Running Home and Back

I asked my kids a rhetorical question, "What is more epic than running from one country to another?"
I answered "Running to the Moon,"  But my wise ass kid said you could run from one Continent to another.
Where did they get their smarts?  Don't answer that

We all knew I was gonna run over the boarder.  It had to be done.  The first day we were there I left the family sleeping  and hit the road in the rain at 6am.

Running on the Canadian side was not so much fun.  Yea, there is the Falls, but the sidewalk next to it is sandwiched between a wall and a  road.  It was also mostly lumpy cobblestones.

Thank you Cnugent

So with only my Enhanced NYS Drivers License , my room key and an US$10 bill in my shoe I headed over to the Rainbow Bridge.  (We never did change currency.  Withe the the US dollar worth about 98 cents in Canada, everybody just accepted it as if if were Canadian.  Trading money would have cost us 2%.  Using our credit card would have cost us an additional 4%, so we spent a lot of greenbacks)

But there was a problem.  Not it getting into the USA, but in getting onto The Rainbow Bridge.  There was a toll, not just for cars, but for people.  It was 50¢, 2 quarters, ANY 2 QUARTERS.  Those change machines would break a US or Canadian $1 or $5, but crap, all I had was a Hamilton.

Fortunately, for me there was a nice lady behind the glass that made all sorts of change.  It would have been bad to go old school and jump the turnstile, really bad.


So across (see photos here) the bridge and off to the US.  The Homeland Security tough guy asked me if I had anything to declare.  Not wanting to be funny and not wanting him to check, I said "absolutely not".  I could have been funny, but he could have looked up my butt to see if I was lying.

The bridge lands you right next to Niagara Falls State Park. Of course it was a great place to run. It was designed by Fredrick Law Olmstead.  Most people say that the views of the Falls are better from the Canadian side.  I disagree.  The tourism is nicer from Canada.  The hotels and restaurants have better views, and there are more services.  But if you want to get right up to Niagara Falls, Goat Island is the place to be.

So I ran all around Goat Island and even onto Luna Island, the little scrap of land that separates the big part of the American Falls from the little Bridal Veil Falls  From there I had a direct view of the hotel that my family was still sleeping in.  I took the photo at right with my camera phone.  The Hilton is the tall building in the center with it top covered by fog.  Then I turned my Android back into a phone and woke my family up.

Below you can see a photo they took of me from the hotel.  I enhanced it by putting an exclamation point on the spot where I was.

Yes, I was .6 miles away (in a strait line).  My kids could not tell that I was jumping around like an idiot while they were taking my photo.  They could see that I was in fact the only person on that part of the island.

I repeated the run 2 days later and asked a nice park ranger to take my photo.  The Hilton is the tallest building behind me.