One and a half hours from Toronto — only an hour and a half! — is one of the world’s greatest natural wonders and maybe my favourite vacation spot of all time. And I haven’t been there since I was a kid. I have spent an hour and a half (and much more) taking public transit to the outer burbs or walking to the beach or waiting for a cab on New Year’s Eve. Now that I own a car, though, the Falls is just a hop, skip and jump away. I love it!
You have the actual falls. There’s two of them — the Canadian Horseshoe Falls and the American Falls — in all their magnificent glory. They are actually quite breathtaking and when you stand right up next to them, awash in the perennial Niagara mist, and hear the roar of the falls and feel the power of those cascading walls of water,
there’s nothing like it. So you should definitely check those out.
Then make haste to the old strip where all the glitz and cheese of the past hundred years is still going strong. Where else can you walk along a city street and take your pick of horror houses, and fun houses, and 4D movies? The Falls is famous for their wax museums, too, from Louis Tussaud’s, to Ripley’s and the Guiness Record’s, to Movieland. There’s minigolf and carnival rides and arcades, too. Add a touch of the old lore of people going over the Falls in a barrel and the famous tight-rope walks over those great falls and there really is a special kind of magic just being there.
Oh yeah, there’s also casinos and all manner of overnight accommodations. But this is a family blog, so I won’t dwell on the huge gambling institutions that have sprung up since my childhood. Suffice it to say, I have mixed feelings where my desire to keep the history and mythgology of the falls alive and intact rubs against my attraction to a good casino. We made a day trip to the Falls on Tuesday and it was cold and rainy and we didn’t stay long and it was the most fun any of us have had for a long time.