The Honeymoon

Getting to our Canadian honeymoon proved to be a little less than straight forward than we had imagined.

We arrive at Manchester Airport at 04:30am on Tuesday ready for a 08:30 flight.  Everything seemed to be running smoothly and we boarded the plane, taxied round, then stopped and eventually disembarked as there was a fluid leak from the aircraft.  We both remained pretty philosophical about the whole affair and spent the time talking to some really lovely people from the flight.  The 11:00, 13:00 and eventually 15:00 passed before we were told at 16:30 that the flight had been cancelled until 05:30 the next morning.  Not the ideal start, although the airline company, with more than a little persuasion upgraded our hotel for the night.  Try as we might to imagine it Manchester airport was never going to live up to Niagara Falls: where, after an uneventful flight, we eventually reached early on Thursday morning.

Niagara Falls

We were warned that the town is nothing special, in fact it was described as a tacky version of Gt. Yarmouth or Blackpool and so it lived up to both descriptions; however words cannot really describe just how breathtaking the Falls actually are.  The flow over both the Horseshoe and American Falls totals about 2000tonnes of water every minute, with the Canadians, very proudly, claiming about 90% of the flow.  Niagara was originally named Onguiaahra meaning "Great Thunderer of Waters", and thunder is the nearest thing we can think of to the perpetual background rumbling you could hear all round town.

We spent 2 days in Niagara, taking time to visit Fort Erie; a front line fort in the war between Britain and America; before heading up round the coast and eventually to Ottawa, via the Niagara valley and picturesque Niagara-on-the-Lake, situated where the mouth of the Niagara River flows into Lake Ontario.