Niagara Falls - Day 2 (Monday)

On Monday, we slept in. You’ll remember we did lots of this on our vacation to Virginia this time last summer. People have commented that pretty much every day started with “we slept in” – isn’t that what vacation [and some weekdays, most weekends] is for?

In our defense (really read this, it’s legitimate!), we were up late on Friday night at Bethany’s parents new house helping them paint before they moved in. I slept like a rock but Beth tossed all night and never really got to sleep. Saturday morning we worked for a while up there (then I blew the control fuse on the air conditioner thermostat and we stayed for a couple more hours while I got that taken care of). Saturday evening, we got home and had errands to run, dinner to eat, and some packing to do. It was just shy of 1am before we went to bed – we only got to sleep for 2 hours before getting up for the Rapid Rover. We couldn’t nap too well at the train station or on the regional train from Philly to NY, then the chaos of NY’s Penn Station had us pretty well awake for the day (at 7am). We both occasionally dozed off on the train, but no quality sleep.

So…. on Sunday night, sleeping on the Sheraton Hotel’s “Sweet Sleeper” mattress, we slept great! We woke up a little after noon (like 1:30pm), then got showered and headed out for the day. We had explored the “Fallsview” area on Sunday evening so we wandered the “Clifton Hill” area on Monday afternoon. We ended up a bit too far out of the mainstream places when we realized we were really hungry. Forgive our boring choice for lunch – we stopped at TGIFriday’s. From there, we went down to the river/falls area to checked things out. We brought the camera along and spent a while taking different pictures, pretending we were artistic. We made it up to the Table Rock area and I was able to look over the edge railing down into the rushing water right as it went over the falls – that’s crazy.







The sky was really dark off in one direction and we heard loud thunder and saw the lightning as it got closer to us. There was no rain but it was fun to hear the thunder and see the clouds move over us. I think the weather helped thin the crowds out!











This is how they light up the falls at night - these are giant spotlights:




We went back to the hotel to change (I was wearing shorts and needed to get jeans on as it had gotten much cooler) and then headed out for dinner. We walked around Clifton Hill and enjoyed seeing it alive with people. We checked out a gift shop (thankfully most of the gift shops we’ve seen haven’t been the cheesy kind) and then went to Boston Pizza (which they mention on the back of the menu was started in Canada???) for dinner. It was a pizza/sports bar place with roll-up windows so we got to enjoy the sounds and breeze from outside!

Dinner was great – I’d love to go back there. Afterwards, we went back to the hotel to prepare for our “Day of Adventure” the next day.