Road Trip Diaries

When we awoke, I peered through the curtains to see how our lovely view was coming along. What I saw was mist or cloud.

Breakfast was provided in a little paper bag, by the motel office, because the Howe Caverns restaurant had ceased to serve breakfast, guests are likely to be wanting to stay for the caverns, and it’s a long way to go for anywhere else to eat.

By the time we were ready to leave, the mist had cleared.

We drove to the Secret Caverns, admiring the garish billboards that lured us there.

The first billboard refers to a visit made by Kevin Smith (a.k.a. Silent Bob; not-as-good-as-he-used-to-be New Jersey director of Clerks, Dogma etc.)

The differences between Howe Caverns and Secret Caverns are manifold:
Secret Caverns is run by hippies.

At Howe Caverns you are told not to throw coins in the water. At Secret Caverns there is a wishing well.

Howe Caverns claims to contain only two living things other than humans: bats and moss (which grows in the artificial light). I might believe this if the claim is only meant to apply to multicellular life. Secret Cavens has at least one frog, and claims a cavern monster.

Secret Caverns has a 100ft underground waterfall.

At Howe Caverns you are told not to touch any formations, because it "kills" the growing calcite — oils from the skin permeate it, make it a grimy colour, and stop it growing. At Secret Caverns, they believe that this kind of damage "heals" quickly (in geological time), and so allow you to touch whatever you like. This means a lot of their formations are grey and ugly, but hey, you can touch stuff. Secret Caverns’ formations are younger, and as it is a wetter cave, faster growing.

Secret Caverns has restrooms in the same garish style as their billboards.

It was fresh and cool in the cave, and hot and humid coming out.

Leaving Secret Caverns, we set aim for US-20 West, but somehow missed the main road that would take us there. We spent about half an hour on county roads, never heading in the wrong direction, but going the right way more slowly than US-20 would have taken us, until we were eventually back on track.

During this time, we saw some very pretty countryside and farmland, as well as startling a large raptor in the process of feasting on some roadkill.

We paused very briefly to photograph a roadside "souvenier" shop shaped like a teepee.

… and we ate a delicious lunch of BBQ beef at Quack’s Diner.

We had decided to aim for Niagara Falls that night, so a five hour drive on US-20 followed our lunch, passing through numerous pretty towns along the North edge of the Finger Lakes of upstate New York.

There was one interruption to this drive: I was down to my last t-shirt, and we considered it too early in the holiday to do laundry, so we kept an eye open for somewhere to buy an extra couple of shirts. We happened upon a J.C. Penney, which turned out to be part of the Finger Lakes Mall in Auburn. I quickly located an appropriate offer: four plain t-shirts for $20, and I was ready to pay and leave. Debbie had browsing in mind, however, so I left her to it, and went to see what else the mall had to offer.

I wandered into a huge hunting and fishing shop — Bass Pro Shops — mainly to gawp at the terrifying knives, guns and crossbows, which were indeed a sight to behold. I remembered Debbie suggesting, after our failed attempt to find reasonably priced GPS equipment in Circuit City in Providence, that a hunting shop might be a better place. Sure enough, they had a wide range of GPS receivers, including one just like my old stolen Garmin Etrex Legend for $129.  I gave them the opportunity to give me a reason to spend more on a fancier one, but they told me the extra features were not worth the extra money, and I agreed.

So we have a GPS again, and I already know how to use it. How very satisfying.

For the remaining three hours to Niagara Falls, I kept Debbie up to date with our bearing, ETA and Velocity Made Good. The last 40 miles along US-20 before the suburbs of  Buffalo begin are long, straight and reasonably free of traffic, just like our prior experiences in less populated parts of the USA.

We anticipate more of this kind of road in the next three weeks — roads where you switch on cruise control and barely move any of the car’s controls for an hour at a time.

In Buffalo, we spotted Sgt Pepperoni’s restaurant, and I laughed out loud.

Billboards on I-190 as we approached Niagara Falls invited us to get "information" at the next exit. We accepted. This turned out to be Grey Line Tours being a tiny bit naughty, because while implying they’re a tourist information office, this is actually a Grey Line ticket office. Fortunately, we didn’t begrudge this one bit.  It was already past seven, and here we could book a hotel and tour package with the absolute minimum of hassle. We are staying at the Day’s Inn on the US side of the falls, and tomorrow a 4-5 hour bus tour will tick all the Niagara Falls boxes we intended to tick, and some more besides (for example, a floral clock apparently).

The Day’s Inn underground car park was a dark, hot, nasty place to be: but we found a little girl in there who had decided that the very best place to play was in a muddy oily puddle of car park water. Kids are terribly good at making their own entertainment.

Niagara Falls is a terrible, but entertaining example of what a godawful mess mankind can make of a natural wonder. The US side is just grimy. The Canadian side is like Blackpool, but with a bloody great river and some waterfalls where the beach should be. No donkeys either.

Taking care to carry our passports, we walked over the Rainbow Bridge to Canada, where we had dinner on a terrace which would have overlooked the falls had there not been a sweet shop in the way. We had Canadian draught beer — being walking distance from the hotel makes for a rare opportunity to drink on holiday.

At ten, there was a large and impressive fireworks display over the falls. I was a bit jaded at first — "I’ve seen better" — but by the end they’d won me over. Although, I have seen better.

We walked back to our hotel, artfully persuading US immigration to let us back in (phew!), I wrote this, while Debbie went to sleep. I’d better join her, because tomorrow we have a tour bus to catch.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 15th, 2005 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Oregon Trail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.