Last summer, Keith and I found that it look us quite a while to get ourselves ready every morning. There was breakfast to serve, dishes to wash, kids to dress, gear to pack, a tent to disassemble and a trailer to hitch. Even if we'd been up since daybreak, we'd be lucky to pull out of our campsite by 10 a.m.
Silly me: I thought it'd be easier to get going from Uncle Tom and Aunt Mary Ann's house, what with the fact that the Teardrop was already packed and ready to go. In theory, all we had to do was pack our pajamas back into our bags, hug Mary Ann good-bye and hit the road. In reality, we spent a few hours retrieving various articles -- including DS games, books, Natalie's farm-camp laundry (now clean and ready to be re-packed), and the milk, cheese and eggs that I had parked in Mary Ann's refrigerator -- from around the house.
(The kids, by the way, were content to spend that time on the floor of the garage with a pad of paper and a couple of rolls of Scotch tape, making "Origami Yodas." Quite clever.)
So, we got a late start again, but the trip to Niagara Falls was smooth and uneventful, save for the snarl of stop-and-go traffic just north of Buffalo that added 45 minutes to our trip. And once we got to the Niagara Falls State Park, we had to circle the area a few times in search of trailer parking. The place, as you can imagine, is a zoo -- a jumble of tourists, cars and one-way streets, hotels, motels, souvenir stands, ticket booths, discount shops, IMAX theaters, Indian-food buffets, burger joints and ice-cream parlors. There's not a lot of room left for cars with trailers.
But we found a spot, had a quick picnic lunch near the falls, and set off to find tickets for the Maid of the Mist boat ride, snapping pictures at the overlooks along the way.
From the overlooks, we could see the Maid of the Mist boats cruise up the river to the falls, each one packed with a mass of blue-clad tourists. (Each passenger gets a complimentary parka, and everyone wears them so they don't get soaked.) In fact, there were so many boats loaded with so many blue parkas that we imagined swarms of people waiting to get on at the dock. On our way over, we worried that we'd get caught in long lines, or, worse, that they'd sold out of tickets for the day. But the boats leave the dock every 15 minutes, and we were able to walk right onto the boat, don our complimentary plastic parkas and take the excursion right up to the base of Horseshoe Falls (the biggest and most famous of the three waterfalls that make up Niagara Falls), where 645,000 gallons of water gush over the edge every second.
We returned to the dock 30 minutes later drenched (despite the parkas) and giddy. What an amazing, unforgettable thrill, bracing ourselves against the rush of wind and water at the base of the falls. Niagara Falls have a power and a majesty that is simply awesome, and we're so glad we had the chance to experience it up-close.
One theme that I see emerging on this trip is Dueling Personal Hand-Held Devices. When I drive, Keith is happy to navigate with the maps app on his Blackberry. When he drives, I consult my iPhone for directions. This, for some reason, drives Keith bonkers. He doesn't trust my phone, apparently, and insists that I use his. But I don't own a Blackberry; I have never used a Blackberry, and I can't stand to start now. The random commands make no sense to me, and I don't have the hang of it at all. When we're flying down the Interstate and need to know immediately if we need Exit 34B or 34A, which is coming up in 500 feet, we don't need Keith at the wheel explaining to me how to simultaneously press the Space Bar and "Q" and some invisible button on the side of the device to call up the map on his screen. My iPhone is so much more intuitive, and I'm so much more comfortable with it.
The thing is, though, the map apps on the Blackberry and the iPhone give us different directions to the same destination. And Keith insists that his directions are better.
But on this particular afternoon, as we were leaving Niagara Falls bound for a state park on Lake Ontario shore some 60 miles away, I used my iPhone for directions. The route took us past the kitschy postcard shops, the wax museum, the Hard Rock Cafe, and the Howard Johnson's, to a distinctly seedier side of town, the side with empty storefronts, boarded-up windows and overgrown yards. The side of town where streets are eerily deserted. The side of town where, just a couple of hundred feet ahead of you, the only other two cars on the road side-swipe each other as they both try to make a right turn. And as you watch, the big, bald, muscled driver of one car gets out and makes threatening gestures at the driver of the other car, the scrawny one with the goatee and tattoos up to his eyeballs. And so instead of stopping and offering help, you just drive slowly by and hope that they don't notice you. That side of town. I can't make this stuff up.
In the words of Clark W. Griswold, "Roll 'em up, kids."
Score one for the Crackberry.
My iPhone route eventually got us out of Niagara Falls via Route 18, which winds through whistle-stop towns and past farm stands and American Legion halls as it parallels the southern shore of Lake Ontario. Of course, it took us much longer than expected. It always does. We pulled in to our campsite at Lakeside Beach State Park at 7:30, set up the tent and all the gear and got dinner going as soon as we could.
It's a beautiful campground. From our site, it's about 50 yards through the trees to Lake Ontario. There aren't many campers on our loop. But of course, we have neighbors immediately to our right. It's an older couple with a trailer, and Keith and I were concerned that our children are shattering the peace they had been enjoying before we arrived. We had been trying to quiet their boisterous enthusiasm for gathering firewood until the woman caught our attention, sighed and said, "I love that sound. It reminds me of old times. We used to go camping with our six kids." After that, I didn't feel so bad.
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