Niagara Falls and Bear Droppings by Ami Gates
Hello to All! and welcome to the Summer 2010 travel madness
Our plan for this summer starts with a lovely Tampa Wedding (congratulations to Bert and Deirdra), followed by a trip to Washington DC, then Niagara Falls Canada, and finally Iceland.
As I am unable to locate photos from DC or Tampa just yet, we shall begin with Niagara. So, here I am typing at my little work station in Iceland.
Sadly, Iceland is not well decorated really.
But – let’s do Niagara first. We stayed at the Hilton facing the falls in a town whose entire economy seems dependent on tourism. This was our hotel view:
Apparently, the water seems to fall off of the earth into some lower region and then, as far as we could determine, disappears somewhere else. After considerable discussion on the topic, Jeremy and I concluded that the earth is clearly tilted, causing the water to fall off of it.
After having a few power walks along the falls, we thought it might be fun to see other stuff. By haps, we came across an area about 20 minutes away filled with wine tasting, vineyards, small towns, coffee, and parks (oh my). Therefore, we remained in this area for the duration of our stay and plan to return here after leaving Iceland to see if we can complete the “bicycle challenge”.
What is this you ask? Well, one acquires a bicycle and then follows a path using said bike, stopping at each vineyard to taste the wine. The goal and challenge is to both remain on the bicycles and to later locate the car.
In this photo, we are tasting Ice Wine. It is ridiculously delicious and equally costly. We plan to smuggle 6 bottles on our way back.
Vineyards are everywhere in this area, there must be 100s of them.
The area is called Niagara on the Lake and it is a beautiful park with lots of excellent walking. The weather was cool and sunny.
After wine, it seems almost compulsory to have coffee and this brought us to a nearby town that was very cute and filled with treats.
I asked one of the coffee servers how he liked living in Niagara. He told me that if you poop, everyone knows it. I can only assume that he was referring to the small town aspect, and not hidden cameras. In either case, I avoided the restrooms until returning to the hotel.
The town of Niagara by the Lake seems to have embraced all tourist types, though it appears that there might be a language barrier with respect to the naming of clothing stores for more robust persons.
We then visited a few more fun spots, grabbed some coffee and headed home to start our next journey…to Iceland.
