Fall Colors Adventure 2013: SO MUCH TO SEE, SO LITTLE TIME!

Friday, October 11

We had an extremely full, busy and fun day today. We gathered around 9:30 for a ride-share to the Niagara Parks Butterfly Conservatory. After watching a short video about butterflies, we entered a tropical paradise of exotic greenery and flowing water that creates a rainforest environment for 2,000 tropical buttterflies.

This one landed on my jacket and refused to leave.

Over 50 different species of butterfly fly freely through the 1,022 square meter Conservatory. A 600 foot path winds its way around the Conservatory creating different views to observe the butterfies as they forage for nectar, search for mates or bask in the sunshine. Over 100 labeled unique and exotic plants are housed in the Conservatory.

Butterflies were everywhere! I believe we saw many more butterflies here than at the Conservtory in Houston.

We caught the WEGO - the people moving tranportation system in Niagara Falls - and headed down to the Maid of the Mist.

The American Falls from the Maid of the Mist

The Canadian Horseshoe Falls from the Maid of the Mist

The American Falls from the Skylon Tower

The Horseshoe Falls from the Skylon Tower

The Maid of the Mist is the oldest tourist attraction in America having started in 1846. Two 600 passenger 80' long boats depart every 15 minutes on a journey passed the American Falls and then into the basin of the magnificent Canadian Horseshoe Falls. It is truly 30 minutes of thrills that allows you to "soak" in the excitement. We all wore our blue disposable raincoats, but we still got wet. I'm sure anyone who rode on the top deck got completely soaked.

Jerry, Joyce, Earl, Lynn and Eunice prepare to get wet.

Jenna did get wet

The American Falls are 180' high and 1100' long while the Canadian Horseshoe Falls are 170' high and 1500' long. Over 6 million cubic feet of water flows over the falls every minute with 90% of the water coming over Horseshoe Falls. The water in the gorge below the falls is 170' deep - as deep as the canyon walls above the water are high. What fun we had!

After a quick lunch we walked down the Journey Behind the Falls attraction.

Horseshoe Falls from the observation deck of the Journey Behind the Falls.

Here you walk down stairs and take an elevator to a series of tunnels behind Horseshoe Falls. Two tunnels end with a view of the water cascading down. The third goes onto an observation deck where you can get a full view of the waterfall from the right side.

Again we wore disposable raincoats beause of the spray from the falls. This was less exciting than the Maid of the Mist, and Jenna got a little claustrophobic in the tunnels.

We had tickets to go to the White Water Walk that allows you to walk along the class VI rapids of the Niagra River below the falls, but we didn't have enough time to do this activity. Our farewell dinner was tonight and we needed to get back to the campground to get ready for that. This was the one biggest disappointment about this trip. Niagara Falls and all of its attractions are a major hightlight for this whole trip. Too many things were packed into this one day and we weren't able to fully enjoy any of them. Adventure Caravans needs to revise the stay in Niagara Falls to allow more time at the main attraction - the falls. This may mean cutting out the Butterfly Conservatory or maybe even the city bus tour so that we could have more time to fully enoy the falls and the accompanying attractions.

Our farewell dinner was held at the Skylon Tower, a 520' tall observation tower directly across from the American and Horseshoe Falls.

We had tremendous views of the falls, New York, Onterio, Toronto and Lake Onterio from our seats in the revolving dining room. We had a delicous dinner of either steak or salmon and took lots of pictures of the falls and the area around the city of Niagara Falls. After dinner we went up two flight of stairs to the observation deck to see the falls as darkness came on. At 7:00 the lights slowly illuminated the falls with white light, and at 7:30 the lights turned pink in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness. The dinner and the experience on the obsrvation deck made an terrific ending to an unusually busy day.