Canada

We heard that the Canadian side of the Falls had a much better view than the American, so we decided to go straight there instead of stopping on both sides to save a little time. When crossing the border, the border patrol guy asked us what we had with us because it looked like we had all of our lives possessions. Really? Granted the car is really packed, you have to be a little cautious when opening the back to make sure nothing falls out. 

Anyways he let us through and we were on our way to Niagara Falls. We forgot that Canada uses the metric system, so it took us a minute to figure out how fast 50 km per hour was or how far 18 km were. After we parked and got out of the car we started getting hit by the mist in the parking lot. And we weren't even to the Falls yet. Once we made it over to the Falls area we were taken aback by how massive it is. Niagara Falls was AMAZING, to say the least, definitely the best waterfall we've seen so far! So huge!

There was so much mist and a ton of people everywhere! We walked along the railing for a while, capturing photos and taking in the view. We watched as the boats took people out right to the bottom of the waterfall, I'm sure they got soaked despite the ponchos. From where we were you could actually see both the American Falls and Niagara Falls. 

Since it was Sunday there was going to be fireworks over the Falls that night, so we were waiting around to see that and trying to find out if the Spurs won the championship. :-) At about 9 o'clock they turned on the lights, which was pretty cool. Jacob spent some time taking long exposure photos. Which means you have to stand super still for what seems like forever, in reality it's only 10 seconds. 

Eventually 10 o'clock came and the fireworks started. It was pretty impressive, even though it only lasted about 6 minutes there were so many bursts with so many colors. The sound was amplified as it was echoing throughout the area. Once it was over we took a couple more photos as most of the people cleared out then we left. 

The next morning we walked back, there were far less people than the previous night. We didn't have too long before we needed to go back and check out of the hotel. Once we got packed up we started driving towards the 10,000 Island National Park. We came to a ferry and took that across to Howe Island, we drove for a little bit, further down the road than what our directions told us but we didn't see one sign or anything about the 10,000 islands. So we kept going and came to another ferry. We asked that guy where the Park was and he told us it was back on the mainland. So we got on that ferry, and when we were already partly across we realized that we were taking this ferry back to where we started. Our phones did not have service in Canada so we had pulled up the directions with wifi at the hotel. So we couldn't look anything up or change the route. We do have an atlas with Canada but the park wasn't on the map. Once we got back to the first ferry we decided we'd try again, we thought maybe we needed to turn off the main road on the island sooner. The ferry guy asked us if we really like riding the ferry or what... Jacob told him we were trying to go to 10,000 Islands. He says, "Oh that's about 10 miles that way in the next town over." Because we were already on the ferry, we rode over then got off turned around and came right back. 

We went to the town in search of the park and still had a hard time finding it. You would think with a 1,000 Islands we would be able to find it. By the time we found the visitor center it was closed, so we headed back towards the USA. 

Next Stop: Grafton Notch State Park, ME

-Sarah

Here's a couple more photos from Canada: