After waiting to get down the elevator to the tunnels behind the falls, you line-up again to get your few seconds at one of these openings right behind the raging falls. Most people take selfies or family-portrait selfies. This image really doesn’t do justice to the full drama and fury of the water cascading past, right in front of you.
A lot of time in Niagara Falls as a tourist is spent waiting in long lines (line-ups to Canadians, queues to the English). Thousands of people are queued up, waiting to make use of 1 or 2 ordinary-sized elevators. Click any image to see them all larger
The Falls really are stunning. I will try not to bore with too many, too touristy shots but it’s hard not to want to capture some of their majesty from every angle, as hordes of tourists were doing with cameras and phones. Click any image to see them all enlarged.
Back in our hotel in Niagara Falls the next day, we looked down on this odd, fake minaret-ty thing and the fountains and garden below
Niagara-on-the-Lake is also the home of the Shaw Festival and in the evening we saw an extremely good production of Howard Barker’s Victory. I was not previously familiar with Barker and read up on him a bit after the play. While, ultimately, I’m not sold on his reported approach to theatre or what I was able to take away from the play, it was certainly an interesting evening of serious drama, well acted, particularly, I thought, by Martha Burns as the widow Bradshaw. In the intermission we sat briefly in a small garden plaza behind the theatre, bordering a meadow, whence this picture.
Niagara-on-the-Lake proved to be a very charming, antique sort of town, very much laid out for tourists. Lots of twee shops selling “local” products, bakeries, ice-cream shoppes, restaurants, local artists. There was an old apothecary set up as a kind of museum and lots of plaques detailing historic sites around town and a lovely little park. Ideal, if you really like shopping.
The main street we walked along, laid out for tourists, was lined with stunning flowers.
Click either image to see them both full-sized.
A popular place for taking pictures. Click either image to see them enlarged.
Between gigs for a little while and we decided to go visit Niagara Falls for a few days – my wife had never been. The first day we drove out to the town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, under 25 km from Niagara Falls. A charming, colonial-era town with interesting history, particularly from the War of 1812, we walked down to the shore of Lake Ontario, a popular spot for family photography, evidently, and saw what follows in some of the next few posts. Then we returned to Niagara Falls, Ontario and I’ll try to keep the touristy shots to a minimum…
