1:30 a.m. comes early. Way too early. Mike didn't sleep much. I did get in about 4 hours of sleep.
I remember traveling through Las Vegas, and seeing the lights of the Big City as we crested the hill. Now it's more than a big city. It's an entire desert valley.
Our flight left on time at 6:05 a.m. We got to DFW, had about an hour and then had a slightly delayed flight on to Buffalo.
Early days mean you nap when you can. So we snoozed at airports and on planes.
This is Mike laughing at me when I said I was getting a bit giddy about being here! But I AM giddy and excited to see new things!
Our room is comfy.
There are lots of old cool houses around. These aren't a good selection, but just out our hotel window.
A church we walked past on our way to eat.
We were able to get our Rental car without too long of a wait. Mike enjoyed visiting with a Buffalo bills fan while we waited in line. They upgraded our vehicle from a small Toyota Corolla sort of thing to a Jeep Wrangler. We thought it might be kind of fun. It turns out it's something of a gas hog and pretty noisy.
We drove from the Buffalo Niagara international airport up to Niagara City proper. We found our hotel. We figured out what we would be doing in the coming days by picking up some other maps from the hotel lobby. And we also talked to Jo-Anne Miner from Mississauga.
Mike taught and baptized Jo-Anne about 55 years ago. It was kind of fun to find her recently, because it had been more than 30 years since he had heard from her. But we have talked about her and thought about her lots in those 30 years.
When we spoke with her and found out that we had to be at the temple quite early in the morning in Toronto, we determined that we would need to wake up really early. We found this out right after eating our dinner at a nearby buffet restaurant in Indian casino Tuesday night. It was walking distance. We enjoyed the walk over there. But it was a long day of travel and we hit the sack pretty early that night. Thankfully, Mike was able to sleep well and long. But not long enough. We had to get up about 4:30 a.m.
When we accidentally ended up in Buffalo when trying to get our phones to work. That's a little BUFFALO statue behind the pole.
Freeway scenes. We saw a LOT of freeway. The traffic barrels are a bit smaller than ours and remind me of Halloween and witches hats. Or socks.
Lots of lake Erie. ? Ontario?
A bridge
A part of the old bridge.
Maybe Ontario in the distance.
A barge or ship? Blurry.
It took about an hour and a half to get to her place, and when we got there, she didn't answer her door. First off, we had to ring her room number in the highrise apartment from the secured lobby. She did not answer. Our phones, we found out, were not working. Mike had tried to change our phone plan before we left home, but they weren't open when he phoned. And then we forgot before we drove out of the country and went to Canada Wednesday morning for our appointment to pick up Joann and her roommate and go to the temple. Poof! no more phones. That was really frustrating and stressful for Mike.
Then he looked at his phone and discovered that he had missed a phone call from her last night about 10:30 p.m. He had not listened to his voicemail, and couldn't now, so we had no idea why she would have been calling that late, or what changes there might have been to our original plans to be at the temple quite early. He immediately thinks of worst case scenario. So rather than drive the 40 minutes or so more from her house to the temple, which wasn't even possible because now navigation no longer worked on my phone, he decided to go back across the river and get our phones turned on... The navigation initially started in the US first thing when we started out at 5 a.m., and continued on into Canada at first to get us to Jo-Anne's, but I couldn't plug anything new into it after that. Nothing was working. No one was able to communicate. There was nothing to do but to drive clear back to the US 1 hr, 30 min or so, call our cell phone provider and get the international roaming going and then call and figure out what was going on with Jo-Anne. She has been in very poor health for the last several months, so Mike just assumed maybe she had been taken to the hospital in the night or something.
Of course as soon as the new phone plan turned on, then we got her telephone calls and messages that came through about changes, about a later time start, etc etc. So we ended up keeping to our original plans which had just been to attend the 12:30 p.m. endowment session. Which is what we did. Whew! It was quite the ordeal to get there. But we did it! And then we went out to eat Chinese food afterwards. And even that was a bit challenging because the close by Chinese food restaurant that we tried to go to closed at 3:00 p.m., along with all of the other franchised Mandarin Chinese restaurants!. Well we found a Chinese restaurant and ate there anyway. We had plenty to eat. And it was yummy. We had a good time visiting. It was great to renew old acquaintances, and meet her new Young friend Jen. All in all it was a good day at the temple with friends.
Mike and Jo-Anne
Mike, Jo-Anne, Jen
We were pretty pooped out when we came back to our Niagara Hotel, but figured it would be the only chance we would have to see the falls at night, so we navigated back to our hotel, changed our clothes, and drove around to see where we could possibly go to view them. But all the parking was very expensive, and it's so close by. We decided that we would be better off walking to the falls from our hotel, rather than drive and pay and park. Plus, we have been sitting and driving all day long, so a walk would do us good.
I was very excited when I first viewed the Falls as we were driving across rainbow bridge from Canada to the us. I forgot to mention that we missed a turn somewhere along Queen Elizabeth way and ended up down by Buffalo instead of in Niagara and had to backtrack a lot. Getting lost is what we do. And we do it really well. :-)
That first view is pretty spectacular! I might have accidentally deleted that shot from my phone, thinking it was just one of the many bazillions I took in the evening. Oops. But it was soooo nice.
We also enjoyed many views of the lake on our many long drives, the Welland canal, high-rises in all the cities nearby like Toronto and Mississauga and Hamilton and Burlington. Those were areas where Mike served his mission. It has changed a bit in the past 50+ years. :-) Canada is still smelting and producing steel. We became very familiar with the Queen Elizabeth highway because we traversed it going to her house once, going back to niagara/Buffalo ( by accident) , going back to Mississauga, going on to Toronto to the temple, back to Mississauga for lunch, and then back to Niagara Falls again. It was a lot of miles. But Mike did it with just one hot chocolate, and a Dr pepper on the way home. And a couple of ibuprofen because his headache was starting after all of that phone fiasco in the morning. And a few and a few navigational snafus, too! Haha. It's a good thing our rental car has unlimited mileage. I'm kind of afraid of what the toll fees are going to be, however. Because we did use toll roads quite a bit and then ended up backtracking and doing them again. And again! What a day.
We went to a Tim Horton's for a breakfast donut. We bought expensive gasoline for the Jeep-- which ended up being very difficult for Joanne to climb into. She normally uses an electric wheelchair, but had a rollator type Walker that was close to a portable wheelchair. It was extremely difficult for her to do that climb into the Jeep, even with the help of a stool. She simply has no strength in her legs. I'm glad we didn't damage her too terribly much trying to wrestle her in and out of that jeep! Poor joanne. She must have felt really manhandled. But she made it! And I think she enjoyed spending time with us. She said she did. I believe her.
Here are some photos of our two days so far.
