Apple Farm & Niagara Falls

On our way to Niagara Falls, we took a slight detour through Vermont to visit one of the (many) apple farms. This one was so charming! 

Soooo many varieties of apples! 

This farm also hosts drystone wall building classes and had some really interesting info about the building process, plus tons of walls all over the property that demonstrated various techniques. 

So charming! 

We ended up with a ton of apples, cider donuts, and a big bottle of peach cider. 

And on the way out we drove past a maple syrup farm! 

We drove to Niagara Falls that night and passed out very gratefully at the hotel (the traffic ended up adding another couple of hours, so we were in the car for 14ish hours). The next morning Neil and I went for a run along the river to the falls and around the islands. 

And then my sister Mary Beth arrived! Yay!!!

We got our ponchos (pink since it's October) and boarded the Maid of the Mist! 

Never fails to be impressive. 

Then we walked across the Rainbow Bridge into Canada! (Probably a 20-minute wait via the pedestrian border crossing? But make sure you have a dollar per person in quarters to pay the toll on the way back.) 

This was so fun--we rambled along checking out the view from every possible angle and Mary Beth treated everyone to very delicious ice cream. 

And then Mary Beth took us to lunch at an Indian restaurant and we said our goodbyes! So fun to be able to see her for the day. 

 

vacation destination four: Niagara Falls, NY

A picture is worth a thousand words, right?  Here's the short version:  we went to Goat Island the first night we arrived in Niagara Falls and wandered all over the American side of the falls before eating our picnic dinner (French bread, Nutella, apples, grapes, cheese, and carrots.  Yum!)

The next day, we went back to the falls and took a ride on Maid of the Mist.  I've visited the falls at least a half-dozen times, and I much prefer the boat ride to any of the behind-the-falls thingies you can do.  Best part about Maid of the Mist from the American side:  you also get to go up in the observation tower and you can go on the walkways next to American Falls and get completely drenched.  So soaked, in fact, that Isaac went to sleep in Rosalind's arms purely out of self-defense.  Apparently he was not a fan of being swaddled in a poncho (but he was sooo cute). 

And commence pictures.  Keep your eyes open for the kids in their ponchos (can you spot Abigail's watch-the-falls method of completely enclosing her entire face in her poncho hood?  If you've never gone to the falls, guess what--you get totally soaked.  It's so cool.)  These pictures are kind of mixed, but mostly they're of American Falls and Bridal Veil Falls, since Horseshoe Falls (the ones that most people think of as "Niagara Falls") are hard to get a good shot of unless you're on the Canadian side.  And we don't have passports for the kids, which is frustrating because the Canadian side is totally awesome). 

Later in the day (after yet another picnic), we drove to Lockport, NY, and took a tour that included the locks of the Erie Canal and then through a man-made cave running beneath three factories (burned to the ground in the 1800s) that relied on hydropower.  Which meant that they had REALLY HUGE tunnels blasted through the bedrock.  Which meant that we climbed up inside a huge drainage pipe (8 feet in diameter) to get into the hydropower caves.  And then took a boat ride underground.  Pretty cool stuff.  Then we went into town and had the best ice cream I have ever had in my entire life (go to DeDee's Dairy; get the Rocky Mountain Raspberry.  Sooooooo good.)