So we made it to Niagara, but first we stopped in Beacon, NY. Eh, but I didn’t take any pictures there. We arrived on the totally wrong day — Tuesday — when all the art galleries were closed. We went to some glass-blowing gallery which was kind of cool and after we ate this hearty dinner we just crashed in our bed & breakfast.
So then after about 7 hours of driving we made it to the border for 2 hours of waiting at the Rainbow Bridge. We later found out that’s where all the dumb tourists like us go because it goes straight to the Niagara tourist district. Funny, this was the second time I’ve recently crossed over to Canada and both times we got a fairly harsh white lady customs officer on the way in, and an easygoing male officer on the way back. You’d think Canada would be less severe but that wasn’t my experience.
We were bemused by our own choice to go to Niagara since we tend to avoid touristy areas as well as huge crowds, but we didn’t want to spend a lot of dough for this trip, and though I wanted to see my grandma in Ohio my aunt thought that would be too much people around over the holidays. Once we learned Styx was playing that clinched it, even though we both were only vaguely familiar with that one song of theirs.
Of course, even the most kitschy of tourist attractions has something worthwhile about it and in this case that was the Falls. You can get a slight sense of the undeniable awe of being there even in my hastily edited night footage. This is our little stroll on the way to the main event on New Year’s:
Then of course, there was Styx…this is just a cover they did of a Beatles song, a nice surprise. They were pretty tight, good energy…wonder how the guitarists dealt with the cold, I couldn’t even hold my camera very long without my fingers freezing. We’d gotten to the vantage point this video was shot around 10 p.m.:
and after a half hour had to walk around, ducked into a place for some Irish coffees. I was not looking forward to going back out but when we did at 11:30 the crowd had grown massively and it was significantly warmer, not bad at all. And the spectacle was not lost on two homebodies like us, the display they put on was thrillingly near-apocalyptic as you can see:
The whole milieu was pretty balanced for family-type fun. There were strollers and rowdy college kids, but the atmosphere never felt overly belligerent or policed.
Happy 2010 friends! I’m not a maker of resolutions, but consistency in blogging is visible on my agenda.
