St Catharines and Niagara Falls

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St Catharines
This almost fell apart at the last second due to Megabus Canada not accepting UK cards on their online payment system, with only 2 seats left on the bus and hours of trying (and failing) to book them we gave in for the night and waited until we could phone them at 7am. Fortunately the seats remained available and we booked them over breakfast, our trip to Niagara Falls was on!

 Our stay in St Catharines was a room in a suburban house on a quiet and idyllic road in a peaceful neighbourhood. We received a warm welcome from our host, Vicki and then quickly set out on a quest for food.

 We'd both heard about Wendy's before our visit to Canada and had been looking forward to one, luck was on our side as there was one down the road :)
Tasty burgers!!!
After gorging on fast-food we returned to our AirBnB and spent a good chunk of the evening chatting with Vicki, putting the world to rights about our respective countries, governments, societies and lots of talk about healthy eating (which Wendy's certainly wasn't!). 

Sidenote:

Our mascot Snapper also made a friend at Vicki's house;

Snapper (left) with new friends


We were made very welcome by Vicki and David and wish that we could have spent longer with them in St Catharines. To top off Vicki's great hospitality she gave us a lift to the bus station in the morning to catch our bus back to Niagara Falls which saved a trip on the bus and battling morning commuters.

 Niagara Falls

 The bus dropped us in the town of Niagara and we opted to walk to the falls instead of catch the bus (a kind sole at the station gave us free bus passes as they had finished with them, we used these for the way back to station later on), the walk along the river slowly unveiled the falls to us, first the American Falls and then the famous Horseshoe Falls


Looking upstream on our approach

A teasing glimpse through the trees

The Maid of the Mist below the American Falls

The Maid of the Mist runs from the US side, the Canadian equivalent (Hornblower) wasn't running until the day after our visit :(

Snapper on his sightseeing tour

It became obvious where the name comes from

Stood at the top of the falls (Mike nearly lost his sunglasses...again)

Further downstream (windy!)

 The wind had increased throughout our time at the falls and turned out to be the start of worse to come. We headed back to Toronto on the bus and were warned by the driver about high winds on the highway, a truck had already been blown off the road so it was slow going the entire way...

Next post: Toronto Part 2 (Extended Edition)



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