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Toronto, ON → Niagara Falls, ON 71.7 mi (115.4 km) |
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To the falls, everyone!
Today, we are visiting one of nature’s true marvels, the kind of place where a drought-weary Californian cringes at the sheer quantity of flowing water. That place, straddling the border of Canada and the United States, is Niagara Falls, where the Niagara River dumps over the Niagara Escarpment at a rate of 168,000 cubic meters per minute!
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Before we arrived, Danielle wanted to ease us into the touristy side of Niagara Falls with a stop at Souvenir City, which is surrounded by giant sculptures of kitschy wonder: huge thimbles and massive bottle openers, enormous decorative spoons and a larger-than-life bull moose! Souvenir City was a great place to pick presents for folks at home and to sample Canadian maple syrup of all shades, Canadian fudge of all flavors, and very special Canadian ice wine (made from grapes that have frosted over), which was fortunately served in very small portions!
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We couldn’t browse for long, because we had a jam-packed day ahead of us, starting just ahead of the Falls. Here stands a monument to electrical magician, Nikola Tesla, who set up the first hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls in 1894 and harnessed the water’s awesome power to send alternating current electricity as far as Buffalo! Today, there are five power plants at the Falls, which divert 60-75% of the water to produce up to 4.9 million kilowatts of power! While that means the falls are only flowing at 25-40% capacity at any given time, that does slow the rate of erosion quite a lot!
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This has been one of the world’s fastest eroding waterfalls, having receded 11 kilometres in the last 12,500 years! That’s roughly a metre per year, 68 metres in an average human lifetime! One casualty of this rapid recession was Table Rock, the first major tourist vantage point of the Falls in the early 1800s! Because of rock falls every 10-20 years since its discovery, Table Rock had to be demolished in 1935 for safety reasons. Now, all that remains is a commemorative plaque!
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Niagara Falls is actually a generic name for three separate waterfalls: the famous Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side and the less praised American Falls and Bridal Veil Falls on the American side! The human connection comes from the Rainbow Bridge, which has symbolized friendship between the US and Canada since November 1, 1941! A walking path passes all along the Niagara River, which offers lots of vantage points, but the Falls look so small from there! It was hard to appreciate their majesty from a vista. We needed to explore with more prepositions!
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Above the Falls, the daffodils swayed gently in the breeze as the river rushed by. This was the calmest part of the Falls, where I wondered if the water knew what it was in for! It’s strange to think that, for as old as these Falls are, all of the water pouring over its edge is still doing so for the very first time! What has its journey been like for all these years?
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To get a better feel for the water power, we signed up to take the Journey Behind the Falls, descending 46 metres in an elevator to a series of tunnels leading out to an observation platform. There, the Falls towered over us, roaring mightily, making it extra terrifying to imagine being Annie Edison Taylor, the first person to go over the falls in a barrel and survive! For us observers, our greatest challenge was just keeping the cameras from getting soaked in mist! All of the humans wore free rain slickers, but they did not offer extra-extra small slickers for these city rodents. We had to accept the chilly water as part of the experience, and wow, what an experience!
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For me, though, the ultimate sensory experience was when we went back inside and around to a portal where we looked out through the Falls. It was just a simple window, really, but the tunnel amplified the roar of the cataract! It was like looking into the face of chaos, which made me nervous to think that chaos might be looking back!
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Taking just a moment to dry off, we hustled back up and down the road to get wet again on Hornblower Cruises! The Canadian twin of Maid of the Mist on the American side, Hornblower has a huge presence in the States, shuttling people to Alcatraz Island and the Statue of Liberty, and doing dinner cruises in my own backyard!
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The boat motored out onto the river, a bright blue green because of all the eroded rock dust it’s carrying! We passed first along the American Falls, which was so white it looked like a snowy hill cascading down onto the brown rocks below! Then, as we approached the Horseshoe Falls, I had to quickly snap a photo then put the camera away, because the torrent of water was coming! Not that that stopped some folks… At that point, looking up from under the mighty Niagara Falls, I had a moment of zen! These Falls are an allegory for life, constantly flowing with new experiences, some wet and wild, and never the same from one day to the next.
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That moment of zen only lasted until we docked, because then it was time to walk back up to Clifton Road, a whole street of haunted houses, fast food restaurants, and that international symbol of Americana, the Hard Rock Cafe. There were gift shops by the bushel, and Scooter even found himself a new shirt to take home! Sometimes, you have to let go and just be a tourist for a minute. For instance, I had to tell my good friend, Danny Dinsdale, that I visited the dinosaur-themed golf course that he recommended a while back.
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For our last Niagara preposition, Danielle recommended we hop aboard the Niagara SkyWheel for some views over the Falls. We made three slow turns to a height of 53 metres, looking out over the hotels and the Falls and the construction happening around the Falls. The cloudy day was clearing gradually, and it promised to be a nice sunset!
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Back on the ground, we took our last photo from our Canadian adventure, in front of Tim Hortons, which I will miss oh, so much when I start my New York road trip tomorrow. For the rest of the evening, we watched the sun set and the lights come on at the Falls, gorged on Danielle’s favorite spicy perogy pizza (kind of a potato skin pie) at Boston Pizza, and had our pants scared off (even though I don’t wear pants) in a shoddy wax museum that doubled as a haunted house!
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This has been one heck of a whirlwind adventure in Canada, but it has given me lots of reasons to come back! We only scratched the surface of Ontario, and Danielle has a whole list of other amazing places to visit. Then there are the breathtaking mountains of western Canada and the polar bears in the north. Land of Beavers, I will be back!
See you later, eh?
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Total Ground Covered: 543.5 mi (974.3 km) |
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