New York: The Great Niagara Falls

Sometime during my elementary school years, we went on a mega vacation that had us driving in our gray station wagon all the way out to Niagara Falls, New York for the first leg, and then on the return trip we would be staying in the Dayton/Columbus area of Ohio. This post will be dedicated to the the first leg of the trip, with the second part coming in the next entry. I forget when exactly this trip occurred, but it’s still one of my favorite and earliest memories of bonding with my family. This trip may have even predated the Florida trip I mentioned in my last post, as I remember watching some of the video dad took of the trip with my two sisters and I jamming in the car to Bobby Brown’s “Every Little Step.”

I don’t remember much about the trip out, except that we got into Niagara Falls very late at night. It had taken us around 15 hours to get out there, and in those days, we didn’t have Mapquest or GPS; all we had to go by were TripTickets from Triple A. So, we got lost, and drove for at least an hour around town trying to find our hotel. We finally got there and checked in around 11:30 at night, and we were all starved. Mom and Dad settled us in the room, and then left to go find us some food while my big sister watched over us. They returned a few minutes later with a half dozen footlong hot dogs from a gas station just across the street. They came in little foil bags with “DELICIOUS HOT DOG”  printed on them in cheerful letters, and while they were the epitome of gas station hot dogs, they were the most delicious franks I’d ever had.

Our hotel was a standard two-bedder with a modest shower, but what it lacked in accouterments, it made up for with a sweet location. It was located just across from an unassuming  sandstone building with orange block letters proclaiming it to be the home of the Nabisco Co. Shredded Wheat Plant. A couple blocks away was the Native American Museum of Art, which was a neat building shaped like a totemic turtle statue. You had to cross a bridge and go down a circular metal staircase (something my young mind thought was so cool, for some reason) to get to get there.

But the main attraction, of course, were the falls themselves. They were only a couple more blocks away from the Native American Center. I remember following the trail for the first time, passing over the shallow rapids that crashed over a cliff forming the American Falls. The sound was incredible and the air was perpetually filled with mist that created little rainbows. But the American Falls were nothing compared to the sight that was just around the corner.

The Horseshoe Falls are an amazing sight, plummeting over a hundred feet into the Niagra basin. They are appropriately named, as the water that rushes from Canada into the basin has carved the cliff into a huge U-shape, forming one of the most iconic vistas in the country. We visited this site every day we were in Niagara Falls, with one of the more memorable trips coming after sunset, when they would project a rainbow of lights on the Horseshoe and shoot off fireworks. This same night, we followed the trail around and into Canada, marking my first and only trip outside of the United States. It was a short trip, as we only stopped in a gift shop, where mom and dad bought me a navy and blue boomerang that to this day sits above my window in my room.

Perhaps my favorite part about our trip to Niagara was my ride on the Maid of the Mist, or one of the iterations of the ship owned by the park. We were given blue ponchos as we boarded the vessel that were essentially sheets of cellophane with Niagara Falls printed on the chest. I rode with my father and sister on the upper deck of the boat, gripping the railing the entire time, except when I needed to wipe mist away from my glasses.  We chugged our way into the heart of the ghostly mist until it was all but impossible to hear each other talk over the thundering falls. And then, unceremoniously, we turned around and headed back to the dock so the Maid could exchange us for her next batch of passengers. The whole trip lasted maybe 15 minutes, but was still one of the coolest things that happened during our stay in Niagra.

We climbed the long stairway up the cliff back to my exasperated mother, who had been wrangling my little sister while we were on our ride, and walked over to the observation balcony to tell her about what it was like to go into the mist. We found a little section of railing that was missing that let us walk right down by the rapids that raced over the cliff. It was a lot like the ocean in the way that it made you feel small, that if you stepped out into that water, it would do whatever it wanted to you, and there wasn’t a swimmer in the world who could outrace that current. I remembered a legend a tour guide had told us about boy who fell into the water in a barrel and rode in it over the falls. I didn’t want to become a legend, so I timidly backed away from the edge of the water and waited on Dad to stop taking pictures.

It was evening time, so we followed the path back to the winding metal stairs that would take us back to the main walk that lead to our hotel. We were going to be leaving Niagara Falls the next morning, but we weren’t going home just yet; Mom and Dad had another plan in store for us. We were going to stay in Dayton, Ohio, for a few days and go see some of the sights there.

I’ll detail that leg of the trip in another post, hopefully within the next couple of days.

Tags: new york, states, travel

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 1st, 2010 at 8:10 pm and is filed under The 50 States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.