Saturday, September 6, 2014

Today’s destination was Niagara Falls, but we took the scenic route and saw some beautiful country. Our first struggle with a round-about took us off course and through St. Mary’s. The beautiful stone buildings and the waterfront drive could have been a destination. From there we headed towards Tillsonburg where we expected to see tobacco plants. It wasn’t until we got to Delhi that a few fields of tobacco showed up. The main crops were corn and what we think might have been beans. It was a beautiful rural drive. Our second problem with a round-about took us on a road under the Welland Canal – again something we can say we did (although it is like going through Vancouver’s George Massey Tunnel).

Many of the towns we passed through had quilt shops and I saw a needlework shop. I would have liked to stop at every one of them, but we took over four hours for what could have been a two-hour drive and I was really enjoying the country. I saw the sign for Mary Maxim as we drove past the Paris exit but, again, there was no need to stop as I’d already made my yarn purchase

The town of Niagara Falls was a real disappointment. On the drive in the first places we saw were Gentlemen’s Clubs and stripper bars. The next oddity I noticed was a sign for funeral home parking – in an alley between a comic book store and The G-String store (I never actually saw the funeral home). But wait, it got worse. We rounded a corner to go down the hill to the Falls and were bombarded with ugliness – Ripley’s Believe It or Not, a huge likeness of King Kong, the Guinness World Record Museum – and those are just a few of them!

Fortunately The Falls themselves were unspoiled and spectacular. This is the point where I would have liked to insert a photo but I left the camera attachment at home so I can’t download my photos. We didn’t spent too much time at the falls as the only thing that didn’t feel like a huge tourist/money trap were the falls themselves.

Our return trip took us through some lovely wine growing estates and Niagara-on-the-Lake. There were several tasting rooms but we didn’t stop to indulge. We drove around Niagara-on-the-Lake but it was wall to wall people; we found a parking spot very close to the edge of Lake Ontario for a few minutes.

For the first part of our day we were using a map Pat saved to his iPad photos. When that wasn’t working so well for us we switched to his iPhone. When the iPhone ran out of batteries we had to dig out the paper map. There were a few moments along the way where we weren’t exactly sure we were on track (and a few times when we weren’t and had to turn around and backtrack) because I’m not a very good navigator or map reader no matter the medium.

We went to Gene’s Restaurant for dinner – not exactly where you would expect to find Szechuan Chinese food. We had to wait a long time for our food (and the service was terrible) but it was worth the wait. We’ve ended up at what is turning out to be our favorite coffee shop (with free Wi-Fi).