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reileenThe 12+ hour roadtrip to and from the Falls:
Even though my dad took what he called "the shorter route" and went through NW Indiana and Michigan to get at the Canadian border, it still took us the better part of the day to arrive at the Falls. We left on Friday morning at around 6:00am and didn't get there until about 6:00pm or 7:00pm. It was even worse on the way back because we didn't actually start for home until maybe 3:00pm or so. Daddykins got so tired that he had to pull over at a rest stop for a bit and nap for an hour. The rest of the family (minus my hyperactive little sister) took this as a sign to get some shuteye too. Because of the way people and things were arranged in the van, I ended up sleeping on the floor between the front and middle seats. That was fun, like getting to emulate the lifestyle of a drifter or a vagabond who has enough money for gas for her car but not nearly enough money to spend on even a cheap motel, so she has to sleep in her car. Although I'm pretty sure said drifter/vagabond would have been traveling alone, so she'd be sleeping on the seats instead of the floor.
The cheap-ass Admiral Inn motel:
Is "cheap-ass motel" a redundant phrase? It probably is.
All the affordable nice hotels were booked for this weekend, so we ended up at the Admiral Inn, which was about one of the most depressing places I ever stayed at. First off, the parking was so cramped that it would make the Chokey from Roald Dahl's Matilda look absolutely spacious. And then the room that we got was a special sort of shittastic. There were the requisite vomited floral print curtains and bedspreads, staple of any temporary lodging. The floor didn't even look like it had been vacuumed before we walked in. Two of the windows (one in the bathroom and one in one of the bedrooms) wouldn't even lock, which was bad because we were on the freakin' first floor. Management managed to get a piece of wood that we could put on the inside to prevent the window from being slid open from the outside. Also, the lamp in my room was missing a bulb, and then when we got one in, the lamp still wouldn't work, until we determined that the outlet we'd plugged it into was shot. And then we were trying to figure out why the wall lights in my parents' room wouldn't work when we flipped the switch, until we determined that the bulbs just hadn't been screwed in tightly enough.
Then there was that Mountain-Dew-can-green mold colony flourishing inside a hollow in the clear plexiglass sink faucet handle...
The shitfast buffet on Saturday morning:
For foodstuffs on Saturday morning, we decided to check out this all-you-can-eat buffet place (Mommykins, for some reason, was very insistent on eating at buffet places - I tried to get the family to try Tim Horton's like![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dantaron told me to, but alas). Looking at the interior of the place was like someone had taken a moderately priced Italian restaurant and fused it with a school cafeteria, and the food basically tasted like it came from the dusty posterior of said school cafeteria. I knew things were going to be bad when the iced tea I got was way too sweet - I had to swirl the ice in it to water it down a bit. The pancakes were tough like pleather and didn't taste like anything; the peaches were sour; the muffin's crap taste could not be captured in words.
Readers, if you fear for your lives, I must advise you to avoid the Breakfast Buffet near the Admiral Inn that's paired with a Bocelli's restaurant.
The Skylon Tower:
We were tired and cranky, and yet my dad still dragged us out to the Skylon Tower to get a view of the Falls at night. Before we went up to the skydeck, we saw this super-cheesy 3D/4D movie about the creation of the Falls, which involved a modern-day woman with Native American heritage being summoned by her ancestors to restore the Magickal Sparkly Rainbow of Nature's Goodness or something by collecting samples of the three elements involved in creating the Falls and offering them up to the spirits of the land. There was bad acting, tacky 3D effects, and an entirely too dramatic orchestral score. Hey, don't look at me, I was just watching the film, aight?
The view from the skydeck was cool. The air from the skydeck, however, was fucking cold.
The tower itself:
Pictures of the view at night (which unfortunately could not capture how cool the Falls looked with the night lighting):
Dinner was at this really nice Italian place located inside the general area of the Casino Niagara building (...I think?). It was incredibly posh. This is a picture of a fountain from one of the hubs.
On Saturday, we returned to the Skylon Tower for a daytime view of the Falls.
Bridge to the American side of things, plus a view of the American Falls:
The Horseshoe Falls:
And other miscellaneous pictures:
The Falls themselves, of course:
We walked along the boardwalk that bordered the Falls, and I taked moar picamatures, thankful for the good weather (which was not meant to last).
The building on the right side of the picture is, I think, a power plant that converts Niagara's waters into hydroelectric power:
And then here's a picture of part of Niagara's skyline:
Check out the mist rising from the Falls:
OOH, BIRDIES:
The Maid of the Mist boat tour:
This tour took you right near the base of the Falls, inside the mist. Needless to say, even with the disposable rain poncho they give you, you got immensely soaked. It was windy too, so I couldn't adjust the hood over my head comfortably - it kept on blocking my view of the Falls. So I gave up on the hood and let my head get drenched. It was refreshing, though.
Looking up at the Falls:
And then some other pictures taken from inside the mist:
As cool as it was to get up right near the Falls, though, I'm still having problems envisioning why and how this became such a tourist hotspot. (Though this may be just me being insufferably cynical and bad-tempered lately.) I suppose it has something to do with the fact that this is probably one of the oldest North American tourist attractions, so it's had a long history and it's become quintessential to the experience of the continent, or something. I think Niagara Falls is one of those things where you really have to make your own fun, with the people around you. I probably would've had a lot more fun going with friends, since I'm really not very close with my family.Although if I went roadtripping to Niagara with friends, we probably wouldn't survive the driving.
The Cesspit of Tourism, a.k.a. the Clifton Hill area:
No pictures here, sorry - I was getting kind of lazy and cranky by this point. But we visited the Ripley's Believe It or Not museum, which was really awesomecool and featured quite the assortment of "Are you fucking kidding me?"-inducing oddities, like the dress made entirely out of Starburst wrappers, and the chair once owned by one of the tallest men (he was 8'8" - there was another one taller than him who was 8'11.5", whoah), and the funeral wreath made from the locks of deceased relatives' hair, among other cool things. Dinner was a Chinese restaurant called Star Dragon, which was decent enough.
The overpriced waterpark, with an added guest:
On Sunday morning, after signing out of our hotel, we went to frolic in an indoor waterpark. The fee was $55 per person, holy shit. Then again, it was a pretty nice waterpark...located on the top of a hotel parking structure...
It was at this time that Miss Flo decided to drop by for a visit. I've always had a very irregular period, sometimes skipping months at a time, so I can never figure out when it's "SURPRIZE CROTCHBLEEDING!" tiemz pour moi. At any rate, I was very disconcerted upon seeing Miss Flo's distinctively crimson mug, because I hadn't been swimming in ages, and now here my period had showed up to mess with things, but like hell I was sitting this one out.
So I stole two quarters (one American, one Canadian) to feed into the feminine essentials machine in the bathroom, looking for a tampon.
The machine munched on both of the quarters and burped out only air.
I trotted to the front desk and tried, as unobstrusively as possible, to ask for a tampon. I got one and trotted back to the bathroom...
...only to find out that the attendant had given me an empty tube.
Bzuh?
I thought maybe that the tampon had dropped out while I was walking back to the changing room, but a quick re-tracing of my route proved that this wasn't the case. So I had to ask for yet another tampon. This time, I was met with success.
But success was not to be mine for long, because I couldn't get the damn tampon in. I rarely use tampons, but I'd managed to insert one before, so I thought I could figure something out this time around. I mean, it's not fucking rocket science, for the love of Mihaele! You're supposed to just shove it up there, right?which sounds like some guys' philosophy on sex
I think I ended up only getting it in halfway. Worst. Experience. Ever. That fucker hurt. I tried to just ride it out (lolz) and hope that I would just get used to it in time, but I really, really couldn't. I ended up taking out the tampon and instead plugging things up with wadded-up toilet paper that I changed every so often. Urggghhhh. Thank the Gods it wasn't a heavy flow today...
The best part of the vacation was...:
The maple shortbread cookies I got from one of the souvenir shops, duh! [/Yako Katsuragi impression]
All in all, it could've been better...but I suppose it could've been worse.
-Reileen
you left me tattered and torn, just like that sweet Spanish doll
Even though my dad took what he called "the shorter route" and went through NW Indiana and Michigan to get at the Canadian border, it still took us the better part of the day to arrive at the Falls. We left on Friday morning at around 6:00am and didn't get there until about 6:00pm or 7:00pm. It was even worse on the way back because we didn't actually start for home until maybe 3:00pm or so. Daddykins got so tired that he had to pull over at a rest stop for a bit and nap for an hour. The rest of the family (minus my hyperactive little sister) took this as a sign to get some shuteye too. Because of the way people and things were arranged in the van, I ended up sleeping on the floor between the front and middle seats. That was fun, like getting to emulate the lifestyle of a drifter or a vagabond who has enough money for gas for her car but not nearly enough money to spend on even a cheap motel, so she has to sleep in her car. Although I'm pretty sure said drifter/vagabond would have been traveling alone, so she'd be sleeping on the seats instead of the floor.
The cheap-ass Admiral Inn motel:
Is "cheap-ass motel" a redundant phrase? It probably is.
All the affordable nice hotels were booked for this weekend, so we ended up at the Admiral Inn, which was about one of the most depressing places I ever stayed at. First off, the parking was so cramped that it would make the Chokey from Roald Dahl's Matilda look absolutely spacious. And then the room that we got was a special sort of shittastic. There were the requisite vomited floral print curtains and bedspreads, staple of any temporary lodging. The floor didn't even look like it had been vacuumed before we walked in. Two of the windows (one in the bathroom and one in one of the bedrooms) wouldn't even lock, which was bad because we were on the freakin' first floor. Management managed to get a piece of wood that we could put on the inside to prevent the window from being slid open from the outside. Also, the lamp in my room was missing a bulb, and then when we got one in, the lamp still wouldn't work, until we determined that the outlet we'd plugged it into was shot. And then we were trying to figure out why the wall lights in my parents' room wouldn't work when we flipped the switch, until we determined that the bulbs just hadn't been screwed in tightly enough.
Then there was that Mountain-Dew-can-green mold colony flourishing inside a hollow in the clear plexiglass sink faucet handle...
The shitfast buffet on Saturday morning:
For foodstuffs on Saturday morning, we decided to check out this all-you-can-eat buffet place (Mommykins, for some reason, was very insistent on eating at buffet places - I tried to get the family to try Tim Horton's like
dantaron told me to, but alas). Looking at the interior of the place was like someone had taken a moderately priced Italian restaurant and fused it with a school cafeteria, and the food basically tasted like it came from the dusty posterior of said school cafeteria. I knew things were going to be bad when the iced tea I got was way too sweet - I had to swirl the ice in it to water it down a bit. The pancakes were tough like pleather and didn't taste like anything; the peaches were sour; the muffin's crap taste could not be captured in words.Readers, if you fear for your lives, I must advise you to avoid the Breakfast Buffet near the Admiral Inn that's paired with a Bocelli's restaurant.
The Skylon Tower:
We were tired and cranky, and yet my dad still dragged us out to the Skylon Tower to get a view of the Falls at night. Before we went up to the skydeck, we saw this super-cheesy 3D/4D movie about the creation of the Falls, which involved a modern-day woman with Native American heritage being summoned by her ancestors to restore the Magickal Sparkly Rainbow of Nature's Goodness or something by collecting samples of the three elements involved in creating the Falls and offering them up to the spirits of the land. There was bad acting, tacky 3D effects, and an entirely too dramatic orchestral score. Hey, don't look at me, I was just watching the film, aight?
The view from the skydeck was cool. The air from the skydeck, however, was fucking cold.
The tower itself:
Pictures of the view at night (which unfortunately could not capture how cool the Falls looked with the night lighting):
Dinner was at this really nice Italian place located inside the general area of the Casino Niagara building (...I think?). It was incredibly posh. This is a picture of a fountain from one of the hubs.
On Saturday, we returned to the Skylon Tower for a daytime view of the Falls.
Bridge to the American side of things, plus a view of the American Falls:
The Horseshoe Falls:
And other miscellaneous pictures:
The Falls themselves, of course:
We walked along the boardwalk that bordered the Falls, and I taked moar picamatures, thankful for the good weather (which was not meant to last).
The building on the right side of the picture is, I think, a power plant that converts Niagara's waters into hydroelectric power:
And then here's a picture of part of Niagara's skyline:
Check out the mist rising from the Falls:
OOH, BIRDIES:
The Maid of the Mist boat tour:
This tour took you right near the base of the Falls, inside the mist. Needless to say, even with the disposable rain poncho they give you, you got immensely soaked. It was windy too, so I couldn't adjust the hood over my head comfortably - it kept on blocking my view of the Falls. So I gave up on the hood and let my head get drenched. It was refreshing, though.
Looking up at the Falls:
And then some other pictures taken from inside the mist:
As cool as it was to get up right near the Falls, though, I'm still having problems envisioning why and how this became such a tourist hotspot. (Though this may be just me being insufferably cynical and bad-tempered lately.) I suppose it has something to do with the fact that this is probably one of the oldest North American tourist attractions, so it's had a long history and it's become quintessential to the experience of the continent, or something. I think Niagara Falls is one of those things where you really have to make your own fun, with the people around you. I probably would've had a lot more fun going with friends, since I'm really not very close with my family.
The Cesspit of Tourism, a.k.a. the Clifton Hill area:
No pictures here, sorry - I was getting kind of lazy and cranky by this point. But we visited the Ripley's Believe It or Not museum, which was really awesomecool and featured quite the assortment of "Are you fucking kidding me?"-inducing oddities, like the dress made entirely out of Starburst wrappers, and the chair once owned by one of the tallest men (he was 8'8" - there was another one taller than him who was 8'11.5", whoah), and the funeral wreath made from the locks of deceased relatives' hair, among other cool things. Dinner was a Chinese restaurant called Star Dragon, which was decent enough.
The overpriced waterpark, with an added guest:
On Sunday morning, after signing out of our hotel, we went to frolic in an indoor waterpark. The fee was $55 per person, holy shit. Then again, it was a pretty nice waterpark...located on the top of a hotel parking structure...
It was at this time that Miss Flo decided to drop by for a visit. I've always had a very irregular period, sometimes skipping months at a time, so I can never figure out when it's "SURPRIZE CROTCHBLEEDING!" tiemz pour moi. At any rate, I was very disconcerted upon seeing Miss Flo's distinctively crimson mug, because I hadn't been swimming in ages, and now here my period had showed up to mess with things, but like hell I was sitting this one out.
So I stole two quarters (one American, one Canadian) to feed into the feminine essentials machine in the bathroom, looking for a tampon.
The machine munched on both of the quarters and burped out only air.
I trotted to the front desk and tried, as unobstrusively as possible, to ask for a tampon. I got one and trotted back to the bathroom...
...only to find out that the attendant had given me an empty tube.
Bzuh?
I thought maybe that the tampon had dropped out while I was walking back to the changing room, but a quick re-tracing of my route proved that this wasn't the case. So I had to ask for yet another tampon. This time, I was met with success.
But success was not to be mine for long, because I couldn't get the damn tampon in. I rarely use tampons, but I'd managed to insert one before, so I thought I could figure something out this time around. I mean, it's not fucking rocket science, for the love of Mihaele! You're supposed to just shove it up there, right?
I think I ended up only getting it in halfway. Worst. Experience. Ever. That fucker hurt. I tried to just ride it out (lolz) and hope that I would just get used to it in time, but I really, really couldn't. I ended up taking out the tampon and instead plugging things up with wadded-up toilet paper that I changed every so often. Urggghhhh. Thank the Gods it wasn't a heavy flow today...
The best part of the vacation was...:
The maple shortbread cookies I got from one of the souvenir shops, duh! [/Yako Katsuragi impression]
All in all, it could've been better...but I suppose it could've been worse.
-Reileen
you left me tattered and torn, just like that sweet Spanish doll
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-13 06:56 am (UTC)THANK YOU. I have been to Niagara Falls and it was the SUCK. Longass drive. Check. Crappy hotel. Nice hotel, but sort of small. And full of stuff. my mom famously tripped over a plate of french fries and ketchup in the hall. She went flying and got splattered with ketchup. The whole family ABANDONED her to an angry maid who spoke very little English. It was wonderful.
The American side of Niagara was boring as hell and full of cheap, boring old tacky giftshops. There was no one there. It was like a ghost town. The Canadian side was busy, but loud and tacky as hell. We stayed for all of an hour. I got carsick on the way home. It was fun. Like yours.
Now, it is high time we meet for orgies!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-13 04:35 pm (UTC)LOL! Have at it - credit me by name. I might as well own up to my woes.
The Canadian side was busy, but loud and tacky as hell.
Tacky! That's the word I was looking for. I remember driving around Clifton Hill and going: "Well, it's nice that it's lively here and all, but something still unsettles me about this place..." And nice to know we didn't miss anything on the American side.