Niagara Falls – Niagara-on-the-Lake

By Deanna on September 28, 2013 • ( 1 )

Today: 37 km

To date: 5,143 km

To go: 2,657 km

First order of business – breakfast. We went to downtown Niagara Falls -away from the actual Falls – hoping to find something reasonably priced. The downtown was pretty much deserted but we met a man who led us to a place to eat (and even introduced us to the waitress)! The food was not worth writing about, but at least it got us going.

We headed back down to the Falls to enjoy the view a final time and then headed out to the Butterfly Conservatory. The ride along the Niagara Parkway was lovely – a separate bike path and lovely views of the river. The butterfly conservatory was amazing – thousands of colorful creatures fluttering by. Everyone seemed to be trying to get the butterflies to land on them – standing like a statue for long periods of time – but Alex got lucky enough to just have one settle on his arm without encouragement.

Niagara-on-the-Lake was a very cute, touristy town with lots of yummy (expensive) looking restaurants and boutiques. I felt thoroughly under-dressed and out of place. We met a man at a park who told us there was a 15 yr-old swimming across the lake today. It seems like quite the thing to swim across Lake Ontario – there is a plaque commemorating Marilyn Bell’s first crossing as well as everyone who came after her. I thought this was pretty cool because Victoria also has a plaque for her as she was also the first to swim from Port Angeles to Victoria! Looking out across the lake…. I am pretty sure I could do this…….. :) next summer?

Had a delicious dinner at Subway (did you know they now offer avocado?) and once it got dark, we headed into the residential streets to find somewhere to set up for the night. Settled on a patch of grass hidden down an alley somewhere – it was too dark to really tell where we were, so we just fingers crossed we weren’t venturing into a bog!