Well, I’m back. 
I went to Bancroft to visit my friends with the solar-powered, house, went with two other friends to Ottawa, stayed there for a day, took the bus to Montréal, met Dopers and had a good time, stayed overnight at someone else’s place, then took the bus back to T. O. (This is a continuation of this thread.)
Details? You want details? In a moment…
So I had booked last Friday and this week off as holidays. I was feeling rather stressed and frazzled by work, and I needed a break; also I had planned to take another course about the Ontario building code. Well, last Monday (!) I found out that the course had been cancelled. Needing the break and having the holidays anyways, I decided to rravel in spite of things.
Greyhound, in its coporate wisdom, decided to cancel the Saturday bus to Bancroft. This means that I cannot take the bus there and back for a weekend visit without taking a Friday off work.
So Friday (the 23rd of March) I took the bus to from Toronto to Bancroft. The bus goes via Peterborough; it’s about a four-hour journey, though you can drive it in three (or 2.5, if you’re a [del]maniac[/del] trained race-car driver, like my friend Steve (all names changed to grotect the guilty and confound the inquisitive. Except Doper names. We know who you are anyways.))
The bus trip origiates at the Bay Street bus station in downtown Toronto, and the first hour of this trip is spent getting out of Toronto, stopping in the inner burbs at Scarborough Town Centre after 45 minutes). By 1:15 or so into the trip, we exit the 401 at Westney Road in Ajax, and I realise to my dismay that I am on the Bancroft Extremely Local run.
We enter the distressingly-ill-planned town of Ajax, which was more-or-less created out of thin air to house munitions workers during the Second World War and has no centre. The central street, running north-south, is Harwoood Avenue. It’s actually not a badly-designed street, with a grass median, but the surroundings don’t meet that standard. The west side is shopping plazas and parking lots all the way from the Highway 401 overpass south to Bayly Street. The east side is apartment buildings and the Town Hall.
North of the 401, Harwood passes through a few suburbs of ‘temporary’ wartime housing (still occupied these 60+ years later), and then a clutter of ugly commercial buildings, to reach the east-west Old Highway 2. Lately the areas around Hwy. 2 have been invaded and conquered by big-box stores; when I was a kid, it was farms. The ugly quotient is way up.
The bus terminal, such as it is, is a small brick waiting room next to the parking lot of one of the shopping plazas on the west side of Harwood Avenue. We stop and a few people get on. I am dismayed to notice that the Town Hall, an attractively-designed Modern structure in dark textured paneling, has had a hideously-clashing addition grafted all over it. The colours don’t go together at all, and both new and old look cheap and hastily-planned.
The Ministry of Transport, in its infinite wisdom, decided to eliminate the interchange that formerly admitted traffic directly from the 401 to Harwood. They are also widening the freeway to 10 lanes through Ajax. We therefore go east to the Salem Road interchange and rejoin the eastbound 401.
Next stop: Oshawa.
The bus arrived in Oshawa. We left the 401, headed north through town to Old Highway 2, and entered the bus station.
Oshawa has a nice square just south of its downtown. You can see the remnants of what was a pleasantly-prosperous town in about 1955, but some ham-handed developments in the eighties followed by chronic ‘hollowing out’ has left downtown Oshawa much less than the sum of its parts.
Several newer buildings attenped to maintain the scale of the streetscape, but then they put the oversize white blob of the Ministry of Revenue building in among them and destroyed it all. The downtown theatres movie theatres closed; shops moved away; the old GM plants were demolished and nothing replaced them but empty lots. A developer bought one building and started to renovate it, but went under; the building was left open to the sky, was flooded, and was damaged and had to be demolished. And nothing replaced it.
The bus station is not in terribly great shape. It’s built under the north end of the city parking garage, and seems worn and dirty. The building across the street was hastily renovated back in the late eighties, with thin sheets of granite attached to its street-side columns. They were trying for an up-to-date aura of quiet elegance, but it came off looking cheap and tacky.
Several people got on the bus in Oshawa. The one who sat next to me smelled of cigarette smoke.
A few moments later, we trundled back though town, back to the 401, and headed east.