Day 5 - Niagara Falls

The combination of rubber mattresses and my own sleeping mat helped a good night’s sleep and I was up with the larks.  In fact, I’ve been I’ve been up and about by 6.30 every morning so far.  Perhaps going to bed early helps!  Four of us are experienced campers so breakfast and breaking camp was completed with little fuss and we were soon on our way to Niagara Falls, a journey completed soon after lunch, so we were all set up at a “Camps of America” (KOA) site at Grand Island, Niagara by early afternoon.  Before we left, we found time for the short walk to the Taughannock Falls which are actually higher than Niagara, although nowhere near as vast.  The river had cut a classic gorge through alternate layers of limestone and shale and, with water levels low we walked up the valley on the upper surface of a limestone layer, disturbing a heron and a bright yellow bird on the way.

With temperatures heading into the low thirties we set off for our first look at the falls.  Even though I thought I knew what to expect the scale of the spectacle was truly impressive and the sheer volume of water (100,000 gallons/sec) hard to register.  Photos were taken from every vantage point before a trip on the “Maid of the Mist” which advanced into the spray from the Horseshoe Falls.  Awesome, as they say.  I climbed up to the Crow’s Nest for a view of the American Falls close up before retreating, saturated, to the observation platform and a few final photos.

Back at camp I’d drawn the first cooking detail so my pasta staple dish got its first outing and seemed well received.  This might have been politeness but Rick managed two portions  so it can’t have been too bad.  Lindy is allergic to pork so I left the bacon out until the end and made hers separately.  Once fed we headed back to see the Falls all over again in the dark.  Another impressive spectacle and, strangely, I felt even more aware of the sheer power of the water.  Volumes were extremely high in the aftermath of the recent hurricane but I don’t think the flow rates would be much less without it.  The evening ended with a firework display so there were plenty of families out for the evening.  The area seems incredibly multi-ethnic and there were lots of Indian families, in particular.
Happy with the day’s events we headed back to the camp for a beer and bed.