Day 2 – Niagara Falls – Dinner at CN Tower

This morning we woke to another fabulous day in Toronto.  After breakfast down in the hotel restaurant we hopped on our tour bus for the first time.

The tour group are pretty good, bronchitis patient however there are a few special people on board, disinfection and one in particular from New York who is getting on everyone’s nerves already.  She has already invited herself to stay with us in Australia, and again, we politely ignored her request.

The bus took us out of Toronto around the edge of Lake Ontario.  On the trip we passed through or past a number of interesting places.  The first was a town which is basically Canada’s equivalent of Newcastle – a big steel town which today looked like Beijing with all the smog.  Apparently the steel mill there is owned by an Australian company, I am guessing BHP.

On the way they played us a DVD about Hydro Power in Canada, and about how they built the hydro plants at the falls.  Was interesting to hear that during off peak tourist times (basically before 8am) they divert half of the flow of the falls off to be used for hydro power.

After about two hours on the road we arrived at the falls.  It was one of those moments were you have to pinch yourself to realise you are standing at the place that you have seen so many times in movies, tv shows, in the news etc etc.  We pulled up and took a heap of video and plenty of photos.  Unfortunately we STILL can’t share them with you because this is the second Internet cafe we have been to that has the computer locked up… which means I can’t plug my card reader in :(  .  As soon as we find one that can we will make sure we upload everything you have missed so far.

Anyways… Kerrina, fearing that her brand new shoes would get wet when we went down to the falls, ran into the souvenier shop and bought an emergency pair of thongs. 

After some more photo opportunties up the top of the Horseshoe Falls (the nice looking ones!) we walked down to the Maid of the Mist.  The Maid of the Mist is a company that runs those boats up the river to the base of the Horseshoe Falls that you see in all the photos.

After donning our blue rain poncho’s, and Paul figuring out the best way to hold the video camera without it getting wet (for the record, if you wear your poncho sideways you can push the camera out through one of the arm holes)… we got onto the boat for our quick trip up the river.

The first falls you go to are the American Falls.  Whilst impressive, they didn’t really get you wet.  There is a walkway on the US side of the river (forgot to mention that the river the Falls are on is the border between the US and Canada) that you can use to walk down to the very edge of the falls, and there would have been at least 200 people down there when we went past.

After the American Falls the boat goes a little further up river to the Horseshoe falls.  At first the Maid of the Mist lived up to its name.  Then as we got closer, it wasn’t really mist anymore, more like standing out in the middle of a severe Brisbane summer thunderstorm downpour (as Forrest Gump would say “big fat rain”).  It was so heavy you couldn’t actually see the top of the falls!

After about 5 minutes at the edge of the falls, the boat turned around and took us back to the landing.  After taking the poncho off we were both pretty dry which is a bonus, beacuse we were about the only people on the tour who didn’t bring a spare change of clothes.

Then we hopped on the bus back to Toronto.

Later that night we dressed up and had dinner at the top of what is currently and officiallythe tallest free standing structure in the world – the CN Tower (techncially the Burj Dubai is taller, but it has not been completed, nor the official height been declared, so we can still say we were on top of the world for one night).

It was just like any other tower revolving restaurant like you would see in Sydney or Auckland, just a little taller.

It also has a section of glass floor.  Because the CN Tower is right beside the Rogers Centre (where we watched the baseball the night before), we spent some time watching the Toronto Blue Jays play the Boston Red Sox from about 1000ft above the stadium.

We took the lift down the tower, then hopped on the bus back to the hotel for our last night in Toronto.