Our next house sit will be in Massachusetts, and we have a two-week gap between when it starts and when our Kentucky sit ended. Maricela’s brother will be joining us as we travel around upstate New York, Philadelphia, and New York City. Then we will part ways and complete our drive to Massachusetts.

After driving through the snowstorm in Kentucky and Ohio, our first stop was at Niagara Falls in New York. The weather was great in Niagara; the only bad weather was on the drive to get there, not while walking around the tourist sites.

Niagara was more impressive than I had anticipated. I was expecting to be a bit disappointed by another over-hyped site that didn’t live up to expectations. But that was not the case. The Falls carry a massive amount of water – 20% of the drinking water for the East Coast passes through the Falls!

The other surprising thing to me was the river itself. It makes sense that for such massive falls, there must be a substantial river leading up to the falls. And the river is very accessible – you drive along it, park right next to it, walk out to it and cross over it. Some stretches have powerful rapids; you can really sense the magnitude of water passing through.

We visited at an interesting time of year. It was early March, when it’s very cold, which made for some interesting landscapes. There was no ice in the river, except for a little along the shores, but at the Falls themselves, since the Falls generate a lot of spray, the frozen spray settles onto the nearby cliffs and rocks and gives the Falls a whole different look than if we had visited during a warmer season. There was so much ice as a result of the spray that the observation decks below the falls were closed – they were inaccessible because they were buried by many feet of ice.

While there we made a brief trip across the border to the Canadian side. We walked across, figuring it would be easier than taking the van across and back. The Canadian side had a more touristy and commercialized feel – large casinos, expensive restaurants, flashy gift shops, and Ripley’s Believe it or Not types of places – a whole different vibe. There were some on the US side as well, but it was more low key. I like to say that my favorite part of our visit to Canada was crossing the border back into the US!