<– Guess where I bought this mug??? CANADA!!!!! That’s right. Last weekend – our last three-day weekend before we move across the country – my family decided to road-trip across Massachusetts and upstate New York to visit Niagara Falls. None of us had ever been there before, and I wanted the boys to experience it before we moved 2000 miles away again. It was a whirlwind trip – eight hours driving on Saturday, an overnight stay in Buffalo, a day at Niagara followed by a second night in the hotel, and then another eight hour trip home on Memorial Day. Exhausting, but so worth it.

Fun things/stories from the trip:

• It took us three hours to get dinner the first night, and in the end, after five different schemes failed (yes, really), we ended up walking five minutes down the road to a fish place that turned out to be much better than any of us expected.
• Because we brought swimsuits (for the hotel), Ambrose thought we were going to swim in the falls. He had no idea just how big they were…
• Only Jason and I have passports, and of course we couldn’t leave the kids alone, and Jason has been to Canada many times (his mother is from Canada), so I crossed Rainbow Bridge myself and spent half an hour in another country, buying souvenirs. Plus I got a great picture standing one foot in Canada and one in the US. 😀
• We hiked and hiked and hiked. At one point, we went up a staircase that turned out to be roughly 150 feet tall. Oy, that was exhausting!!
• We ate at a kind of international food court, where Laurence and I got the best Indian chicken curry and naan. Mmmm. Later, we all got “Twist o’the Mist” ice cream after our long hike. Yum, yum, yum.
• Because it was Memorial Weekend, there were tons of people there. The majority of them were non-white, with the highest ethnicity being Indian. As I walked in a crowd of thousands of people of all colors, sizes, shapes, and styles, I couldn’t help marveling at the vast beauty of diversity. I really and truly don’t understand how people can only see beauty in a single color, size, shape, and style. How frickin’ boring!
• We had a little issue with our hotel the second night when the toilet suddenly stopped working. The innards had broken and the water wouldn’t shut off without the emergency switch. The hotel had no maintenance available, so they had to move us to a different room. Oops! At least they were prompt and gracious about it, and we only had to drag our stuff three doors down. I’m REALLY thankful they had another family room available!
• On our last night in Buffalo, we went to a nearby Mexican restaurant which ended up being very authentic tex-mex. I think my chimichanga in queso was the best I’ve ever had. Plus, all three boys wrote a note in Spanish for our Spanish-speaking waiter on their paper napkin-holders, and Ambrose left a paper crane he’d folded out of his napkin. I love my boys!

All in all, it was a wonderful vacation. I do wish I could have taken everyone across the border, and that we’d had time to visit the Horseshoe Bend section of the falls, but considering we only had limited time and resources, I think we made the best of it.

That’s it for travel until we move across the country again. Just a month to go!