Brokaw Tidbits

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

2012 Summer Vacation- Part 3

Get ready for some pictures, folks! The next part of our trip took us back to Ottawa to pick up Josh from his conference. Then we drove down to Buffalo, NY to pick up my brother from the airport for some serious fun at Niagara Falls!

One of the Parliament buildings, Ottawa

Ottawa, Ontario Canada

We crossed back into the US on my birthday. At the border they had these plants cut into the date.

Now on to Niagara! This was probably my favorite part of the whole trip. It was pretty hard to narrow down the pictures, but I tried.
These first pictures are taken from the Canadian side. People always say you have to see the falls from Canada, but I didn't understand why until we were there. Later I'll show pictures from the America side and you'll see the huge difference.
There are 2 waterfalls that make up Niagara: the American Falls and Horseshoe Falls.


American Falls- the small waterfall on the far right is called Bridal Veil Falls. You can also see one of the Maid of the Mist boats at the base of the falls. We took this ride the next day.

Bridal Veil Falls- the walkway and stairs are part of the Cave of the Wind path. We did that the next day too! Those yellow spots are people wearing yellow ponchos. You can also see people at the top between the 2 falls.

Horseshoe Falls. That is not a cloud, it is mist rising from the falls. You could see the mist from miles away.

American Falls, left, Horseshoe Falls, right

Skylon Tower- my brother treated us to dinner at the top for my birthday- aww!

Horseshoe Falls

If you look close, you can see a double rainbow. That's another Maid of the Mist boat at the bottom of the rainbow.

A pretty poor attempt at a panoramic shot of the whole rainbow

View of Horseshoe Falls from the top of the Skylon Tower. This was our view for dinner- not bad!

While we were eating dinner, this guy appeared out on a high wire that goes from the Skylar Tower to the 53rd floor of the Hilton Hotel. It probably took him about 30 minutes to walk across. The distance is 1/4 mile! He does this walk every night for 12 weeks! You can click here for more info. It was pretty amazing to watch.

View of American Falls from the Skylon Tower

One of my favorite pictures- Niagara Falls at sunset, view from Skylon Tower

The next day, we stayed in the US and toured the Falls area. Here's what the falls look like from this side. Just a little different!

American Falls with Horseshoe Falls in the distance. The tall buildings are on the Canadian side.

American Falls with the Rainbow Bridge in the background.

American Falls

Rainbow Bridge- US on the right, Canada on the left

Josh on the Maid of the Mist boat ride with American Falls in the background. We didn't get nearly as wet as we expected here. I think it depends on the wind direction.

American Falls

Me at the end of the boat ride. See, not too wet. I never used my hood. It was way too hot, and I didn't mind getting my hair wet :)

American Falls with Horseshoe Falls in the background.

On our Cave of the Winds walk, we spotted these baby seagulls. The mama is up a little higher behind the grass.

At the base of the American Falls. It was fun to reach out and touch the water!

Josh in his yellow poncho at Cave of the Winds- this is where we got really wet! It was too wet to take any more pictures after this point, but we got a lot closer. We were able to stand under part of the falls and let the water fall on our heads!

Next up: Buffalo, NY, Statue of Liberty, and our drive home- we're almost done!

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

2012 Summer Vacation- Part 2

The second part of our vacation took us across the Canadian border to Ottawa, Ontario. Josh was speaking at a conference there, so Mom and I dropped him off and then spent the night in Montreal. It was fun using kilometers instead of miles and trying to figure out all the french signs. We didn't do any sightseeing stuff in Canada at that point because we knew we would be back later to get Josh.
Mom and I reentered the US and drove through Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York over the course of a few days. Here are some highlights from our little road trip.

We visited the LL Bean flagship store and outlet malls in Maine.

Capitol building in Concord, New Hampshire

The drive was so pretty and green, but sometimes I wished we could see farther than just a few feet off in the distance.

Lots of green, curvy roads. There were cities out there somewhere, but we couldn't see them.

Capitol building in Montpelier, VT

Montpelier, VT- pretty setting for the capitol building, don't you think?

Montpelier, VT- only a town of 8000 people

While we were in Vermont, one of our main goals was to get some real maple syrup. We found Morse Maple Farm that has been in operation for 8 generations. They no longer hang buckets from the trees to collect sap. Now they use a more efficient system of tubing that connects all the trees and feeds sap directly into a large tank without any manual labor.

You can see some of the tubing running between the trees and large pipes that carry sap down the hill.

Sap collecting tank outside the sugar house. Again, notice all the pipes running to this area. The condenser is inside the building.

More maple trees with tubing and pipes

A close up of 1 maple tree. The little clear part at the end of the dark blue tube will be inserted into the tiny hole in the tree at the top right of the picture whenever it's sap collecting time.

The sugar house. The tall chimneys are connected to the condenser inside. Big clouds of steam come from these chimneys when the syrup is being made.

Another necessary stop in Vermont was the Ben and Jerry's ice cream factory. We toured the factory and then had ice cream for brunch. Mmm mmm!

From Vermont, we headed west through New York so we could eventually get back to Ottawa. We took a ferry across Lake Champlain and drove through the Adirondacks stopping in Lake Placid along the way.