Monday, August 4, 2015
We were up early today. We were up before the alarm went off.
We were up because we were up for hours overnight because the water was so
rough and the splashing against and windows and the slamming into the bottom of
the hull had so awake and horrified. It was not a restful night like last night
on the St. Lawrence River. No one made an announcement but evidently we entered
Lake Ontario last night just before dinner. It got progressively rougher all
night. We were scheduled to be docked at Port Weller at 5am. It was 7am before
we were docked there. We picked up our pilot about 5am. Mercifully, shortly
after that we entered the breakwater to enter the Welland Canal. The Saint
Laurent will spend all day transiting the canal and 8 lifting locks while we
are off today in buses.
Breakfast was at 6:30am. We sat with Edgar again. We really
like him. He is a great waiter. He told us this morning that he hoped to get his
work done quickly after the passengers left and to get to go to see Niagara
Falls. We had him again for dinner and his boss didn’t let him go. How
disappointing. So, we still left the boat on schedule between 7:30am and 7:45am
to load our color-assigned buses. We got our color assignments with our final
cruise documents. We are blue bus. There are 5 buses. I think they tried to put
schools together if they could but I’m not sure. It seemed like a lot of Tulane
people were on our bus, but I don’t know if all of them were. We were
instructed yesterday to pick up our listening device and to carry them today,
but we never used them. So, we drove about 30 minutes to get to Niagara Falls.
We had a lot of different views and a drive through the town which has built up
like crazy around the falls. We were scheduled to do the Hornblower cruise from
the Canadian side (the Maid of the Mist still does the US side) at 10:15am, so there
was time to kill. I learned on the bus that we did not have to take the 20
minute boat ride into the mist of Horseshoe Falls. I saw a Starbucks about a block
away where we disembarked the buses and decided not to go on the boat for good.
I had been waffling about it as I didn’t really want to. I think it is stupid
to take a boat to the bottom of waterfalls to get wet. We watched the
Hornblower sit and bob like an ocean tender from the Visitor’s Center and I
really didn’t want to do it and now I had another excuse. I bought my most expensive
ever Starbucks mug at $17.95 Canadian. I used my $10US giftcard from Stuart
Jones again! Thanks Stuart! It is one of the new design mugs and I really
prefer the old designs but I like this one. I rejoined the bus and Clay without
any trouble. The same cannot be said of everyone else on the bus. We had a terrible
guide today. She could talk a blue streak without actually communicating any
necessary information. So, we got back on the road and it was time for lunch. We
drove to Niagara-on-the-Lake and the Peller Estates Vineyard. We had a 3-course
lunch in the Cellars. It was good and quite well done. After lunch we had a
winery tour and tasting. Their specialty was a red icewine. We don’t usually
like icewines, but this one was very nice. After lunch, we drove around
Niagara-on-the-Lake, a scenic and historic little town. We drove by the 2 forts
on either side of the mouth of the Niagara River. I remember visiting those
forts as a child. That was another reason I didn’t want to do the boat ride. I
didn’t do it as a child either. The other thing I remembered was stopping at a
fruit stand and then eating sweet black cherries. Guess what? I got to do it
again! We stopped at Walker’s where there is a tiny wedding chapel and I got
cherries and ate them. I was especially glad because lunch’s dessert was
blueberries 3 ways! We drove along the route of the canal for a bit and we
stopped at lock 3 and watched a freighter get lifted. We arrived at lock 8 in
time to see Saint Laurent in it but we drove on by. It would have been nice to
park there outside the lock and get to take photos of our boat exiting the lock
but they raced us on past the vertical lift bridge at Port Colbourne. When we
got there we just sat in the buses waiting. I was looking back for the bridge
to lift and right before it did I interrupted Wendy and asked if we could go
outside and watch and take photos of the boat coming under. She agreed and we
started unloading, soon all the buses were letting people out. I don’t know why
they didn’t do this at the parking outside lock 8.
We overheard some people who ate last night at Cliff Rock
Grille, the hot lava rock place, raving about it after not being sure beforehand.
So, Clay now has our reservation for tomorrow night. Dinner tonight was at 7pm.
It was minutes after we reboarded and coincided with entering Lake Erie. It is
just as rough as Ontario was. I guess now I am glad we are mostly sailing at
night! Though tomorrow we don’t dock in Windsor until around 1pm. I hope it isn’t
this rough all morning tomorrow! Dinner. Clay had escargot that he proclaimed
delicious, as good as Marina’s. He had the chef’s special duck. He ate it all
so I guess it was good. He had the lemon lime pie, which he declared was a
perfect balance and the best. I had an iceberg lettuce wedge with vinaigrette followed
by the always available chicken breast. My fries were not refried tonight which
made Clay very happy. I had a chocolate mousse pie for dessert. We were back to
the cabin by 8pm but the turndown had happened before we reboarded the boat.
The daily program for tomorrow was delivered just before 9pm. I took it in my
pajamas. Well, it has been a long busy day and I am somewhat sleep deprived and
a little queasy. So, I’ll stop now and see if I can get this published.
