Five things I learned in Niagara Falls

We’re freshly back from three days in Niagara Falls. It was a terrific trip for many reasons, including spending time with our extended family and excellent behaviour on the part of all five kids in attendance. Here, in no particular order, are five things I learned in Niagara Falls. (The “five things” bit is a new idea I had. I think it’s a neat new theme with a lot of potential!)

1. My boys are excellent travelers! Tristan and Simon have long since proved their roadworthiness, but even Lucas – who fusses on the drive to the grocery store – was an angel in the car. On the way home, we drove straight through from Niagara Falls to Ottawa with only one stop (in Belleville, where we stretched and dined at the Quinte Mall.)

3. Don’t let the weather forecast get you down. They were calling for grey skies and rain (and egads, even snow!) in the week leading up to our trip, but the weather was damn near perfect. Cloudy with plenty of sunny breaks, mild enough for shorts but cool enough for walking. It was perfect weather for gazing at the Falls!

(Or, perfect weather for gazing at each other!)

This is just a gratuitous shot of the Falls because I like it so much!

3. You can take 600 pictures of your boys and still not manage to get them to smile nicely once. Sigh.

.

4. The time for the “Thou Shall Not Leave My Line Of Sight” lecture is *before* you arrive at the crazy indoor waterpark, not after. Within the first half hour we arrived, I’d had to scoop up Lucas and run into the deep part of the wave pool to rescue a floundering Simon (the lifeguards hadn’t even noticed him, even though he was crying and flailing) and spend more than half an hour climbing up and down stairs searching the water park for Tristan and Simon, who’d wandered off behind their uncle. The place is so noisy that I’d spot them but couldn’t make them hear me hollering (despite my shrillest voice, which is pretty damn shrill) and they’d’ve moved on by the time I made my way down to where they were.

(This is not an image of my kids drowning or disobeying me, but one of the few times I brought my camera into the water park at Great Wolf Lodge.)

(Edited to add: Found this picture on my back-up memory card, and thought it was cute enough to share! It’s the still photo companion to the video above!)

5. A ride on the Maid of the Mist is an excellent way to spend Canada Day! (I was determined to bring my Nikon with me, but was deeply worried about water damage. In the end, I cut a hole in one corner of a large ziploc freezer bag and trimmed it to the exact size of my lens, then taped the edges to my polarizing filter. Ghetto solution, but it worked!!)

This is the Maid of the Mist from above, approaching the Horseshoe Falls:

And this is the view of the American Falls from the Maid of the Mist:

My favourite Canada Day shot:

(There may or may not be another post about our trip in the near future. I’m struggling with the “and then we did this, and then we did that” travelogue narrative — it seems a little like torturing you with the verbal equivalent of vacation slides! But if you like the pictures, there’s more on Flickr!)