Recently, my mother and I visited Niagara Falls, Canada. Yes, that is the name of the city. To make it incredibly confusing, the city on the American side is Niagara Falls, New York. But I intend to talk about the Canadian side. Next week, about the rest of the town, but today, I want to talk about the Falls themselves.
They are magnificent. I had only seen one waterfall in person before, Multnomah Falls near Portland, Oregon, and those had been alongside a green cliff face, so you naturally saw it from the top, and it didn’t seem to be all that powerful, just beautiful. Niagara Falls, on the other hand, are at ground level at the top and drop into a gorge, so you could see the sheer force of the water tumbling over the Falls at terrifying speeds. Can you believe somebody rode a barrel down that???
We also got to see it up close from the Hornblower boat, which is the Canadian version of the Maid of the Mist (the American side gets blue ponchos, the Canadian side gets red ponchos, and the people standing within mist zone but not on a boat on either side get yellow ponchos). We got to stand right in the mist of the large fall, known as Horseshoe Falls, while on the boat. The other two Falls are the Bridal Veil Falls and the American Falls, which are located next to each other and, between the two of them, dump out about 175,000 gallons of water a second.
All summer long, at night, the falls are lit with giant strobe lights, turning them all shades of the rainbow, and to accompany the lighting, there’s a small-ish* firework show that goes on. It gets pretty crowded, but it’s worth the view. As one could expect, they have light-up toys for sale during the show.
*I only really have my local 4th of July firework show as comparison, so to me, it was small, but that’s probably because they do it every night.
