A TALL SHIP LISTS LAZILY IN JORDAN Harbour as a warm breeze blows from the west. To the east, Lake Ontario stretches endless as an ocean, and the day is clear enough that the Toronto skyline is visible across the water.

With this idyllic scene their backdrop, Andy Saito and his four-year old son Dylan are taking a break. Dylan, his trail-a-bike hitched to his dad’s road racer, has a windburned nose. A support van pulls up. Do they need a lift? Dylan shakes his head, and father and son finish the day’s 80-kilometre ride — from Niagara-on-the-Lake to Hamilton — under their own steam. For them, the trip is half over.

The Saitos chose to cycle just two days of last summer’s Great Waterfront Trail Adventure, a fully-supported, eight-day bicycle trip from Niagara to the Ontario- Quebec border along bike paths, bike lanes and country roads. Most of their 250 fellow riders did the whole route: retirees on rentals and recumbents kept pace with young couples on tandems and athletic types on featherweight racers zoomed past clunky hardware-store mountain bikes. Some days, the gap between the front and back of the pack measured dozens of kilometres, but everyone caught up by sunset for group camp-outs that are covered by registration fees (although some participants stay at B&Bs along the route).

“The trip was designed to address every concern people might have about riding a bike over eight days,” says Marlaine Koehler, executive director of the Waterfront Regeneration Trust (WRT), which organizes the trip, starting this year on July 3. “It’s low cost and we carry the luggage, fix flats, support emergencies and offer encouragement and van shuttles.”

More than 100 local groups in 41 waterfront communities help out. Ontario towns such as Cobourg, Ivy Lea and Bath, which are used to being treated as gas station stops along Highway 401, are eager to host hundreds. In Brown’s Bay, the St. Lawrence Parks Commission sells picnic lunches; Port Hope holds an outdoor concert. There’s kayaking in Gananoque and a temporary tent township in Johnstown on the St. Lawrence River.

One of the WRT’s goals is to foster a connection to the river and Lake Ontario by showing riders the sand dunes, wetlands, forests, bluffs, orchards, historic towns and harbours that hug the shoreline. Since the ride’s inception in 2008, the trail has been extended or aligned closer to the water in St. Catharines and Iroquois, and Hamilton recently installed signs on a route through Stoney Creek. Going forward, the WRT is looking to close a 17-kilometre trail gap between Trenton and Belleville and a partnership with the Carolinian Canada Coalition aims to connect the trail with the north shore of Lake Erie.

Go to www.waterfronttrail.org for more information.

— Amy Kenny

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YOU’RE IN A PEDAL BOAT SURROUNDED by greenery, listening to frogs and birdsong, cruising past reeds and trees gnawed by beavers, when suddenly a turtle plunges into the water and a heron takes flight.

“It’s amazing — you’re in the animals’ habitat and you feel privileged, like you’re one of them,” José Lafleur says about her trip through Eco-Odyssée, a water labyrinth with 6.5 kilometres of trails (below) that former conservation officer Michel Leclair opened on his land in Wakefield, Que., in 2008.

In the maze Leclair created to showcase the marshland’s typically inaccessible world, visitors learn about the ecosystem by identifying plants and decoy-like animals that guide the way through 64 intersections. As you navigate down a watery corridor, you see maybe six metres in front and less than two metres to either side. All you’re given are life jackets, a compass, a field guide and a walkie-talkie (to use if you get lost).

“You’re at the same level as a beaver in the water,” says Leclair, who points out that frogs keep mosquitos and flies away. “You know when you’re young, you have this sight, you discover everything. As you get older, you lose that. But in this maze, you discover.”

In 2009, Eco-Odyssée won the Tourism Industry Association of Canada’s new business of the year award. For more info, go to www.eco-odyssee.com.

— Shelley Cameron-McCarron