Road Trip
A long, long drive and we are finally in Canada. The trip has been smooth, despite its length and the mind-numbing monotony of long periods of night driving on the interstates. I tried to stop every two hours or so, just to let this clown car of seven people crammed into a putatively seven-passenger vehicle discharge its disgruntled and cramped occupants. A few moments of shaking out cramps or walking off stiffness and off we went, back to the darkened road.
There were no problems this trip. No breakdowns, no accidents, no suicidal deer trying their luck on the sheet metal; no, this has been smooth sailing. That isn’t strictly true, actually. My wife’s perennial road trip curse has raised its head. She came down with a case of conjunctivitis on the morning we were to leave. This is not bad by previous standards. She didn’t throw her back out, requiring me to fly out to rescue her. (That time ended up with me needing rescue. That’s another story, though.)
When we got here, it was far, far too early to check into the hotel in Niagara Falls, so I decided we should try to find Niagara on the Lake and Fort George. This would not normally be an especially difficult task; the Niagara region is not really all that big. However, when seven groggy, sleep deprived people – or rather six groggy, sleep deprived begin to give helpful advice at odds with the navigator’s judgment, it can get a bit more difficult.
We did finally track down the Fort, which I am sure was doing its best to hide from us. Had our positions been reversed, I would have tried to avoid contact with a clown car full of grumpy, stiff, sleep-deprived people. When we pulled into the parking area, we encountered The Confused Scot.
The Confused Scot was desperately trying to feed $6 (Canadian) into a device that spits out a ticket good for parking at the fort. He was, and I am not making this up, using nickels. This can be a tedious thing to watch, or even to remember having watched. Especially since said machine would also take plastic. This is what I used when The Confused Scot finally won his ticket in his bizarre reverse slot machine game and let me get to the machine. We never saw The Confused Scot again – a good thing, since my hands had begun itching to throttle him after the first dollar went in. I do not even want to know why he had six dollars worth of nickels with him (although I suspect he won them in a slot machine and was confused about the process of cashing out.)
The fort is a reconstructed one, built in the late 1930s. The only original part is the old powder magazine. But they have reenactors dressed in the period costumes to tell you about the fort and its history. (The original fort was flattened by American artillery during the War of 1812. British forces retook the fort a short while later.)
After wandering about the fort for a couple of hours, watching a demonstration of the “Brown Bess” musket and a fife and drum corps performance and examining the various displays in the buildings, we trudged back to the car, more awake and alert than we had been when we arrived. The rejuvenated occupants of the clown car all agreed that their earlier questioning of the navigator’s sanity had been premature. Then I unlocked the car and let them into the car.
We followed the Niagara Turnpike down to Niagara Falls after grabbing a surprisingly good quick lunch in Niagara on the Lake. The turnpike is a rather narrow, twisting, two-lane road with a nice wide bike path next to it. So naturally, the first thing we encountered was a guy on a bike wanting to share the meager pavement with the horde of cars rather than use the nice, paved blacktop bike path – which actually looked wider than the turnpike. I decided against adding a new hood ornament to the rental van – I cannot guarantee other drivers were so inclined.
We arrived at our hotel and found that one of the two rooms was ready. The other one took about another hour to get ready. By now, the toll of the trip was again showing on the occupants of the clown car. So, I sent the worst looking of the bunch (my youngest boy) to bed, which determined the rest of the sleeping arrangements. My wife, daughter and I waited for the unready room to be readied. By the end of that hour, we were looking an awful lot like extras in a zombie movie.
We finally got into the room and collapsed for a few hours of sleep. When I rousted the brood, they emerged looking less like zombie extras. More like apocalypse survivor movie extras. It was an improvement. We wandered down Clifton Hill to make the obligatory viewing of the falls – after doing the obligatory dodging of the traffic to get there. Crosswalks are a real rarity for some reason. After some picture taking, we waded through the sea of humanity (there were a LOT of people) back toward the hill in search of a restaurant. We had coupons for a fairly decent discount at a fairly nice restaurant, so the kids announced that they wanted to eat at the Hard Rock Café. Sans said discount.
After we ate, I sent the kids off in various directions while my wife and I went in search of a pharmacy. We were able to get an eyewash kit that helped her eye when we got back to the room. We still needed to get her some antibiotic ointment, but this at least relieved the discomfort. None of us stayed up late, we were all back in our rooms by around 10pm. We needed the sleep.
Personal Thoughts | Gaius July 8, 2008
By Quilly Mammoth, July 8, 2008 @ 10:59 pm
Say hello to my wife’s family when your up there. They live in Sudbury…but, heh, it’s Canada. Everybody knows everybody.