Day 81 - Niagara on the Lake, Niagara Falls and Welland Canal, OntarioSeptember 17, 2008
We woke up to a sunny day again this morning so this is the second day of sunshine and no rain. How lucky can we get.
Today is the day that Leo will be filming locks 4, 5 and 6 of the Welland Canal. There are a total of 8 locks between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie which raise the ships a total of 91 meters. Three of them are located one immediately after the other, and to make it all better, they can be viewed in line from Lift Bridge 5 so that you can see a stair step effect as the ships move through each successive lock. This is Leo`s Welland Canal nirvana, and where he had been drooling about taking pictures and video. I have decided to go with him and just sit in a lawn chair and read my book. But first we went to the Canal Visitor’s Centre (http://www.stcatharineslock3museum.ca/ & http://www.thoroldtourism.ca/) which is located at Lock 3 and where they post the times, lengths and direction of the ships which will be coming through the locks that day. Yesterday was a really good day for ships coming through but unfortunately today is not that good, with just 1 ship being projected to arrive at Lock 3 but not until around 4:30 pm.
So we decided to go to Niagara on the Lake as we had to do some ‘souvenir’ shopping at one particular store and then on to Niagara Falls before we went back again to the locks. But this must be our bad luck day as the store we wanted to shop at in Niagara on the Lake had closed down about 3 years ago. So we walked up and down the main street viewing all the shops to use up our parking time and then went on to Niagara Falls.
The falls are certainly spectacular but not the man-made structures around them. Despite this Leo braved the tourists and the rank commercialism to take some pictures for all of us to enjoy. From the falls we went to the locks and there our luck turned for the better. The Visitor Centre now showed another ship arriving in the opposite direction at around the same time as the earlier scheduled ship. We arrived before the latter was due to appear, but were pleasantly surprised to see another unscheduled one was already about to pass up the canal below the lift bridge 5 to head towards Lock 4. Soon it was in the lock and the scheduled ship appeared behind her headed in the same direction. Then after some time the ship from the other side came into the locks and as she descended an unexpected fourth ship appeared going down the canal as well. At one point there were actually 4 ships in the locks before us, although by this time the first could only be seen by her masts. Well you can imagine the excitement Leo was feeling at all this. Unfortunately it got too dark to film the very end of it all so we left to go back to the campground to get ready to leave again in the morning for Sudbury. But the pictures will allow you to share in this spectacle, and if you ask Leo some time down the road he can show you the time lapse movie he will be making from the video tape he took of all this action.
Today’s pictures can be found here.
Day 82 – Drive from Queenston to Sudbury
September 18, 2008
We are in luck again today as we woke up to sunshine again for our trip north. Summer may finally be arriving for us although it took until September and Ontario to do so. There is only one quick way to get to Sudbury and that is by taking the expressway 401 all the way past Toronto and then highways 427 and 69 up to Sudbury (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Sudbury). We had asked our navigator about a route which would avoid freeways, but this wound up taking 8 hours instead of around 4, so we buttoned down the hatches and hit the traffic around Toronto again. We made pretty good time but it did mean of course there was no chance to stop anywhere to take any pictures. However, the scenery was very nice at times after we left the build up area of Greater Toronto and headed into the countryside to the north.
Sorry but there are thus no pictures for today.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I guess we forgot to tell you that the Winnie-the-Pooh store closed at Niagara-on-the-Lake...we were looking for it a couple of years ago when we were there, too.
ReplyDeleteDid you at least get to drink some NotL wine????