Niagara Falls

Niagara Falls was the first destination on our Cosmos Tour. There are 42 of us on the tour, and we were warned that the average age would be about 40 - but it's more like 60! There are about 8 of us who can't share stories of our grandchildren so it's not so bad. Our group is mostly English but there are some Americans, Australians, South Africans, Malyasians and Kiwis. The Malaysians must be struggling a bit with English as on our second day we had to introduce ourselves to the rest of the group and say something about ourselves. The poor Malyasian lady had us all in hysterics when she said 'Hello, we are Lee and Ho Quang and we are alcoholics'. She was obviously confused by our amusement but this was soon followed by 'ohhh, I mean workoholics'...

Our tour guide and bus driver are Margaret and Bob. Margaret has had 2 hip replacements and reminds Warren of his Grandma. She started the tour with an over-enthusiastic American 'Gooood Maarwning everyone, isn't it a graaayt daaay', but as the tour has gone on, the cheesyness has lessened as she starts to look more frazzled. At least the jokes have subsided. As we passed the Niagara Falls Golf Course she told the group that it was a rule on the course that all golfers must wear 2 pairs of pants in case they got a hole in one. And the amazing thing was that people actually laughed at that!

Niagara Falls was a day's bus ride but well worth it. The Falls are magnificent and the rainbow that could be seen in the mists of the water kept me snapping away with the camera for ages. The mist can be seen from miles away. The highlight of the day would have to be the Maid of the Mist boat ride. The boat can be seen in the first photo, and that's us in the boat on the left. It goes right up to the bottom of the falls. From here you can really feel the thunderous power as the boat gets thrown around like a kid's toy in the torrents. It's not hard to understand why many of the idiotic daredevils who have thrown themselves overboard in barrels haven't lived to tell the story.

I have never before seen so many different nationalities and heard so many different languages as I have here. This place is trully multicultural. I even saw Amish for the first time, which confused me for a minute as I was looking around to see where the costume party was!

Our hotel was quite far away from the Falls and we heard that the Falls get lit up at night. We wanted to stay around for the lights so we had 8 hours to occupy. There was a street dubbed 'Clindon Hill- Street of Fun'. This was over-the-top blatant, cheesy tourism at it's best. There were Wax Museums, Haunted Houses, Frankensteins, Draculas and Games arcades. Not exactly the things you'd expect to see at Niagara Falls! We had time to kill so had a game of 'Dinosaur Mini-putt'. We were tied right up to the 17th hole but the pressure got to me and I lost it on the 18th - I'll blame it on the 28 degree heat.

For the rest of the day we just wandered around the gardens and the falls. I was pretty tired after walking around in the heat all day so was quite grumpy when our tour bus didn't stop to give us a ride back to the hotel. So it was another hour of walking.... at least the photos made it all worth it.