Rachel and I each took well over a hundred pictures of the falls and the surrounding area, so I'm not going to share all of them here. I will be uploading a photo album to facebook eventually which will contain photos taken by each of us. All of the pictures in this post were taken by me using my phone. Click on any image to see it at full resolution.
We started out pretty early on Saturday morning by taking a taxi to the train station and then an Amtrak train down to Penn Station in New York. That part was about 2 hours and we've done it before, so it was a little humdrum. After leaving the train and getting on a packed escalator, I suddenly realized that I didn't have my wallet, which meant that I had left it on the train which was going to depart in a few minutes.
As soon as I got to the top of the escalator, I found an escalator down to the platform, told the employee who was checking tickets before sending people down what was happening, and she let me go down. I searched near the area where I thought we had been sitting and found nothing. I returned to the up escalator just in time for it to turn into a down escalator. I found another way back upstairs.
We made a quick search to make sure I hadn't shoved it in my backpack somewhere. I hadn't. There was now someone manning the escalator we had originally come up, so I told her I needed to go check for my wallet again. She gave me more of a hassle than the other had, but eventually let me go down so I could check the route we followed off the car. No dice.
When I got off the train again, I spotted a couple of conductors and told them I'd lost my wallet on that train and asked if there was any way to find out if someone had found it before the train departed. One of the conductors returned to the car with me one more time, and while I crawled on the floor and looked, he announced to the passengers that I had lost my wallet. Someone found it at that point, because the next thing I knew, the conductor was tossing it to me. That was a huge relief; I might not have enjoyed any part of the trip if I hadn't been able to find my wallet.
But the fun wasn't quite over. As the conductor and I went to exit the train, we found that the doors were already closed, meaning that the train was going to start moving at any moment. He grabbed his radio and told the train not to leave while he got the door open and we stepped out. I was nearly on my way south a bit further than I wanted to be. Thank goodness it hadn't taken any longer to find my wallet.
The rest of the trip to Niagara Falls was pretty uneventful. It included a 9 1/2 hour train ride, so it was also pretty boring. We arrived in Niagara Falls, NY at about 10:30, or 15 minutes early. Luckily, I had been able to call the cab that was supposed to pick us up and he was waiting for us as we got off the train. We stayed on the Canadian side of the river, so he had to take us across the border. We were amazed at how long the lines to cross the border were at 11:00 on a Saturday night in mid-March (and freezing temperatures). While we were on the bridge, Rachel spotted a colorful glow off the the left. We guessed (correctly) that it was the spray of the Canadian falls reflecting the colored lights that they shine on the falls until midnight. That was sort of our first view of the falls.
Our real first view of the falls was from our hotel room. Well, "room" is a bit of a misnomer; the hotel was pretty empty, so they upgraded us to the "Junior Presidential Suite". I didn't take any pictures of the suite and now I wish I had. I assumed that the hotel's web site would have some good pictures of it, so I could just link to that. Unfortunately, the picture they have labeled "Junior Presidential Suite" is very clearly not of the suite we stayed in. The suite we stayed in had a kitchenette, a dining area, a separate living room, a bedroom, and a large bathroom with both a shower and a two-person hot tub. The view was incredible; it was night when we arrived, so the all three falls (yes, there are three that make up Niagara Falls, not just the two) were lit up with multicolored lights. Personally, I'd rather they just used white lights, but that's me. No pictures at that point because our camera doesn't do well with that kind of shot, but here's an image of what it looked like in the morning:
The steaming cauldron in the foreground is, of course, Horseshoe Falls, which is the part of Niagara Falls on the Canadian side of the river. On the left is American Falls. For those of you wondering about the third falls, it is in this picture right next to American Falls. If you look really closely, you can see that the very right-hand edge of that part of the falls is separated from the rest by a bit of rock. The bit on the very right-hand edge is Bridal Veil Falls, and is the third part of Niagara. This image is looking roughly southeast with Niagara Falls, NY in the background. For some reason, neither Rachel nor I realized that the river was flowing north at this point, so we both had pictured the falls going the other direction for our entire lives.
The package deal we got included being able to ride buses all day, but we were close enough to the falls that we decided to walk down. To get there, we first had to walk north a bit so that we were straight across from American and Bridal Veil Falls. Coming down the hill and seeing the falls through the trees, I was amazed at how close it was; it seemed much further away to me from the hotel. The picture below was taken just as we finished going down the hill. You can clearly see Bridal Veil Falls on the right.
Looking downstream, you see a lot of ice blocked up under Rainbow Bridge. The "ice bridge" used to be much larger (and extend all the way to the base of the falls). People would go out on the bridge to take in the view of the falls. On at least one occasion, the ice bridge suddenly broke up and people lost their lives. These days, they block the larger chunks of ice from entering the Niagara from Lake Erie.
At this point, we turned south along the river. It wasn't long before we got to see Horseshoe Falls.
I was enthralled with the falls itself. Pictures do not do justice to the flow of water and amount of power those falls represent. And we were there in March, which meant that the flow we saw could be as low as half of what is flowing over the falls during tourist season! While I was staring at the falls, Rachel spotted odd lily pad-like bits of ice in the water. I guess they get rounded by their trip over the falls.
As we walked closer to the falls, we spotted a viewing platform very close to the falls themselves. We figured it was closed for the season, but as it turned out, we got to go down there ourselves before the day was over.
Being there in subfreezing temperatures (the predicted high for the day was 30° F) gave us an opportunity to see things that most visitors to the falls never do. The rock below is entirely encased in ice from the spray to a depth of up to an inch in places.
Of course, there were also interesting ice formations near the falls.
And man-made structures are frequently completely coated in ice, too. The railing that Rachel is leaning on here got coated with more ice as you moved closer to the falls. Right above the brink of the falls, one of the railings was so icy that the blank spaces between the bars were completely filled in with ice!
No, I don't know who the guy is in the next picture, but he wouldn't move and I wanted to get the shot while the sun was still back lighting the ice.
The plants were even completely encased in the ice. The shot below is from almost at the lip of the falls. All that separates these plants from the water is the wall you can see.
After taking that shot, it wasn't long before we got to where the walkway practically overhangs the lip of the falls.
After being amazed by this view for a while, we realized that it was after noon and we were both very hungry. The second part of this post contains pictures taken during that very sunny afternoon, including some from the viewing platform shown in the sixth image above.
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