Personal Post: Niagara Falls Vacation

Last week, my husband and I went to Niagara Falls to celebrate our 11th anniversary (yay us!)  I found a great deal on Expedia on the Canadian side of the Falls, with a Falls view.  I started to get a little nervous as the dates approached because it was supposed to be quite cold. I didn’t think a whole lot about that when booking, since in Texas, November is still typically pretty warm!  Also, being “off” season, I was worried that we wouldn’t have much to do.

Well, I worried for no reason.  We went prepared for the cold, so I was pretty comfy the entire time.  The only exception was at night in certain areas, the wind was pretty brutal.  Otherwise, we loved the Fall weather, the beautiful leaves turning and there weren’t any crowds ANYWHERE.  I had visited the Niagara area when I was younger, and I remember it being jam packed with people.  For every tour or attraction we wanted to go to, we just went right on through!

I have a TON of pictures, of course.  I AM a photographer, so it would be a little alarming if I didn’t…  These are a combination of my D700 (normally my backup camera), so that it was a little more portable than my D3s, and we also used my Canon G15 for when I didn’t want to carry my DSLR and there are even some iphone pics that my hubby took that made the cut.  We were on vacation, so I wanted to be sure to have fun, and sometimes that means leaving the big camera behind!

I hope you enjoy the pictures!

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First, here is our hotel.  We decided to upgrade to a junior suite.  I pretty much lived in that jacuzzi tub. It was HUGE 🙂

This was the view from our room…

For the first stop, we went to the Skylon Tower.  It was crazy windy and cold up there, but the view was gorgeous.

These are just some random pics from Keith’s phone 🙂I have a thing for bridges.  I loved this one on such a gloomy day.

This is an old hydro-electical plant.  This building was gorgeous! I wish I had more time to shoot it than through the bus window.  You will see more of it later in the distance in some of the Falls pictures.

That’s an old ship in the water below.  Its supposed to break up and go over the falls any day (for the past 5 yrs).

A short 4D movie.  What is 4D?  You get drenched in water and the whole room and platform shake during the movie. LOL  The yellow panchos are for the Journey behind the Falls.  I got a few great shots from some of the platforms.

These are some shots of the rapids, and another bridge.  I told ya, I love bridges…

We found some unmanned photo booths.  They are way more fun doing it yourself 😉

At the butterfly conservatory, a little guy landed on me and stayed until I left when I had to get him to fly off.  Hopefully thats lots of good luck 😉

Goofing around at the Botanical Gardens…

The next few pics are from us taking a stroll down to a former monk college.  The leaves were amazing so we even stopped for a few shots of us with the tripod for some selfies 🙂

We were at the Falls (again) and I saw this storm coming in.  I LOVE this picture.  I think I’m going to get a 32×48 canvas to go over our fireplace.

Wide angle panoramic of both Falls.

This area was called Clifton Hill.  Its basically a few blocks of carnival type stuff.  You will go broke in an hour.

Here is a random pic of me in a funny mirror at Ripley’s and we played glow-in-the-dark mini golf.  I beat Keith by 4 strokes.  This is something I’m not going to let him forget anytime soon 🙂

I froze one night for my obligatory night scenic shot.  This is a 30 second exposure on a tripod.

And, the night before we left, they officially started their Festival of Lights, so we got to see some fireworks 🙂

That’s it folks!  If you want to see the Niagara area in the off season, I do recommend it, but just know a few of the attractions are closed and be sure to dress warm!  There are still plenty of things to do, and to be honest, after a couple of days, you want to do other things that DON’T involve the Falls.  The one thing I really wanted to do, but didn’t have time for was a vineyard tour.

If you made it this far, thank you looking through all my images!  I hope you enjoyed a post that was a little more personal 🙂

Lyncca