Forest Hill Road Park

Equipment by Little Tikes, Berliner Seilfabrik.

Surface: Wood chips, sand.

My favourite walking / biking trail in Toronto has to be the Kay Gardner Beltline. Following it from Eglinton West and heading southeast, it gradually gets wider and greener and more spectacular until linking up with the Don Valley at the Brickworks.

Because it’s a former rail line, the terrain is fairly level, so even little bikers can handle it. Add to that the near-constant shade and you’ve got a great place to go walking.

It’s about halfway along the Beltline that you’ll find Forest Hill Road Park. In fact, when the railway was completed in 1891, the park was the site of the stop that served Upper Canada College at its then-new location in Forest Hill.

I really like this one. The playground isn’t as great as the Neshama Playground just a bit further along the trail, but it’s a very nice, quiet spot with some atypical equipment. Most notable is the rope climber, almost a cross between a standard cope climber and a play house, which we’ve only ever seen at one other playground in the city. There’s also one of those hand-operated diggers that construction-crazy kids tend to enjoy, and a specific type of spinner – Kompan’s Supernova Spinner – that my kids have always loved. (And they're not alone, but the way; Kompan claims the Supernova is its best-selling single piece of equipment around the world.)

The surface here isn’t great - a bit too much sand for my liking - but the shade is lovely, and this is a good alternative if the more popular parks in the area are too crowded.

And if you don’t like it? Well you can just hop back on your bike, pretend you’re a train, and head off to the next station.