The Niagara region is a beautiful area with its wineries, vineyards, and gently rolling hills. There are many creeks that meander through this fecund landscape, and hotels and restaurants (such as the Inn on the Twenty) can be found in abundance. One of the jewels in the crown of the Niagara region is a small village called Jordan, home to the inn above. It’s a gorgeous area, smack dab in the middle of wine country and not far from the well known Cave Springs winery. Niagara-on-the-Lake is a bigger, more commercial town, which still manages to maintain a sleepy, peaceful feel, with lots of bike paths and walkways following the shoreline of Lake Ontario and the Niagara River.
If you were to follow the Niagara River upstream, you’d soon arrive at the world famous Niagara Falls, which is now home to a number of casinos, hotels and tacky motels. The town of Niagara Falls is completely geared towards tourism and is nothing like some of the more prestigious destinations in this region. With the United States on one side of the river and Canada on the other, the hotels and casinos stand like sentinals on both sides of the Falls, staring across the water at their counterparts on the opposing shores.
The Falls themselves are impressive at any time of the year. The volume of water tumbling over the falls is truly staggering, yet hardly surprising when one considers the fact that this is actually an overspill from one Great Lake into another (Lake Erie into Lake Ontario).
This is where we found ourselves yesterday, after driving the two hours or so from Toronto. It was one of the destinations Robert and Liz (my nephew and his girlfriend) had requested we make on their visit from the U.K. Of course, once here, we just had to take a ride on the Maid of the Mist boats that travel to and from (and into) the spray from the waterfalls. It’s one of the major tourist attractions when visiting this natural wonder of the world. That, and a journey into the tunnels beneath the falls, which open out onto the sheet of water and awesome volume pouring out from above!
We only spent a few hours here and drove back to Toronto later that evening. The trip was a huge success as far as Robert and Liz were concerned, however, and they both seemed suitably impressed with the natural wonder of the Falls, if not the tackiness of the town itself.
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I was born in England, spent
Read a nice little biddy about the falls in Sam Moffie’s newest novel No Mad. Thelast chapter surely plays up the falls like your blog article does.