Niagara Falls

Blogging seems to be much more difficult than I anticipated. My cell phone has internet access, but it is a pain to type on and the pictures get put on Dave’s computer. But, we are having difficulty getting internet access at our hotels. Most of them charge for it, which annoys me, or there are problems with it, which seems to be the case tonight. We are in St. Louis. Today, we got in early and walked to dinner. It is only 8:30, and the kids are in bed. Dave was heading to the casino, and I was going to blog. But, of course, the internet is not working. So, I am typing in Word and will hopefully find a WiFi in the morning to post this. We also were at Abby’s in Cincinnati for 3 days. Even though blogging would have been easy, I didn’t want to spend our time together doing it. So, therefore, nothing was done there either.

So, I need to backtrack quite a few days. On Wednesday, we had reservations for a show in Niagara at 6:15, so we needed to make good time on our trip. The weather was horrible. Dave was driving through rain and horrible winds. The car kept jerking as we caught a stiff crosswind. It made the drive more difficult. But, we made it into Canada and to the hotel with a little time to spare. We got dressed to go out and checked out the wonderful hotel. We had gotten a suite at the Embassy Suites. I had found a great deal. The room was large with a bedroom and enough beds for all of us (a luxury, for sure). It had free buffet breakfast for all of us, a pool, views of the falls, an arcade. We were very pleased with the hotel.

We headed out to see this dinner show about Canada. I had read about it on the internet. The reviews said it was good and entertaining. I knew that it would be kind of cheesy, but I hoped that it would give us an overview of things Canadian. Well, the food was just OK and I thought the show was pretty bad. They sang a lot of songs and really told us nothing about Canada. They had Canadian things like hockey players and Mounties, but they didn’t tell us anything about them or do anything interesting. It was a real waste of time and money.

The tour desk guy talked us into their tour of the attractions around the Falls. I knew that the costs were steep, but he gave us an extra kid free and it seemed nice to have someone else take care of everything. I couldn’t use my phone in Canada without paying ridiculous prices, so I would have had to do everything old school – find brochures, get maps, etc. Seemed more trouble than I wanted. So, we paid for the tour. The Maid of the Mist, which is the boat tour at the bottom of the Falls was not going yet because of the ice still in the river. They substituted another attraction for that one.

We started by doing this 4-D attraction. First, it showed a cartoon of how the falls were created years ago. I actually thought that was really well done. Then, we donned ponchos and headed into a room where they rained on us, the wind blew, lights flashed like lightning, etc. Matthew and Zack were scared, but it was actually pretty poor. The idea was great, but the execution was bad.



Next, we did the Journey behind the Falls. This is an elevator that takes you down into these caves behind the falls. You can walk out to a space to get a close-up view of the falls. But, we couldn’t walk out on to the platform they have outside, so we couldn’t really appreciate the falls very well. They also had little windows that are actually behind the falls. Those were interesting but not all that great.

We had a few moments to look at the Falls from the lookout point before we headed out. The mist was heavy and the lighting poor to get a good look and/or picture of the Falls.

We ate lunch at a cheesy cafeteria and headed to our substitute attraction. This is the Whirlpool Aero Car. It is a little skyride like car that goes over the whirlpool area of the Falls. We thought when they were talking about it that we would be able to see the falls, but you cannot see them at all. It is downstream a ways. We did see the gorge and the rapids. But, I’m pretty sure that ride has not been updated or even maintained since it opened in the ‘60’s. I was pretty nervous and it was pretty cold and windy.



The rapids from our car high above.  I didn't get a picture of the whole thing for some reason.


Back on the bus to a classic Niagara site (I guess), the flower clock. It’s a clock with flowers planted on it. Apparently, you can go inside and see it working and see pictures of all the faces for the past 40 years or so. But, it was neither working nor the back door open. So, that was pretty lame.

Final stop was the butterfly conservatory. This was actually really great. We’ve been to one in Aruba and one at the Natural History Museum in DC. This was the best one we had seen. There were tons of butterflies and many different varieties. Dave had his marathon shirt on, which is a super bright shade of yellow. Not the best color to wear normally, but it really attracted the butterflies. He even gave it to Zack for awhile, so he could have them land on him.




At the hotel, we did the kids’ favorite activity – swam in the pool. They had a good time. I became convinced that Matthew will do just fine on the swim team this year. He’s been resistant to the idea, so I was afraid he would throw a fit the first few days and they would bump him down a level, but I think he will be just fine. We went to Margaritaville for dinner. Here are my pirate men. They really have good margaritas there!





We took a walk down to the path by the water. At this point, the lighting was perfect. The American Falls were really beautiful and easy to photograph. The Canadian ones had a lot of mist, but they kept throwing up a rainbow, so that was pretty. Afterwards, we had dessert at the casino food court, left Dave at the casino and headed home to bed.


The next day, Good Friday, we spent 2.5 hours trying to get through customs and back into the US. Basically, this part of the trip was a lot of money, extra time, and the best thing was seeing the Falls from the free walkway. The view from the Canadian side is definitely worth it, but that traffic was horrible. And, all the attractions are just not up to par with the price. I think it’s hard to improve upon the view of just seeing the falls from the street. They are super impressive. If I knew what I know now, I would have stayed at that hotel, just watched from the Falls from the path, and left town the day before. I think Niagara has just become too much of a tourist trap.