New York Trip Part Three - Niagara Falls!

I'm sorry I've been so slow at finishing up the posts about our NY trip! I really want to do them justice, so it takes me a long time to write each one.

After a wonderful (albeit sleepy) session at the Palmyra temple on Saturday morning, followed by lunch and a much needed nap at the hotel, we decided to go to Niagara Falls.


(James with Grandma at lunch that day.)

I don't know why, but I wasn't all that excited to go there. I guess with all the hype about it, I figured it was just going to be touristy and unimpressive. I was not expecting such a beautiful park or such incredible waterfalls! I highly recommend going there sometime, if you ever have the chance.


There's a big statue of Nicola Tesla at the entrance to the park. Unfortunately, I wasn't smart enough to read the plaque and figure out why there's a statue of Nicola Tesla there. Oh well. ;) Nevertheless, it's a common pastime for people to climb up onto his lap and take pictures even though there's a sign next to the statue telling you not to do that very thing.

Grace wanted to reenact a photo that was taken of her while she was on her mission sitting in Tesla's lap, but she found it harder to do than she remembered:


It's ok, though, Jonathan made the climb instead. :)


James sure loves his Uncle Jonathan! I know I've said it before, but it's true. I just hope Jonathan doesn't use his influence on James for evil purposes...specifically shenanigans that are against the rules such as those represented in the previous picture. ;)


We had heard that it was more beautiful from the Canadian side, but since not all of us had passports and we didn't want Jonathan and Kristina to get stuck in Canada, we stayed on American soil. ;) The view from our side of the river was still breathtaking:



As you can see from that last picture, the sky suddenly turned stormy as we started walking to the other side of the park. The wind was blowing pretty hard, and before we knew it, we were caught in a downpour!


We eventually made it to the other side of the park and took refuge under an awning until the storm blew over.


James did get a bit freaked out by the storm, but as always, he was a trooper!

It definitely didn't matter that we didn't go to the Canadian side in the end, because we got to ride the Maid of the Mist right up to the falls themselves! Also, we didn't even end up having to wait in line, because everyone had cleared out during the storm.


Here we are aboard the Maid of the Mist! They even had child-size ponchos for James. :)


Funny story about those blue ponchos: We thought that they were going to charge money to get them before we got on the boat. After all, they charged money for pretty much everything else! Since it was already so expensive to buy the tickets in the first place, we figured we'd save money and ask people for their ponchos when they were about to throw them away. It was tricky, but we eventually acquired ponchos for all ten of us before heading down to the docking area...only to find a man passing out nice new ponchos to each passenger as they got on the boat--free of charge. ;)

Here are a couple more pictures I took of the beautiful waterfalls (as you can see, it cleared up beautifully after the storm!):


The big cloud coming up on the right side of both of these pictures is the mist from the big waterfall. It's always there. It's so amazing!


Like I said, I'm so glad we decided to go to Niagara Falls. It was worth being soaked the rest of the day (although I felt really bad for Baba...she couldn't remember why she was soaking wet, and she was so very cold :( ).

We ate a delicious (and warm!) dinner at The Cracker Barrel, and had a relatively early night! Well, ok, we were at least in bed by midnight or shortly thereafter. ;)

As per usual, here's a link to our complete photo album: Niagara Falls.

I think I'll clump the rest of the trip into one more post. Stay tuned!