We started today by driving  just over 100 miles from Toronto to Niagara Falls 
.
I’m not sure what I expected Niagara Falls to be like, but I definitely wasn’t expecting the huge town that has sprung up around it and comprises casinos, theme parks, big hotels and lots of  falls related tours and attractions. We could have stayed there for a couple of days but we’d come to see the falls and we weren’t disappointed!
We decided to take the famous  “Maid of the Mist” boat tour . After taking an elevator from the rim down to the river we boarded the boat with around 150 others which took us right up to the bottom of the falls. As you can see from the photos it was very wet and very windy (hence the fetching blue ponchos), but amazing to get that close and hear and feel the power of the water coming down.
We then drove about another 300 miles back into the US (after being stopped at customs for a “secondary inspection”) and we’re staying at an amazing hotel tonight in Detroit . We’ve worked out that you can get some really amazing hotels pretty cheap through Expedia’s “secret saver” deals. Basically the big hotels sell off their unsold rooms on the cheap but it doesn’t tell you which hotel you’re going to be staying in until you’ve booked it. We’ve done it twice so far and they turned out to be the two nicest hotels we’ve stayed in.
Oh, and as we got to our hotel just after dusk we were treated to something I’ve never seen before, an amazing display by some fireflies just outside the hotel.