WE arrived in Niagara Falls, Ontario on Thursday, July 29th, checking into the Sheraton Fallsview Hotel at around 9:45 this morning. We left home, near Cincinnati, yesterday morning and drove most of the way, staying last night in Brantford, about an hour and a half from Niagara. My sister Mary and her family [see our 1996 Wild, Wild West extravaganza on these very web pages!] left very early this morning from their home near Philadelphia. The idea was for us to meet at the hotel lobby this morning. We'd had such luck with our timing on our other vacation and we wanted to see if we could do it again.

We sure could.

Mary, Lou, and Liz got there about half an hour after we did. If it hadn't been for a traffic delay, we'd probably have collided in the parking lot.

Yesterday's drive took us north through Dayton and Toledo into Detroit, where we crossed the Ambassador Bridge into Windsor, Ontario. Linda was able to add Michigan to the number of states she has driven in, as well as a new country. Actually, Linda thinks she may have driven in Canada when we visited Niagara Falls before, on our honeymoon, but we're not sure whether she drove while we were there.  The unbroken tradition of having rain fall at some point during every vacation we've ever taken came this time in the form of violent, nasty thunderstorms as we drove through Dayton. Once that cleared up, we had nothing but wonderful weather the whole time (well, except for the severe thunderstorm on Saturday, but more about that later). Wonderful, COOL weather!. The East and Midwest are going through a serious heat-wave right now (and drought,  too, despite the rain we experienced), and with twenty-degree-cooler temperatures in the seventies, this promises to be a really comfortable weekend.

The drive from Windsor to Brantford, along Canadian highways 401 and 403, was pleasant and really not a lot different from driving in the USA, except for speeds and distances being in kilometers instead of miles. We took a couple of side trips off the main highway, exploring areas around Chatham. At Woodstock, we left 401 (which is the main highway to Toronto) and took 403 toward Brantford and Hamilton. It was on this highway, just a few miles from our destination at Brantford, that Linda smelled something burning. A couple seconds later I smelled it, too. There was nothing subtle about it; it smelled like burning electrical wiring and I expected to see smoke come billowing out from under our dashboard at any moment. We pulled over to the side of the road, rolled down the windows, turned everything off, and prepared to grab as much stuff as we could and flee if actual flames broke out. They didn't. The smell went away. Linda had been driving. Now I took over, and gingerly started the engine, both of us sniffing like crazy to detect any new odors. Everything seemed to work okay. We decided the smell must have been something we drove through, so we continued on. We had a suspicion that it could also have been a short in the CD-player, so we hesitated to use it until we'd safely arrived in Brantford. It worked fine, and of course we never smelled that burning again.

In Brantford, we stayed at the Comfort Inn. We had selected Brantford as a good place to stay because we knew that from here we can easily get to Niagara this morning after a good night's sleep. We preferred this to leaving home around midnight and driving for hours. So this morning we woke up all nice and fresh and had a fine breakfast at the Golden Griddle Restaurant. Then we drove out highway 403 to the city of Hamilton, where we picked up the Queen Elizabeth Way through St. Catherine's and Niagara Falls.

Of course, Mary, Lou, and Liz, having driven since 1:30 this morning, arrived looking just as fresh. And the end of the day didn't find them any more exhausted than we were. So I'm not so sure we were really any better off.

Story and original photography copyright ©1999 by John Lipman. All rights reserved.