Road Trip – Day 13 

Katahdin and Berkeley have wanted to visit Niagara Falls for a few years now.  They have an audio story they really like that dramatizes the time Tchaikovsky came to visit America and took a train to see Niagara Falls.   I have a fond memory of going with my mom and siblings to see Niagara.  It was pretty impressive.  Although we have road tripped somewhere every summer, Niagara has never been close to the route until now.  Today the drive from Palmyra, NY, was only 1 hour and 45 minutes.  A “short drive” in Skye terms.

I did surprisingly little planning for this stop of the trip.   Parking in the State Park is $10.  I also checked out two DVDs on Niagara Falls from the library last month and made the kids watch them.  That’s it.  The goal was to see the falls from a few angles, see a rainbow, and have a picnic.  We were able to do it all and the weather held out for us.

There are three waterfalls – the American Falls, Bridal Veil Falls, and the Horseshoe Falls.  They were all walkable.  It was not crowded due to it being a Monday with imminent rain in forecast.  At least 50% of the visitors we saw were Mennonites, which was interesting because the first week of our vacation in Cedar Run, PA, had a lot of Mennonites, too.  I saw Mennonites in lawn chairs in the back of pick ups twice last week.  I finally had some questions from the kids about them when Katahdin mentioned the “people from other countries” in line all around us to get ice cream.  He was shocked to find out they were local even though they had thick Germanish accents.  It made our day a little more fun to be surrounded by them at Niagara.  They were having so much fun.  The Ice Cream shop at Bridal Veil falls ran out of ALL ice cream flavors even though it really was not crowded at all.  It was fun to look at our overpriced Cave of the Winds photos together with a Mennonite family.  We skipped the $40 photo, but they bough theirs.  I’m not surprised.  I had my own camera and pictures.  They did not have a camera in the group and their picture was priceless.  I wanted to buy it.

One of the DVDs we watched explained about the Cave of the Winds, which is an elevator through the rock next to Bridal Veil Falls. The elevator shaft was dug through 175 feet of stone with all hand tools. At the bottom is a seasonally built deck for visitors to get up close and super wet.  Katahdin really had his heart set on seeing the Cave. The line for Cave of the Winds tickets was outrageous when we first walked by.  None of us had any line waiting ability after sitting in the car.  On our way back from seeing Bridal Veil Falls however, the line was gone.  Not one person.  So we cruised right in.  It was amazing.  I didn’t think it would be as thrilling as it was.  To be at the bottom of the falls!  In hindsight, it is totally worth a line wait.

A Seagull colony lives on the rocks at the bottom of the falls.  It was chick season. We saw hundreds.  We got to do it all – see three waterfalls, two rainbows and ice cream and PBJ picnic on Luna Island.  4 hours well spent.

Enjoy the unedited pics.

 

Cool things we learned –

• Niagara Falls used to be surrounded by private and corporate land – resulting in fences built around the view and you had to pay to see the falls through a hole in the fence!
• Niagara Falls was the first State Park in the U.S.  It inspired the National Park system that followed.  That is why the Niagara tag line is “The World Changed Here.”
• Niagara Falls flow could fill an Olympic size pool every second.
• Seagull colonies are stinky.  Their chics have the same coloring as their eggs – light gray with dark gray speckles Berkeley discovered.