Niagara - wine country and the falls

Samantha considered which bunch to chug next
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From Toronto we headed along the QEW highway for an hour around the edge of Lake Ontario into the wine region of Niagara. Although Canada’s climate is not ideal for growing grapes they give it a good go and this small area is packed with small vineyards, who grow whichever varieties possible, and then usually harvest, bottle and retail the finished product themselves. And so we stuck a pin in the map and pulled up to one such vineyard,

Harbour’s Edge, sitting on the banks of a river which leads into the lake. Being a self-guided vineyard, we were given a laminated map and guide to the site and told by the friendly lady that we were welcome to sample one grape of each variety as we strolled around. The tour took us about 45 minutes in the warm sun, and we all found it really interesting. We chose to ignore our hosts request, hungrily sampling the grapes with greedy abandon before stopping for a rest, a large belch and to wring the juice from our t-shirts into the river at the halfway point. So on returning to the shop where we had parked our car we felt obliged to step inside to taste a few of their wines and buy a bottle of our favourite to drink later.

Fills an afternoon - if you take Sudoku

In front of the falls - not high enough in my opinion
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Slightly further down the road we again stopped for a tasting, this time in a lovely little town called Jordan where a local vineyard has a larger retail outlet. Adjoining this is their own restaurant, the Inn on the 20, where we could not resist the smells coming from the kitchen and splashed out on the first decent food we had eaten for days. For $25 dollars Sam and I enjoyed fresh soup, hen/pickerel mains, cheesecake desserts and a selection of wines, feeling  not even a twinge of guilt as we ordered the usual crap for the boys!

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Onwards to Niagara Falls and as we pulled into the main street you could almost hear the average IQ counter racing towards zero and the ‘cheese factor’ going through the roof as we passed arcades, houses of horrors (at least 4!), waxworks, casinos and every fast food joint imaginable - basically Blackpool without the drunks! A quick walk uncovered out worst suspicions that man had once again ruined one of the world’s natural wonders. Hotels struggling for the best view of the falls, tacky plastic facades covering every spare inch of frontage and every ounce of soul drained from the area. To make matters worse we had arrived just after the tourist season had finished and so all nasty tourist traps were empty and bored vendors looked desperately from their booths as coaches of pensioners and Japanese shuffled past them the the falls. You can’t have the mass hysteria required to fill their little rip-off joints without the masses, and the masses had left.

Even Jon's hair was pulled towards the vortex as it opened behind him....
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The falls themselves didn’t look high enough to me. Or maybe they’re not as high as they look on TV. Despite that when you stand at the top of them you still imagine it looks like how early sailors imagined how the edge of the world looked like. So in an attempt to see them in their full glory we got on board the famous Maid of the Mist boat (“Soaking suckers since 1846”), along with a couple of hundred old folk/Japanese tourists. We weren’t disappointed. 20% of the WORLD’S fresh water is contained in Canada’s great lakes and it all flows over Niagara Falls at one point or another and as we bobbed in the furious swell at the foot of the Horseshoe Falls (the larger of the two) with a towering blue horseshoe of foaming roaring water on three sides of us you could well believe it. It was terrific, and as we turned back in the direction of cheese city, both totally gob-smacked and soaked to the skin we were glad we had come to Niagara, just disappointed that we had come for more than an afternoon.