Niagara Falls

 

A demonstration of reflection, refraction and dispersion.  Stay in school, kids

I admit I knew little to nothing about Niagara Falls beyond the fact that it’s a series of waterfalls which men have previously felt compelled to traverse in barrels. Evidently people have capitalised on the popularity of the falls by turning the town (on either side of the US-Canada border) into a fairly seedy holiday resort.  It’s not Blackpool or (god forbid) Rhyl-levels of offensiveness, but tacky nonetheless.  If you’ve played Fallout: New Vegas, you might notice a couple of parallels. 

 
Wish you were here

The view from the hotel was admittedly pretty good:

We took one of the Hornblower cruises to the falls, where it sails up to the base and treads water for a bit while you get wet and take soggy selfies.  It’s fun enough and you get a nice view. And you get a rather fetching red poncho.

  
I don’t know why I’ve starting adopting Jack Nicholson’s face

Here’s some snaps:

    

Then we needed to take the edge off at Margaritaville.  Who the buggery bollocks is Jimmy Buffett, by the way?

These are just for Chantelle

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Wir haben Niagara Falls besucht. Die Stadt ist kitschig, aber die Aussicht ist spektakulär.

Toronto

I’m still ensconced next to my Canadian lake, sheltered from the rain and watching the lightning from under my tall tree.  At least I left my copper armour at home.  Back to catching up:

After Chicago we caught a flight to Toronto by way of a Porter airlines flight, who –for a budget airline- were faultless. As in they gave us free alcohol and snacks and didn’t treat us like cattle.  Somewhere, Michael O’Leary just had an aneurysm.

My first impressions of Toronto (which I’ve since started hearing as “Torrono” in my head) was that it a similar feel to Chicago, but with less elaborate and dense architecture. And the traffic made less frequent attempts to murder you.  It’s not a particularly good looking town, but it’s pleasant enough.  Some subsequent Toronto residents I spoke to said they felt it lacked a bit of the character and sophistication of say, Montreal.  I’ll let you know how true that is when we get there.

It does have the CN tower, but I’m afraid we  couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to wait 90 minutes and then pay to go up there.

Whatevs

A quick side note about the Sheraton Centre hotel, Toronto  - The rooms were ok but this is definitely our least pleasant stay.  The staff really went out their way to be unhelpful, there’s no free WiFi in the rooms (1st world problems, right? But frankly EVERYWHERE has managed it thus far) and the barman was a bit of a prick.  So, insofar as what little impact this blog would have:  don’t stay there.

We took another tour with the Tour Guys who ran the similar walkaround we did in Vancouver.  It was called “Death, Disease and Destruction” and was meant to explore the ‘darker’ side of the city’s history.  In my opinion, the town’s too nice to sustain that conversation and it was bit too walky and not enough talky, what with the relative scarcity of unpleasant things to discuss.  But it was ok.

“This was the site of the great flytipping of 1852”

What we did do while we were here was check out a couple of restaurants we’d idly seen on the Food Network (I forget which program, but almost certainly it was the ceaselessly punchable Guy Fieri).   At Lakeside, I had the Cornflake chicken Sandwich but declined the Apple Pie Milkshake (with actual pie blended into it).  I did opt for the classic poutine accompaniment, though, as some things need to be done:

Pictured: An utter fucking disgrace of a meal moments before being devoured by a savage.

And Chantelle scratched her itch for Chicken and Waffles at The Stockyards. 

This is actually a thing

We also met some friends for drinks (Hi Camille and Donald!) down the distillery district, which was civilised.  Well, I was civilised but when you get a drink in Chan, she ends up glassing the bouncer and fighting the police.  Her colleagues from the valleys have had a lasting effect.  For the benefit of our more innocent readers: Yes, I am joking – she runs off before the police get there.  I’m here all week, folks.

Here’s some more photos:

   

And the last thing we did was pick up our next ride from the airport – a rather hard to ridicule Ford Focus- so we could then drive to Niagara Falls and then on to Algonquin park, which is where we are now.  You’ll catch up at some point.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch:  Toronto gefallt mir, aber sie ist für mich vieleicht ein bisschen langweilig.

Chicago

Presently we’re in the Canadian wilderness, but the blog is out of phase by about a week so I’m attempting to fill in the difference while sitting out a storm under a parasol, being slowly exsanguinated by eagle-sized mosquitos next to a lake. Break out the violins.

When we were done in Milwaukee, we had one last trip for the Donkey before the people from Budget had to mournfully take it behind the shed with granpappy’s shotgun, and that was to Chicago – which was the last US stop in this leg.  Driving there was no problem, and was quite brief by this trip’s standards, but driving though Chicago itself was something else.  It was a maelstrom of blaring horns, aggressive driving and general bad humour.

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Please hold for a moment; a squirrel has just run over my foot. I think that one in Wyoming must’ve put the word around.  Oh god, they’re coming.

As you were.
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Being the cultured types, we took an Architectural tour with the Chicago Architectural Society, where a very keen city planner pointed out the more significant examples of Modernist, Post-modernist and Contemporary buildings in the city centre.  This was more interesting than it sounds.

Examples:

Modernist

Post-modernist

Dickhead

I quite liked the art-deco substation that I spotted:

 
Fans of Bioshock will know where I’m coming from

The other tour we did was around several of the more popular pizza parlours, which we did with the genuinely interesting and funny Javier from the Slice of Chicago team.  You should know that the deep-pan pizzas popularised by the likes of Dominoes, Pizza Hut et al are incorrect to the source material.  A Chicago Deep-dish Pizza looks like this weapon here:

Behold your doom

Which is to say, with a relatively thin crust lining a deep pan containing a vast amount of filling.  A small, double-stuffed variety at Giordano’s contains a pound of cheese. The large contains three. One could rob a jeweller shop window with it. They also take a hour to cook and you may well be waiting an hour for a table to start with (if you are unable to work the internet, peasants).  Once again, it’s good, but nothing’s that good and pretty much any portion size will be too much.

“Two slices of delicious regret coming right up”

I report that the locally-made beer was also of a high standard.  The naming of this one I found in the Virgin hotel bar was unfortunate, however:

Snigger

Here’s some more pretty pictures:

  

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch:  Wir haben ein Pizza gegessen, dass dichter als einem Neutronenstern war.