Niagara Niagara

Toronto. After a valiant attempt to defeat that Molson hangover, we piled in the captain's rental and headed out to Niagara Falls. It's about two hours drive from Toronto, but we had a secret weapon... a GPS device. I want one. Not only does it tell you where to go, it's Nicole Kidman. The thing talks like an Aussie. And when you make a wrong turn, it calculates a new path based on your screwup. Of course, it tells you when it does this, and so it got to where we would all groan when the thing said, "Recalculating!"

Niagara Falls is a lot of water going over a large precipice. I knew this going in, but DAYOM. That's a lot of water, and it makes a lot of noise. It also throws a lot of mist in the air that doesn't ever dissipate. Also, there are a lot of seagulls. I think this is like New York for seagulls... once you're here, you've made it. There was also an amazingly thick gray material covering a lot of the rocks there that I strongly suspect was bird poo.
Sometime in the thirties, they blasted a tunnel under the falls, and now it's a tourist attraction called Journey Behind The Falls. They take you down a ten-story elevator and give you a yellow rain slicker, and then you get to fool around in a thundering underground tunnel. Two of the three paths open up right behind the falls, which you might think sounds cool. I thought that. But if you're behind a waterfall, all you can see is falling water, and so for all I knew, I might have been in a sewer pipe in Mexico. Here it is. Note the lame.

The third path was better. It opened onto a balcony at water's edge, just aside the falls. Again, loud. And you get fairly drenched, but that's OK... you're getting drenched by a big Canadian waterfall.

Down here were photos of what the place looks like when they light it up at night. Gonna have to go back and see that.