JB's Blog

Another early day! Headed out with the remaining boys (Ben, Greg, Franger and myself) to Niagara Falls to visit another land mark of this big country. With a little bit of naviguessing we made it in one piece. My lonely planet guide suggests checking out the Canadian side of the falls as the view is better, but we only had about four hours in total to muck about there with our tight schedule of bringing the car back to NYC midday tomorrow.
Tight for time we decided we go for it and race over to Canada. Luckily it turned out walking over to Canada was a quick and painless effort then driving was, and what a sight it was! Just a little different angle of the falls from the Canadian side makes the experience so much better as you can see Niagara Falls in its entirety. Also seeing another country (even if it’s just for a few hours) made the trip worth it. Canada is a wonderful clean country (at least what I saw of it) and had some cool floral arrangements as well. Almost like they wanted to impress whereas on the American side it’s good old NY dirt and dingy.

There are a few tourist things you can do to interact with the falls, so we chose one of the most famous. Maid of the Mist is one of the oldest running tourist services for Niagara falls that sails up close to the falls and lets you have a look close up. Because of the volume of water around us they supply you with funky blue poncho’s which Greg had a few troubles putting on.

Once we were all suited up we started our journey on the Maid of the Mist, a dinky oldish ship that putts along the river up to the falls. I was surprised on how windy it is in the falls, with all the volume of water moving around I guess it makes sense. You do have to hold on to your hat though, though the view is worth it.

See the little pointy things on the top right hand side of this picture, that’s people on the American side trying to have a look at the falls. It is an amazing sight that I encourage anyone to see if there in the New York state area. It’s like a wall of fog when you reach the centre and can’t see in or out with so much water and mist being sprayed around.

Making it back ashore in one piece we dried ourselves off and walked around the ‘falls’ area in Canada and checked out the shops. Funny enough there were heaps of American stores such as Hershey’s and Marvel universe. Everywhere accepted American money at a little extra cost then the Canadian equivalent which was handy for us weary travellers who didn’t want to pull even more money out in Canadian. With a little time to spare we headed to an official Planet Hollywood restaurant for some tucker. The food was good to average and the service was pretty poor, but the surroundings were awesome. Even the restroom had some cool features like sloped walls and character mock-ups.

The meal took longer then anticipated so we quickly walked back to the American border and checked through customs again. Chalked up another country on our list we left the falls we headed back to Syracuse and met up with Daniel and Amanda then headed off to Albany. Albany is where Dan and Amanda are going to be moving to and is closer to NYC then Syracuse is. So over nine hours of driving later we arrived in Albany and had dinner with the newly weds.