Niagara Falls

Saturday, October 5th.

We spent the morning today uploading the latest logs and photos to the webpage and getting stuff organized even better in the back of the van. At around noon we checked out of our campsite and, after stopping for lunch at Subway, headed towards Niagara Falls.

We'd decided to take the shortcut through Canada north of Lake Erie so since the falls are said to bet prettier from the Canadian side we decided to cross the border from the beginning and head towards the falls from that side. Crossing the border was pretty painless. The guy at the inspection booth looked through our passports and then asked us whether Denmark and The Netherlands were actually the same country. A lot of people get that confused for some reason; at least this guy came out and admitted it right away. We straightened that out for him, after which he wanted to know where Holland fit into the picture... :) That was pretty much the extent of the interrogation, though, so after Jens dropped into the customs office to have his passport stamped we were on our way.

A few miles down the road we pulled over for a view of the canyon dividing Canada and the US and the bridge we'd just crossed. We unloaded the couch and took several pictures with it. We goofed around quite a bit and managed to attract the attention of everyone around us :) A German came over and wanted to know if he could sit on the couch with us while his friend took a picture of it! We let him do that, of course. We didn't get a picture with him, though, since our camera was on the roof of the van at that time. We'd just taken an "aerial" shot where Dan placed the camera on the roof and jumped down and made it over to the couch just before the 10-second timer was up.

After that little photo session we drove on down the road towards the falls. The entire area surrounding the falls was crowded with people. We made to passes up and down the street before we found an open space in a parking lot. It was some distance from the falls, so we unloaded the couch and headed back down the road. Seeing a plush green couch being wheeled down the sidewalk towards Niagara Falls obviously isn't really an everyday occurence and it provoked quite a few comments on the way. If we'd been more enterprising spirits we could have made a good buck or two along the way: a lot of people jokingly asked if we could shuttle them back to the parking lot or if we were simply there to let them have a rest on the couch. It also proved a popular picture-taking backdrop. We took quite a few pictures of ourselves and made it into quite a few other people's photo albums as well. Busloads upon busloads of people were being unloaded at the falls and we sort of had to run the gauntlet through the crowd to find a spot to take a picture. And once again we attracted quite a bit of attention. Several people aksed to photograph us on the couch and when we got up after taking a picture someone asked our permission to use the couch to take a picture of themselves. A small group of Japanese tourists that didn't seem to speak a word of English had fun taking pictures of each other on the couch. They never asked for or got an explanation why we were there with the couch, so we wonder what they must've thought. A couple of girls had us take their picture on the couch later on, and lots of people congratulated us on the idea and wished us good luck on our trip. And then there were the few people that didn't get it. When we explained to one guy that we were travelling across the country photographing it he said "oh you are, are you? Well, that's a good answer," as if he totally thought that we were making it all up :)

After we rolled that couch back to the van and got ready to head on we retraced our route to see how far we'd rolled the couch: 1.3 miles. A new record :)

So that concluded our visit to Niagara Falls. We'd made a lot of people wonder, made just as many smile and made our way into completely random people's photo albums. And, we'd seen the falls. And they were really quite impressive. The huge cloud of mist arising from the bottom of the falls and extending a hundred feet into the air was fascinating to behold. And the rainbow that emerged in that cloud was pretty cool to see too. Whether either of us would chose to go there on a honeymoon is a different question, but its popularity as a tourist destination is quite justified.

Leaving the falls we got on higway 3 and headed through southern Ontario towards Detroit, MI. After the beautiful rolling hills of upstate NY and the grandeur of the Niagara Falls it was quite a change of scenery to enter the flat farmcountry along higway 3. But it had it's own low-key charm in a way.

We drove on into the evening and around dinner time we finally spotted a place to have Mexican food. Actually, although it was a very local place it had quite an international feeling to it. It was called the Canadian Mexican Roadhouse, it was owned by a woman who spoke British English and all the locals in there appeared to be speaking something that sounded a lot like Dutch. So we added a bit of Danish to the melting pot just to make it complete. Despite the international atmosphere nobody in there had the slightest trace of Mexican blood in their bloodlines. But the burritos and enchiladas that we ordered were actually quite good.

We drove on all the way to Windsor, which lies directly across from Detroit. We decided to stay the night in Canada and scouted out a good parking lot to park in. The first one we found was in a quite nice little shopping centre, but consequently it was also staffed by security guards that weren't really big on us spending the night. So that was ruled out pretty quick. But further on we found another shopping centre with a nice big parking lot and we parked there and slept the night.