Day One: Canada, Eh?

We left home (only) an hour and a half later than we planned, but we finally left around 9:30. Our first stop was to see the World's Second Largest Garden Gnome. You would think that it would be difficult to hide a garden gnome 15 feet high, but we couldn't find it anywhere!! We looked and looked all over the small town in New York and couldn't spot it. That's why we aren't detectives, I guess... But we did spot a very interesting consolation prize- a *very bad* fake cow on Rollerblades. Who knew!
After about 6 more hours of driving through New York, and several very heavy downpours, we saw signs for Niagara Falls. Of course, with our combined ability of using the GPS, we managed to get turned around quite a bit. (Sad, I know.) Then we had to sit on the bridge to get to Canada for about 35 minutes. I was kind of surprised that we only lost a total of 50 minutes on our entire trip today! That might be a record for the two of us over such a long drive. And of course, there were very few rooms left in town, since there are apparently a lot of Connecticut people around (according to the hotel clerk), we had to settle for an overpriced room. Oh well, I guess that's what we get for waiting around too long.
Anyway, after we had the room all set, we decided to take a walk down to the Falls. Thinking it was a short walk, we left the hotel around 7. Well, it was about a 3.5 mile walk. Should've put on the running shoes. We checked out the Falls. Did some of the touristy stuff. Then we decided to stick around to see them lit up at night. The friendly police officer said that they were lit around 9:30, so we decided to stop and get a coffee to waste some time. We wasted a little bit too much time, and they were already lit up by the time we went back. They did look very pretty though! We decided that it was time to make the 3.5 mile trip back to the hotel, uphill this time. Definitely got in a great  lower body workout with all that walking around, after doing all that sitting!
We are going to check out the Maid of the Mist tomorrow morning and then off to Toronto for a couple of days.
A link to pictures will follow tomorrow.
Thanks for checking in!

States Visited: Connecticut, New York (2/50)
Provinces Visited: Ontario (1/10)
License Plates Seen: California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia (24/50)