Month: June 2018

Yup, now I’m talking about the town. For those of you who have no clue why I started this week’s post like this, go back and read last week’s. For those of you who do know what I’m talking about, congratulations! What, you thought there was a prize or something? Give yourself a hearty pat on the back, then. Anyways, what was I talking about? Oh, right, Niagara Falls. Yeah, the Canadian town, not the American one. I already made that distinction in the title, didn’t I?

Right, so, while the town is named after the Falls, there’s so much more to do than stare and thousands of gallons of water falling over a cliff. That’s because the downtown seems to be one huge tourist trap, particularly Clifton Hills. What’s Clifton Hills, you ask? It’s the name of a street. A street with a slope. So it’s a hill. Thus, the name. Where did they get Clifton from, you ask? I don’t know, look it up.

Clifton Hills is home to the SkyWheel, both indoor (glow-in-the-dark) and outdoor (has-a-volcano-and-life-size-dino-statues) miniature golf, an arcade, and a whole bunch of rides (click here for one, two, and three), all of which are included on the Clifton Hills FunPass! In the area, but most of them not technically on Clifton Hills, there are also multiple wax museums (the one we went to), mazes, haunted houses, and three different Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museums (the one we went to), because that’s just the sort of stuff that tourists like. I mean, why not? When you can listen to an animated head talk at one of Ripley’s museums, or take a picture in front of an Avengers 1 poster–that strangely also has Batman and the Joker–while you give Iron Man a high-five, why wouldn’t you want to? If you drive out a little bit, you can go to Bird Kingdom, where the main room alone would be amazing, without all of the smaller rooms leading up to it! You can feed the birds in a little room, or hold your arm out and have a parrot sit on it in another, and, of course, for these experiences you can’t take your own pictures because they’ll take some and then try to sell them to you. Why? Because it’s another way of getting money out of tourists. But hey, it was fun!

And of course, the shops. Everywhere. You can buy merchandise with Niagara Falls branding, merchandise with Canada branding, and merchandise that are seemingly utterly irrelevant to where you’re buying them, but hey, that shirt looks comfy, so I’ll buy it anyways! Or, you know, real Kinder eggs are illegal to bring into the US because they have toys in food, so why not eat a few in Canada, where they’re practically everywhere? And there’s even a Hershey’s store! Yum!

There were nearly as many restaurants as stores, because where there are tourists, there are mouths to feed! And why not have imported chain restaurants like Hard Rock Café, Rainforest Café, and Margaritaville there, even though the American tourists should really be trying something new? In their defense, all three of those restaurants are decent quality. But Burger King? I mean, I could understand one, just to provide a quick and cheap option. But there are three Burger Kings in the immediate downtown area. That’s a tad overkill.

I was originally planning to go into heavy detail about all of this, but then I realized that that post would be far to long. So instead, you get heavy sarcasm interspersed with a quick description of an entire town! Enjoy!

Recently, my mother and I visited Niagara Falls, Canada. Yes, that is the name of the city. To make it incredibly confusing, the city on the American side is Niagara Falls, New York. But I intend to talk about the Canadian side. Next week, about the rest of the town, but today, I want to talk about the Falls themselves.

They are magnificent. I had only seen one waterfall in person before, Multnomah Falls near Portland, Oregon, and those had been alongside a green cliff face, so you naturally saw it from the top, and it didn’t seem to be all that powerful, just beautiful. Niagara Falls, on the other hand, are at ground level at the top and drop into a gorge, so you could see the sheer force of the water tumbling over the Falls at terrifying speeds. Can you believe somebody rode a barrel down that???

We also got to see it up close from the Hornblower boat, which is the Canadian version of the Maid of the Mist (the American side gets blue ponchos, the Canadian side gets red ponchos, and the people standing within mist zone but not on a boat on either side get yellow ponchos). We got to stand right in the mist of the large fall, known as Horseshoe Falls, while on the boat. The other two Falls are the Bridal Veil Falls and the American Falls, which are located next to each other and, between the two of them, dump out about 175,000 gallons of water a second.

All summer long, at night, the falls are lit with giant strobe lights, turning them all shades of the rainbow, and to accompany the lighting, there’s a small-ish* firework show that goes on. It gets pretty crowded, but it’s worth the view. As one could expect, they have light-up toys for sale during the show.

 

*I only really have my local 4th of July firework show as comparison, so to me, it was small, but that’s probably because they do it every night.