Day 5: On to Ontario

[thewhitelily]

Yesterday was a lazy day – we slept in, caught up on jetlag, read books, and caught up on internet/computer deprival on iviolinist’s unbelievably comfortable couches. If we ever actually purchase our own couches, rather than just stealing Hubby’s parents’ old ones, we now have a goal to aim towards. We also went along to iviolinist's church, which was fascinating being our first experience of a catholic service. We finished up the day by going to see Prince Caspian, which was lots of fun, particularly since I’d almost entirely forgotten the story and so wasn’t going “oh, they changed/left out/added this” the whole time.

It was very sad to say goodbye to iviolinist (and her couches!), who’s been a fantastic host, but it’s time to move onto the next legs of our trip. We set off at 8am to allow plenty of time for the border crossing into Canada and all the attractions therein – including an unprecedented opportunity to meet up with the most paranoid member of the Orion community: Gus.

Hubby was pretty stressed all morning about the idea of driving across a border – and personally, I have to agree with him – the whole idea is just unnatural. We’d been warned that since it was Memorial day in the USA, we might have to expect higher than usual queueing at the border, but this turned out to be no problem at all – there was only one moment of panic when the customs official asked us if we’d be visiting with anyone while in Canada and we weren’t sure whether “uh, sorry, I don’t know his address, uh... or his name... uh... his screen name’s Gus?” would be a sufficient answer. Fortunately I came up with “Yeah, visiting a friend in (Gus’s city)” and he didn’t ask any further questions. Phew!

We actually ended up waiting much longer about a hundred metres past the border when we wanted to change some money at the drive-through currency exchange – again, only one car in front of us – but this one was changing a serious amount of money. The monetary exchange capsule transferring money between the outside world and the hermetically sealed manned booth actually had to make two trips to give him back all the Canadian dollars!

So, we crossed into Canada around midday, and decided rather than heading up to Kettle Point and Pinery Park, as we’d hoped, we’d rather go to the Lonely Planet recommended archaeological museum, which has a dig of an Indian villiage on site. This was a pretty good decision, because the museum was excellent – everything from the traditional arrow-heads to necklaces made from fish vertebra to the partial jawbone from a mastodon, which has seriously scary teeth! And we still had time on the way there to enjoy a few of Canada’s lesser highways, travelling along parallel to the major highway we’d originally intended to be on.

It was after leaving there and almost at our arranged meeting place with Gus when disaster struck. The driving directions we’d printed for each point-to-point trip we had planned were all well and good, but failed to take the increase in city traffic due to school peak-hour into account, as well as some unpleasant roadworks and dodgy drivers in front of us. Nonetheless, we arrived at the arranged meeting place barely ten minutes late, only to find...
Mapquest lied to us! It hadn’t let us put in the name of the park we’d arranged to meet, so we put in the name of the street adjoining, received one result, and noticed that it looked roughly right. Unfortunately, there are at least two streets with that name, and we’d found ourselves in the other similarly named dead end street that ended in a park. Gaargh! A very helpful lady in the park gave us excellent directions back to the proper one, back through the roadworks, where we arrived just less than half an hour late to find...



Only the squirrels. (And a girl squirrel, at that, I suspect. :P ) We were too late, obviously, as Gus was nowhere to be found. (I've later found out that we missed each other by only a few minutes.)

We waited around for a while, snapping pictures of squirrels and flowers and enjoying the Brisbane-like weather Canada had turned on specially for us (only lacking the banana smoothies we were most unsuccessful in finding).

Ah well, apparently it was not meant to be. I left a miniature koala clipped to a park bench where we’d arranged to meet – whether it’ll be rained on or snaffled by someone else before Gus has a chance to have a look for it, I don’t know. Darnit! I was totally looking forward to photoshopping a picture to insert a cartoon penguin in place of Gus. :P

So, we moved on towards our next destination: Niagara Falls

Of course, I’ve taken oodles of photos, but... well, you can’t photograph Niagara Falls any more than you can photograph the Grand Canyon. The sense of scale and volume and awesomeness is just plain lost in the transition to pixels – besides, the places where you really want to take photographs are where the spray makes it difficult enough to see through a pair of glasses, let alone a camera lens.







One thing that did surprise us, though, was the tacky tourist nature of the town around the falls. Well, perhaps not surprise, but our first impression arriving at our hotel was that we’d taken a wrong turn and ended up in Las Vegas. Walking along towards the road down to the falls, we ended up going from balcony to balcony behind the casino trying to catch better glimpses of Horseshoe Falls, with the thunder of the falls practically drowned out by music piped from the rocks. The live band down at the falls heading into evening, on the other hand, played an eclectic collection from Elvis to Kiss which struck the perfect note of deliciously hokey and had everyone grinning, but perhaps that’s just the difference between live musicians and muzak. Then the spotlights turned onto the falls, lighting them up with various coloured stripes, and the fireworks... Talk about gilding the lily! :P



All in all a spectacular evening – tomorrow, Journey Behind the Falls and Maid of the Mist!