Niagara Falls

The drive from Toronto to Niagara Falls takes about an hour and forty minutes on the QEW, and for most of that drive you're looking at flat Ontario farmland thinking about nothing. Then you round the last bend, the highway dips toward the gorge, and you can see the mist rising before you see the water. It appears over the treeline like smoke from something enormous. That's the first sign you're close.

We went in early July. We needed to get out of the city for a few days. Niagara was close enough to be easy, dramatic enough to feel like an escape.

The Marriott Niagara Falls Fallsview Hotel & Spa is the hotel you book if the falls are the reason you're coming. The Fallsview rooms on the upper floors have floor-to-ceiling windows looking directly out onto both the Canadian Horseshoe Falls and the American Falls. You can watch the water from your bed. You can hear it. This low, constant roar that starts as background noise and becomes the thing your brain calibrates everything else against. When you leave and check into a quiet hotel somewhere else, the silence feels wrong for a day.

Don't book a city-view room to save $50. The entire point is the view. Request a high floor, 15th or above. The corner rooms on floors 17-20 give you a wider angle that includes the gorge downstream. Worth asking at check-in even if your booking says otherwise.

The mist changes all day. Morning is blue and white. Late afternoon turns gold. At night they light the falls with colored spotlights, which sounds like a tourist gimmick and kind of is, but also works better than it has any right to. There's something about watching that much water lit up in shifting colors at midnight from your hotel room that quiets your brain down. We'd pour a drink, sit in the dark, and just watch it.

We did the Journey Behind the Falls one afternoon. Elevator down 150 feet through bedrock, tunnels behind the waterfall, and then a platform directly behind the curtain of water. The sound is so loud you can't hear yourself think. You will get soaked regardless of the poncho they give you. Bring a change of clothes. It delivers on exactly what it promises, which is rare for a tourist attraction anywhere.

One afternoon we drove the Niagara Parkway north to Niagara-on-the-Lake, about 20 minutes along the river. The parkway itself is a beautiful two-lane road through parkland. Niagara-on-the-Lake is a wine-country village with a main street that looks like it was built for a period drama. Victorian storefronts, ice cream shops, and about a dozen tasting rooms within walking distance. The Niagara Peninsula is one of Canada's best wine regions and most people have no idea. The micro-climate created by the lakes and the escarpment is ideal for cool-climate grapes. We did a tasting at Inniskillin (they pioneered Canadian icewine, and the tasting room lets you try it without committing to a $60 bottle) and stopped at Peller Estates for their underground wine cellar tour, which takes you into a barrel room kept at icewine temperature. They give you a jacket. You'll need it. G bought three bottles at Inniskillin that she swore were for gifts and then opened all three within a week. No gifts were given.

We ate at AG Inspired Cuisine one night, inside the Sterling Inn & Spa about ten minutes from the falls. Chef Cory Linkson does farm-to-table tasting menus with Niagara region ingredients. The wine pairing leans local, and the sommelier will walk you through Ontario Rieslings from producers like Tawse and Hidden Bench that'll make you wonder why these wines aren't more famous outside Canada.

Three days. Watched the mist from bed every morning. Drove the parkway. Drank wine in a village that looks like England. Good three days.

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