Travels with Jen: P’burgh to Niagara Falls

Do you know what I love about traveling?  Seeing new things and having new experiences? 

Want to know what I don’t love about traveling?  Sharing a hotel room with my children.  Someone who shall remain nameless (but I’ll drop a hint here and let you know that she is almost eight years old) nearly got herself mailed back to Virginia last night when SHE WOULDN’T STOP TALKING AND JUST GO TO SLEEP ALREADY.

(And I can already predict that tonight is going to be exactly the same, even though we went on a long walk this afternoon AND Pete took the girls to the hotel pool again and made them go through a rigorous Olympic workout.)

So, I’m thinking Valium for elementary school kids isn’t such a bad idea.

Ahem.

Anyway, so we got up this morning and spent a little more time in the Steel City.  Actually, we went back to the science museum we visited yesterday, because we just weren’t done.  Specifically, the museum currently has an exhibit on the Titanic, including actual artifacts that were brought up from the ship. It was interesting, but defnitely not worth paying $70 for two adults and two children.  But, we did get into the rest of the museum free, so we’ll call it an even trade.

After that we got in the car — again — and headed toward Niagara Falls.  We hit rain right around Erie, PA and it didn’t let up the rest of the way.  Meaning, that Niagara Falls, NY was a bit wet and gray when we got here.

Luckily, the rain stopped right around the time we skirted the mega casino and found our hotel.  After being in the car so long, the last thing we wanted to do was drive again, so we walked to the falls — an easy walk that was less than a mile.

Okay, one person griped about the forced march, but as she’s only nine-years-old, she’s not old enough to vote in our Jenworld democracy, which is really more of a benevolent co-dictatorship (and not even always all that benevolent).

As for the falls — WOW!  Seeing them absolutely exceeded my expectations.  Although, I guess I should confess here that that I had my geography completely ass-backwards and thought they faced the other direction.  But, now I know.

No, we didn’t go on Maid of the Mist.  The three females of Jenworld absolutely hate getting wet and we’re pretty bad sports about it when we do.  Pools and water parks are one thing, but getting wet when we’re in our street clothes is just not okay in our collective book.  We all tend to wear our hoods up on rain coats if it’s even threatening to rain. 

Tomorrow, we cross the border, which we’re hearing should be easy enough going into Canada — hey, it’s a much more laid-back country, people.  If we have time, we’ll see the falls from the Canadian side.  It all depends on the timing, because we’ll have a train to catch!