Water and Falls in Niagara

When we said our next stop was Niagara Falls, our Torontonian friends highly recommended a little town on the way called Niagara-on-the-Lake. We decided to check it out and maybe have lunch there. This town is so gorgeous!! There are flowers and gardens everywhere, it is teeming with life, and it has a quaint little main street with boutique hotels, shops and restaurants. It's aptly named - a lush park borders Lake Ontario, and in the residential areas, the water views are available to everyone. Rather than putting mansions right at the water and allowing only the wealthy owners to see the water, they've made pubic greenways and parks the borders. It's so beautiful - even moreso once you get off main street and head down the Niagara Parkway to the falls. Feels like utopia.

We ate some great pizza at a local spot on the main drag. It was my first taste of bbq chicken pizza. It's a new favorite (but as much as Tom and I love pizza, you can put almost anything on it, and we'll love it).

From here, we drove along the U.S. - Canadian border (the border is the river down which the falls flow) and stopped on the Canadian side to see the view of Niagara Falls. Both sides offer great views for different reasons. From Canada, you can get a bigger, more holistic picture of them (below).

It's free to visit Niagara Falls - you just pay a few bucks for parking and then explore on your own. After walking around on the Canadian side for a bit, we went back to our car and crossed the border. Even at a highly-trafficked spot with many people border-hopping, it only took about 5 minutes. We parked again on the U.S. side and headed in. It's still free, but of course on this side there were more attractions enticing you to pay... that being said, both sides have been made somewhat tacky with tourist attractions and big eyesores. And surprisingly, the Canadian side is worse visually (you can see all the buildings that have sprung up on that side in the pics below). If you can look past those and get to the natural wonder, it's breathtaking and absolutely worth the stop on both sides.

On the U.S. side, you're right in the action. You walk along the river and right up to the point where the raging waters plummet over the edge. It's really amazing to be able to stand so close to such a powerful force. The amount of water that goes over every second is unfathomable (in case you were wondering, it's 3,160 TONS per second).

So after spending an hour or so at Niagara Falls, we continued on the day's journey. We'd crossed into the U.S. in western New York state, so we started making our way east to the Finger Lakes. This is somewhere we'd wanted to visit the entire four years we lived in New York, and we never made it. Since we were driving right by, we of course had to stop.

We had dinner at a little '50s diner in Seneca Falls where we could put quarters into miniature tableside  jukeboxes and choose the tunes (all oldies, of course). I got crazy and ordered a chocolate milkshake. The food was decent, but the atmosphere was cool.

Up next: The Finger Lakes Region - Geneva, Ithaca, Seneca Lake, and Cayuga Lake.