Lakes and Falls

Saturday brought about a good day to drive around and see part of the scenery around Rochester. We drove up to Sea Breeze, NY, which as the name might imply (and might not, for that matter) is right on Irondequoit Bay up on Lake Ontario. We did some letterboxing in a park nearby and then continued around to see (a very small part) of Lake Ontario.


Then we went to the DCA Drum Corps World Championships, right down the street at Paetec Park in Rochester. The DCA is apparently the level below the self-proclaimed "major league of drum corps" which is DCI. But it was fun to go watch. We heard some good bands, and saw some good performances.

Sunday we headed over to Buffalo and then up to Niagra Falls. The falls were spectacular. The funny part to me is how the American side of the falls is a state park, with lots of green landscape and trees, whereas the Canadian side of the falls is mass commercialization. We started at the Horseshoe falls on the U.S. side and proceeded to walk all the way around through the crowded Labor Day Weekend masses, to the American Falls, and over the bridge to Canada. Most of the pictures you see of the falls are all taken of the American Falls from the Canadian side. But once you cross into Canada you feel like you've walked onto the Las Vegas strip, with wall-to-wall stores, Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood, wax museum, well, every other tourist trap attraction you could imagine. Nice to see capitalism is alive and well in Canada. We walked past most of that and walked up the Canadian side of the river, then turned around and headed back where we came from. Noticing the final insult, a 50-cent toll to leave Canada and get back into the U.S., we made our way back and after spending about 4 hours exploring the falls, headed back home.

A note of warning to those viewing my online photo album: there are about 3 dozen pictures of Niagra falls, from all different angles. No, I don't expect anyone to think half of the pictures are any different from the other half of them, but hey, some turned out better than others, why be picky? :)

Monday was Labor Day, though having a holiday in the middle of a vacation doesn't really feel much different than anything else. Today we went to a minor league baseball game between the Rochester Red Wings (AAA-Minnesota) and the Buffalo Bisons (AAA-Cleveland) in Rochester. Yes, that's bisonS with an S on the end... apparently rules of plurality don't matter when it's a sports team. It was a fun game to go to, about 10,000 fans showed up for the final game of the season, where neither team had any chance of making it to the playoffs, but the home team Red Wings were victorious 8-5.

After we returned we had dinner with some friends of the Gingras' from their church. And now it's time to wind down and get things ready to head home tomorrow night. It's been a nice vacation, but it's about time to head home, me thinks. Hopefully my airport adventures aren't too adventurous either.