Summer Vacation

Last weekend I took a four day weekend and spent it in the Niagara Falls area with my family. The whole nine hours in a car thing wasn’t exactly my favorite part of the trip (3 hours to drive “home”, 6 hours from “home” to the hotel room).

Upon arriving one thing that was noticed very quickly was how positively ghetto the american side is. For those people who are geographically challenged this map might be useful. East of the river is Niagara Falls, NY, USA and west of the river is Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. Except for a narrow strip of land along the river operated as a NY State Park the whole of Niagara Falls, NY is run down and economically depressed. We entered the city through a back road on its northeast side and was greeted by run down factories and countless rows of heavy duty power transmition lines.

The sites of interest we saw on the American side were:

• Sight seeing around the park (Luna Island has a really nice view)
• Cave of the Winds (Very Cool)
• Aquarium of Niagara (Very small place, the first floor smelled, but the trained seal show was entertaining and made it worth the entrance fee)

The Canadian side is remarkably different then the American side. The Canadian side is a thriving tourist mecca with new well maintained buildings, many attractions and a whole strip of shops and activities. I counted no fewer then 6 “haunted houses” in a 2 mile radius. Planet Hollywood, Hard Rock Cafe, Two Starbucks, Rainforest Cafe, and many shops were across the street from a great view of the falls. A walk up Clifton Hill reveals a crapload of shops, rides, novelty museums, and quite a few other things to do. All of this being a block or two away from a casino and the wonderful facilities maintained by the Niagara Parks Commission.

The Niagara Parks Commission is a great non-profit organization that basically owns the strip of land along the Canadian side of the river. Not only have they set up the usual walkways and vantage points overlooking the river but they set up other great attractions that made the Canadian side much more fun:

• Journey Behind the Falls (Counterpart to the US Cave of the Winds mentioned earlier)
• Botanical Gardens
• Butterfly Conservatory (I loved this place and my brother pretty much drained the batteries in my camera here)
• Nightly Illumination of the Falls starting at 9pm and Fireworks show at 10pm (some of the better fireworks I’ve seen in a while)
• Quite a few more things we just didn’t have time to do or see…

On our first night I signed up for a tour from Bedore Tours. Normally my family does not like to go on tours but I “encouraged them” by springing for the $50 a ticket. It was well worth every penny for the four hour tour. It was basically a whirlwind tour of the Canadian side ending with a trip up an observation tower after the fireworks finished. We then spent the next day going back over to Canada ourselves and spending more time at the various places we saw. The tour was worth the cost alone because it saved us from all the rather high parking fees in the area for the length of the tour.

Overall a very fun trip. I think three days is about the right amount of time. I started feeling ill at the end of the third night from an irratic sleep schedule and irratic meal schedule from walking around all day. So it ended at just the right time. I would, however, strongly recommend whoever decides to drive in the Niagara area get a very good street map as the street layout is terrible and we ended up having more then one argument over which road was the right road to take.

I definately could see myself going back in two or three years.