Niagara Falls... We meet again. 3 years ago we were in Niagara Falls, NY and the experience was decentish (depends on your definition of decent). We did the Maid of the Mist boat ride packed in there like a can of sardines. It was fun and misty but we left feeling Niagara Falls, NY had gone down hill a good bit. Everyone told us "oh you have to go to the Canada, side that's the nice side". Here we are needing to get from Boston to Michigan and the route would take us straight through Niagara Falls. We thought we'd stay the night in Niagara Falls, ON, drive up and around the Georgian Bay to Sault St Marie, MI before heading south to Otter Lake, MI. We've never spent time in the UP, so we thought we give it a try. You know the UP, the right hand that sits ontop of the left hand when someone from Michigan wants to show you what part of Michigan they're from. Anyway, back to Niagara Falls.
We get to the border at 7pm expecting to follow all the other vehicles through the normal border patrol lines just to see a sign that says All Tour Buses, Trucks and RVs to the left.... What?? That line was twice as long and come to find that's because a tour bus will pull up into one of the two open lanes and all 50 people have to get off and walk inside to go over all the passports. Long boring story short... it took us 2 hours to get through the line and into Niagara Falls, ON.
We had purchased a Best Western Hotel room from Priceline earlier that day and arrived at the hotel by 9:15pm. We had to get some work done so we needed the wifi as we were not wanting to use data on our phones in Canada. I walk inside and tell the young man my name and he says there's no reservation under that name. So I pull up my email and the guy is writing down some numbers to see if he can find the reservation. Just then a lady walks up and says "you booked on Priceline right" and I said "yes" and she said "oh we went ahead and cancelled your reservation for you". I replied, "huh?" To which she so kindly said "yeah, we went ahead and cancelled your reservation for you because our hotel is not going to honor the price you paid on Priceline." I replied, "huh?" She said, "you can purchase a room from us at $109.00 for tonight but we won't honor the $49.00 you paid online." I didn't have much to say. She was so nice and helpful with cancelling our reservation and throwing us out into the street for the night that I didn't have any responses coming to mind. What do you say to someone being so kind about cancelling your reservation?? I know we can all think of somethings to say!
Christopher was so mad that we couldn't help but laugh! Christopher is one of those who tries to be really mad but it makes you laugh instead of tremble. There was no way we were going to pay the extra money to stay somewhere that would do that to their quests. They said they've had to do it to quite a few quests the last few weeks. Well, we needed some wifi to see what our options were and how far it was to just get out of Ontario. As we sat there in the parking lot wondering which direction to turn we see the billboard for Denny's restaurant and in big bold letters it says FREE WIFI. Perfect, we'll go get some food and use the wifi. We drive a few blocks away, get inside and can't seem to login into the wifi. I ask the waiter if there is a trick to the wifi and he said "our wifi has not been working on Apple products for some reason the past week." Of course it wasn't! Why would anything in Canada be working out for us! We paid for our meal and decided to leave, drive as far as we could to sleep in a truck stop for the night and get into Michigan the next day.
We have a few lovely pictures of Niagara Falls that Christopher took from the van window while we waited in line at the border and a picture of the delicious Denny's where we ate. We landed at a truck stop 2 hours away from Port Huron, MI. We scrapped our plans to stay in Canada and travel to the UP just to get out of Dodge :) The truck stop we stayed at was very nice and the cafe we ate breakfast at was also really nice. I guess we ended Canada on a good note. I'll post about Michigan next time.