Niagara Falls, part 2: Boat Tour!

Canada travelog #24
Niagara Falls, ON · Wed, 27 Aug 2025. 11:30am.

I mentioned in my previous blog about Niagara Falls that one of my fondest memories from visiting when I was a kid was riding the Maid of the Mist boat tour down in the canyon. When Hawk and I visited her long-lost relatives in Toronto earlier in the week, and we told them about our plans to visit waterfalls in Ontario, they all told us we shouldn't miss the Maid of the Mist tour.

Funny little detail: the Maid of the Mist is a tour that operates from the US side of the border. There's an almost identical tour that operates from the Canadian side, where we are this week. It just doesn't have the catchy name "Maid of the Mist". It actually has a pretty stupid name, like "Niagara City Cruise", or something like that. I mean, WTF? It's not a city cruise. There's no city down here in the canyon. Just enormous waterfalls to look up at!

Well, either way, it was at the top of our list. We booked tickets a few nights ago for the cruise today.



One thing I remember about the Maid of the Mist cruise decades ago is that the tour operator gave us heavy-duty rain slickers, the kind you see ocean going fishermen wearing in old-timey pictures. Well, those expensive slickers are no more. Now they give passengers cheap but colorful trash bags. And no, it's not any better on the US side than here in Canada. The Americans just have blue trash bags.

As the boat neared the first falls and started to pick up a lot of spray I realized that my fancy camera wasn't going to do well. I packed it away under my trash bag poncho and relied on my iPhone for the rest of the trip. The good news is that means it was easy to record video of the falls.

Watch on YouTube

Here's a 3 minute montage of the highlights of the cruise. We first go past the American side of the falls, then into the Horseshoe Falls which are split by the international border, then back past the American Falls as we return to dock.

As cheap as the trash bags were compared to the old-timey rain slickers of years ago, they got the job done. They kept our torsos dry as we got pounded with lots of spray for a few minutes. Our legs and feet took a good drenching, but that was okay as we wore quick-drying hiking clothes knowing we'd get sprayed by the mist, and it was warm out in the middle of the day anyway.

Back to Work After 10 Days

I'm back to work today after being away for 10 days. It turns out 10 days is enough not just to "clear my head" but to be so refreshed that everything seems a bit new again. And I don't mean that in a good way. 😨 Many things are unfamiliar new. Like, "Is this going to be on the test?" new.

Niagara Falls, part 3: Lunch, then a Journey Behind the Falls

Canada travelog #25
Niagara Falls, ON · Wed, 27 Aug 2025. 3pm.

For our visit to Niagara Falls today we planned three activities. One, we'd do a boat tour into the mist of the falls. Two, we'd do the "Journey Behind the Falls" tour. Three, aside from the first two which required tickets, we'd do general sightseeing. for free. Well, we arrived early and did some of #3 right off the bat. Then we boarded and earlier sailing for the boat tour and completed #1. That left us with just our later-in-the-afternoon tickets for #3. It was getting to around noon so we decided to grab some lunch first.

One of the things I remember from visiting Niagara Falls as a child years ago— really, decades ago— is the debate between, "Which side is better, the US or Canadian side?"

As a child, my parents warned me that the US side would be full of honky-tonk while the Canadian side would be beautiful parks. My actual experience as a child turned out to be the complete opposite. On the US side we saw nothing but parks right up near the falls. When we crossed the Friendship Bridge to the Canadian side, it was nothing but an endless carnival midway of rigged games and overpriced kitschy crap.

So far today I've figured out that my parents were half right— there are parks on the Canadian side. Beautiful parks all along the edge of the canyon. Except right at the foot of the bridge, which is a tourist shit show that stretches several blocks. Well, that's where we went for lunch today. 😂 That's how I know it's still there. We walked around enough to find a relatively not-tourist-trap restaurant and then walked back down the hill to where the parks are.

Then we walked toward the Horseshoe Falls to Table Rock. That's where the Journey Behind the Falls tour is. We swapped our later-in-the-day tickets for a tour departing earlier and waited in line. Here's a video of the highlights from the Journey Behind the Falls:

Watch on YouTube

Overall this tour was interesting but not really worth it. When we were actually behind the falls, peering through two large "windows" in the underground tunnels, the water was pounding so hard we could barely anything. And the lines to get to the front were ridiculously long. The view from the outdoors platform near the bottom of the falls was nice, but given that we'd already done the Maid of the Mist boat tour it didn't really add anything.