The Falls/American Side

The day was a little cloudier and a little windier than the day before but there was still plenty of sunshine!!  We checked online to find a coffee place and soon found ourselves at Murphy's Cafe - a cute little place not far from the falls parking lot!  Great coffee - great conversation!

Today we were staying on the US side - and armed with a detailed map, we headed over to Goat Island which was a really nice walk!  We crossed a bridge and headed over to the Cave of the Winds which was our first excursion of the day!  Yellow rain coats today - and even sandals to put on your feet!!  Knowing what we did from the day before, we rolled our pants leg up a ways (but apparently not far enough!!).  They gave you a bag to carry your regular shoes in and we ended up tying them to our purses, under our raincoats which worked out fine!!

It's amazing how the falls look from different angles - this time we were beside the American Falls - up close and personal!!!

The mist coming off the falls was amazing and there were only certain times you could get your camera out to take pictures!

I love the picture below as it shows the amount of water that comes over the falls - loud, crashing water - I also like the little people at the bottom of the picture - they kind of look like they have been photo shopped in!!

Unlike the Horseshoe Falls, these falls have lots of rocks and boulders and it makes for a stunning scene!

Don't we look cute in our yellow raincoats with our sacks of shoes?

The highest deck you can climb up to is called The Hurricane Deck - and that's exactly what it feels like when you get up there - the wind and rain and mist is unbelievable and that's how our jeans got soaked once again!!  The wind would blow up your raincoat and in seconds you were soaked!!  It was great and everybody needs to experience it once!!

We walked around a lot and the trees were beautiful!  It was nice to see the hardwood trees' colors as we mainly just have the aspens up where we live!

This picture shows the drop off edge - wow - can you imagine being in a raft or a boat and then taking that plunge?

One of the places we wanted to walk was on Three Sisters Islands but as you can see, it was closed!

After lunch, we headed to the Observation Deck, the deck that looked like it was sticking out over the water on some of the pictures.  It was pretty windy by that time so we didn't spend a lot of time there but the views were amazing as we knew they would be!

Our next excursion was to see the movie, Niagara, Legends of Adventure - it felt great to sink down in those nice theater seats and relax for a while - (did I forget to mention that Teri wore a pedometer and we walked 15,000 steps on Thursday and another 10,000 steps on Friday?) - and the movie was excellent, very well done!

We were fading rather fast by this time - so we headed over to Wine of Third for some wine and tapas!

 

It was a nice place with a relaxed atmosphere and we enjoyed our wine and tapas which we just ended up having for our dinner!  One last stop at the Seneca Casino as we wanted to check out the 3 Sisters Cafe - we saw it and we high tailed it out of there - the casino allowed smoking and the smell was so bad that none of us could stand it!!

 

Luckily our clothes didn't smell like smoke for the short time we were there and we headed back to the hotel for some down time and to finalize our plans for the next day!