was the Barbara Ann Scott Rink in downtown Toronto. Or, as most people know it, "the rink behind College Park." The CityRinks site calls it the "poor sad orphan rink" because the new condo tower being built next door doesn't name it in their sales pitch.* I've skated there before, and there's lots of good things about it. There's an indoor area where you can change your skates and rent a locker for your stuff. The rink is round, with benches in the middle, which is a nice change from rectangular hockey rinks. It's near a Tim Horton's, for those who need hot chocolate after skating. And it's usually not very crowded. Of course, on New Year's Day, just after the rain stopped, it was not crowded at all. Cathy and H we
Read more

Great Skate #33: Gage Park, Brampton

Image
On Sunday, March 1, the Great Skate Project revisited one of the rinks of my youth: the skating trail in Brampton's Gage Park . My friends Jennifer and Riubert joined me, with their two small boys. Gage Park is located in downtown Brampton - the quaint, slightly shabby part of Brampton that has been eclipsed by the mushrooming housing developments all around it. In the late 1980s, Brampton rebuilt its City Hall, and that project included the installation of a skating trail in the neighbouring Gage Park. I think it was the smartest thing that Brampton councillors have ever done. It's been years since the last time I skated at Gage Park. This was the first time my friends had been there, so I was glad my memory of it lived up to reality. I don't know how long the skating trail is, but it does a big loop around the perimeter of the park. There is a skate sharpening booth ($5 per pair), a snack truck and public washrooms. Parking (free on Sundays) is across the s
Read more