#tripblog

[jojotheebeloved]

3 Day Niagara Falls Trip

Day 1: Niagara Falls, NY United States

Start your day off with a bit of adventure with the Cave of the Winds tour. This walking tour gets you up close to the American falls.

Dry off at the Top of the Falls restaurant. No reservation required serving standard U.S.(burgers, wraps, ect) food for breakfast and lunch.

After lunch walk(or trolly) on over to the Maid of the Mist boat tour. The tour passes all three waterfalls and directly into the mist of horseshoe falls.

Finish off the day with a beautiful fireworks display on the falls!

Please be aware if you choose not to rent a car the only walkable convenient store is a 7/11 off of fourth Street. Just a reminder incase anyone in your party gets sick on the trip

Day 2: Niagara Falls Toronto Canada

Explore Clifton Hill’s! I completely underestimated the amount of time it would take to explore this area and I highly recommend spending an entire day. Buy a game pass, explore the shops and eat! One of the biggest complaints my group had about the US side of the falls was the amount of food options were very slim. The sky wheel provides a beautiful view of the falls and the Clifton Hills area

Finish off the day with a beautiful fireworks display on the falls from the Canada side.

Day 3: Niagara Falls Toronto Canada (P2)

WildPlay's Zipline to the Falls beautiful zip line down the falls allowing riders a perfect view of the falls. I recommend spending the extra money for the skip line (white helmets) and skipping the photo package. With general admission we waited in line for over 3 hours (which was not the longest wait time of the day). This is a popular attraction in the area and will require a lot of patience to experience. Make sure to use the restroom before getting in line, bring water and portable charger in your bag.

Try wine testing at one of the many highly rated wineries only 12 min ride away from the zip line. One of our guided recommend Château des Charmes to try.

End your vacation with some relaxation at the Christine Fallsview Spa located in the Sheraton hotel.

Alternative Activities

There are three casinos located between the US and Canada.

Indoor Water park

Move over Drake, If you have time check out the CN Tower. Approximately 1 hour car ride away from the falls.

Places that did not work well for my trip

Aquarium US- The aquarium is very small (30mins or less to explore) and smells like a zoo. Coming from a city with one of the worlds largest aquariums my expectations were to high. However for the cost ($19 USD) the seal show was worth it. I hope the aquarium receives the funding it needs to be remodeled and incorporate new attractions.

Wine on 3rd - This place is esthetically pleasing. However, the food was bland enough to be served in a hospital. I found my self envious of the smells wafting from the Indian restaurant down the street. If you are interested in learning about wine, wine tasting or expanding your pallet i recommended finding a true winery.

Things to remember

Walking shoes that can get wet and will not hurt your feet after 3 miles (please leave your AirMax at home)

When traveling across the border remember to bring some cash to cross over. It is free to walk over from the US to Canada but it cost a dollar USD to cross back into the US. There is a toll for cars as well please confirm the cost prior to your journey

Bring your passport or passport card

Canada’s Travel policy https://travel.gc.ca/travel-covid/travel-restrictions/covid-vaccinated-travellers-entering-canada#set-up-account

Hotel options: Hyatt Place Niagara Falls(US) and Sheraton Fallsview Hotel (Canada)

[bananaairplane]

The Winding Road

Harvest ended early— about a month early-  because of the smoke damage from the fires. I hit the road for San Francisco on Wednesday, taking three days to drive the Pacific coast from Newport, OR to Mendocino, CA and then cutting in through the Alexander Valley, Sonoma, and Napa. Harvest ending so early is just another wrench thrown into this weird year, another pivot to plan B, C, D— whatever we’re on now. I felt like I was hitting my stride at the winery, mastering the different tasks and beginning to put the pieces together to understand the process as a whole, from pumping the grapes off the crush pad into the tanks, to pumping over the tanks before fermentation, to inoculating with yeast, more pumping over, racking off the lees, and finally, on my last day, barreling down the best lots of wine. I started by branding the new oak barrels (spray painting them with a stencil, really) and numbering them, so it felt good to come full circle and pump the wine into barrels. I was sad to see it all ending, but also conscious that my sadness marked how good the experience has been. It struck me as I packed up: there’s nothing like leaving a place to make it feel like home.

The road trip is another novelty in this year of adventure, because as a city kid I’ve never really driven much. And, most of the driving I’ve done has been low-speed, tactical driving around the East Coast. It’s the kind of stuff most people hate: elbowing into a lane, swerving around a delivery truck, and trawling for a parking spot: circling the block, antenna quivering for a door opening, a brake light igniting, any sign that a parked car is about to move. That’s the real secret to finding parking in the city— you have to identify the spot before it opens up, because once the current car leaves, it’s too late. (this also leads me to hover annoyingly at busy restaurants.) So getting behind the wheel and rolling down the highway for 6 hours is a novel experience. I agonized over whether I should have turned off at that last vista point. I wondered whether my “drive safe and save” bluetooth beacon could autodial the Highway Patrol to report me for speeding, and how many minutes ago it was likely to have done so. I set cruise control and felt smug. On this trip, I discovered all the most banal aspects of driving and exalted in them.

The trip began in earnest when I hit the Pacific. It felt like an impact, the way it opened up at the end of the road as I crested a hill. Royal blue and velvety, blotting out the pavement and the low-slung commercial strip, the trees and part of the sky. Within minutes I was waiting in line at a roadside clam shack, debating whether to have the fried oysters and halibut or the steamers, and then ordering both. My first analyst said that according to Jung, who was Swiss, some people are drawn to mountains and others to the sea. When I lived near Mont Blanc, I remember hearing locals say that some people experience the mountain as a sinister presence, were almost driven mad by it looming over them. These seem like the beliefs of people who have not visited the West Coast. In Oregon, Highway 101 hugs the curves of the hills, periodically bursting through the curtain of pine to reveal the sea thumping against tall cliffs. I opened the sunroof to let in the alternating waves of crisp mountain air and gauzy ocean breeze. Everything had a sheen to it: the ocean, glimmering with reflected sunlight, and the rolling green hills of evergreen forest, its thousands of individual pine needles shimmering like bugle beads on an evening gown.

There’s something weird about going on a road trip within the context of a larger, longer trip. It’s like Shakespeare’s play within a play. The road trip is usually a place of wildness and interior voyage: The logic of the road pulls you away from the everyday and, unmooring you from the contexts where you recognize yourself, opens the way for introspection and discovery. Already at sea, I turned to the sea as a point of familiarity. But this was not my sea; this was the Pacific. The steamers were smaller than Atlantic little-neck clams, and sat in tiny, pleated shells instead of heavy, horizontally ridged ones. The relentless cliffs, the eerie rock formations jutting up out of the beach, all signaled an other ocean than the one I knew. The sea is the same; it is you that are different. I dreamed I loved a man who left his wife for a woman other than me. This was all getting a bit baroque. I probably should not have listened to so many hours of Dua Lipa. I was that person pulling up at a trailhead miles down a dirt road in the middle of Redwoods National Park at 8:45am, amidst the silent majesty of the ancient trees, with the sunroof open and dance music blaring. Fortunately there was no one around; I was the second car in the pullout. I could rustle around in my trunk and snap selfies in front of the trail sign in peace.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I didn’t get to the Redwoods until Day 2. I had my weird dream at a Dickensian forest lodge/ RV park pressed up against the highway that evening. On Day 3, I took the fork where Highway 1 begins in Legett, CA and headed for Mendocino. My favorite three minutes of cinema is the opening credits of the original Italian Job, in which a man in florid brown wraparound sunglasses guides a Lamborghini Miura through the switchbacks of the Italian Alps. Matt Munro croons “On Days Like These” as the driver walks his hands walk back and forth around the steering wheel underneath the dizzying view out the windshield. This was my aesthetic imperative for the day. At its beginning, Highway 1 slithers through forest, looping back and forth more aggressively even than it does on the coast. The speed limit is 55 but you would have to be Evil Knievel to go that fast, because most of the curves are 25 or 15 mph. I played Frank Sinatra and, as I flung my 20-year-old Camry back and forth, reflected that everyone should really be issued a roadster at the beginning of the road. Also perhaps a barf bag for any passengers. Fortunately my only passengers were the debris that accumulates on the passenger seat when you are driving alone, and they hit the rubber floor mat immediately.

On Highway 1 I found the sea again, after the interlude of the Redwood National Parks. Freud describes an “oceanic feeling”: “a sensation of eternity, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded.” He has never felt it, he claims, but a friend describes it to him to explain why people seek out religion. Over the following hundred or so pages of “Civilization and Its Discontents,” he seems to find the roots of this feeling in the condition of modernity, which separates us from one another and leaves us longing for love and connection. For Freud, the oceanic feeling isn’t really about the ocean so much as what it connotes— expansive, pacific.

Probably what earns Freud’s scorn most about the oceanic feeling is the benevolent view of nature it contains. The idea we have when we go on a hike or feel lulled by the sound of waves—of nature as restorative, nourishing, salutary— is a product of the Enlightenment and coeval with consumer capitalism. As Odysseus sails around the Mediterranean, Homer calls the sea “wine dark,” usually rendered as one word: winedark. I thought about this at the winery, sometimes while contemplating the wine stains on my t-shirt. The darkness describes more than the rich, opaque red of wine; it also stands in for the mysterious forces concealed in the sea and in the beverage. The sea yields monsters or, equally terrifying, storms. Wine holds a transformative power over humans— unpredictable and dangerous. For Homer, the sea is also a kind of beast: Odysseus’ ship sails on its back. The idea of the sea as a winedark monster reinforces this idea of a mysterious life force, the sea as a living beast with mysterious depths. The sea and the wine contain a vital force that promises to overwhelm and shatter human projects.

From things that Freud says at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents, I think he sees the oceanic feeling as something womblike and reassuring. The wine dark sea represents loss of control, the futility of human will before the capricious gods. Between the oceanic feeling and the winedark sea lie the will to dominate nature and the sorrow when this domination is achieved, shot through the with the unsettling idea that an untamable current runs deep within the human psyche.

[androshchuk-run]

Getting to know the streets of Varna

[miatravelove]

. . 🕊️🕊️🕊️ . . . #traveltheworld #traveler #travellovers #travelphotography #travelgram #travelling #travelblogger #tripblog #triproud #girlstraveler #girlstrip #girlsborntotravel #wearetravelgirls #iamtb #joytb #mytrip_stw #tabippo #tabigenic #instatravel #travelawesome #travelersnotebook #beachstyle #beachgirl #beach #bikini #traveltogether #traveller #thewonderingtourist https://www.instagram.com/p/CAhh48opGt6/?igshid=1sbql1gu2coar

[suzyatlatin18-blog]

A bubble man in Plaza Mayor, Madrid 🇪🇸👀💕

[acidchihiro]

[saltwater-maple]

party on staten island

[justmonicca]

Leaving for a weeklong trip with no wifi, see you all on Saturday night! Don't kill anyone while I'm gone and also no discourse

[tripblogging-blog]

GoodBye Coronavirus! Information From Coronavirus Patients Recovering From Hosptial's. STAY HOME.SAVE LIVES.Help stop coronavirus

[gaialnp]

This is Rome!! #instarome #instaroma #pointofview #romebynight #instaitaly #igersitalia #igersroma #lights #romelights #landscape #landscapephotography #landscaperome #instatravel #instatrip #blogtrip #blogtravel #bloggertrip #bloggertravel #tripblog #tripblogger #travelblog #travelblogger #wanderlust #wanderlustinrome #solocosebelle (presso Rocca di Papa)

[swan-tours-blog]

Road Trip to Bhubaneswar Konark Visakhapatnam

Road Trip to Bhubaneswar Konark Visakhapatnam

Road Trip

Road Trip to Bhubaneswar Konark Visakhapatnam

Road Trip to Bhubaneswar Konark Visakhapatnam

Bhubaneshwar

Bhubaneshwar is the capital of Orissa and also the former capital of the ancient kingdom of Kalinga. It is often referred to as the ‘Temple City’, because it had a thousand temples at one time. Dominating the skyline of Bhubaneshwar is three easy to identify monuments, the Lingaraj…

[miatravelove]

. . . I can’t wait go to beach. . . ♡＿＿＿STAY HOME＿＿＿♡ . #travelling #travellovers #traveler #travelersnotebook #travelblogger #traveltheworld #travelphotography #travelgram #triproud #tripgram #tripblog #joytb #tabigenic #tabippo #histrip_japan #mytrip_stw #wearetravelgirls #thewonderingtourist #iamtb #womensecret #beach #beachgirls #beachlife #beachstyle #europetravel #europetrip https://www.instagram.com/p/B_mZy20puar/?igshid=kx865v6a3ho6

[saltwater-maple]

-passing the exit for nasa goddard- -me pressing my hands against the window and whimpering softly-

[justmonicca]

I renamed one of Lon'qu's Killing Edges "THOTSLAYER"

[tripblogging-blog]

Best things in Switzerland are Shimmering glaciers, snow capped mountains, gorgeous blue lakes, picturesque landscape, enchanting view of rolling mountains and glamorous cities are very exciting.

[gaialnp]

They all float! Do you want a nice colored balloon? #theyallfloat #pennywise #coloredballoons #nicecoloredballons #ballons #halloween #enjoy #chiostrodelbramante #palloniinfaccia #fotosceme #crazyphoto #ballonsonface #balloonseverywhere #redballoons #enjoylife #enjoythelittlethings #enjoyeverything #instaroma #instarome @chiostrodelbramante_roma #tripblog #travelblog #wanderlust #blogtrip #blogtravel #discoverrome #solocosebelle #roomballoons #alwaystravelling #alwaystrippin #neverstop (presso Enjoy - Chiostro Del Bramante)