Volume 6: Pete in Canada Part 10. Beaver Las Canada. 1 Continent, 2 Blokes, Infinite Weird Sh*t
Day 21 – Toronto to Niagara Falls
Today we headed off to the place where Clark Kent nearly boned Lois Lane, Niagara Falls. A number of the many people we’d met and whose names I now can’t recall had said Niagara Falls reminded them much of Las Vegas, which surprised me somewhat as I didn’t remember Clark Kent playing any poker machines in the superman movie (that said, he was more concerned with trying to get naked with Lois in between saving the occasional falling child so had limited opportunity).
Swooping into catch a falling child would’ve been an easier task than catching the correct bus with our luggage on this day. The first struggle was finding the correct boarding gate number. We eventually got on a bus heading to Niagara Falls, only for the bus driver to take a second glimpse at our tickets and release they were with a rival bus company. He’s bus company was fussy about non-paying passengers so we headed off and finally found a greyhound bus heading to Niagara Falls. We hopped on board and the bus driver said he’d put our luggage underneath the bus. To continue on the tradition of misinformation that was now becoming this tour, Brad had a gut feeling to get off the bus and check that our luggage had made it on board. He’s gut was right, so Brad chucked our luggage in the under carriage and got back on the bus. There would be no singing of “Hail to the bus driver” on this trip.
We reached our hostel at Niagara Falls in the afternoon, where we were eventually served by some tall hippy doofus. Presumably having just finished his after lunch joint, he put us up in room 6 and in his drug induced wisdom gave me the key to 206. The key to 206, without surprise, didn’t work in room 6 so I was forced to head back to reception to get a key to room 6.
This was yet another hot day on tour, made all the worse by the lack of air conditioning in the hostel so after dropping off our luggage in room 6 we headed outside and enjoyed a beer. During that time we enjoyed a conversation with a German chick named Jana and I amused myself by watching a bee drink the last contents off the top of my beer can, hoping he would get drunk and start a fight with some other bee.
Brad and I were keen to see the falls, so we invited Jana along and took the 20-minute walk from the Hostel down to the falls. Along the way we walked past the “Birds of the lost world aviary”. I’m assuming they didn’t have any homing pigeons there because they would have been able to find their way home, which would have made it the “Birds of the known world aviary”. Once down at the falls the things those nameless people had said about it being like Las Vegas weren’t too far off, especially when nightfalls and the place is lit up by numerous neon lights serving as a lighthouse to any passing spacecraft. Niagara Falls gets about 13 million visitors a year, with the goal of letting none of them leave with any money or dodgy merchandise. You can actually buy coloured water, with the colour allegedly coming from the rainbow captured at the same time as the water. There were countless amusements, featuring the “House of Frankenstein” versus the more cashed up Dracula who lived in “Dracula’s Castle” (tipping his wealth came from the sale of blood products). To confirm that this was a tourist trap; there was a Ripley’s believe it or not, the perfect place to leave the kids for a while as you pump in quarter after quarter into the poker machines at Casino Niagara.
The splash back from the falls reminded me of the splash back from the award winning toilets at the Toronto hostel. Why they had to fill those toilets with so much water still confounds me as it wasn’t a very pleasurable experience to feel water that had touched urine bounce up and hit your legs. The splash back from the falls, however, was quite a pleasurable experience as it took some heat out of the day. Anyway back to the falls, people had gone over the falls in a barrel in the past, no doubt a rum barrel that they’d just consumed the contents of and were now making crazy drunken bets with their mates about how they reckoned they could ride the barrel down the falls. The world would truly be a boring place without alcohol and idiots. It for some reason was good to see that the more impressive of the falls, the Horseshoe Falls, was on the Canadian side of the border.
We had dinner with Jana, before deciding to head back to the hostel to tidy ourselves up for a night on the town. Jana wasn’t keen to go out, so we said our goodbyes in which she wrote something in German in Brad’s tour diary book. As Brad had dated a German backpacker in Australia who turned out to be an absolute psycho who rang him so much he had to change his phone numbers I’m assuming it was something along the lines of “You can run but you can’t hide”.After tidying ourselves up at the hostel we began the walk back to the area near the falls as that was where all the bars were. As I stepped out of the hostel I saw a bus that said it was going to the “Hospital & Optimist”. An Optimist at a hospital: someone who looks at your eyes and hopes that they’ll get better? Along the walk we could hear fireworks which forced Brad to up the pace as if he was walking to a place that was giving away free beer. Unfortunately, we only got a small glimpse of the fireworks, before following the masses in a slow walk up the hill with most of them stunned by all the bright lights. We eventually found a club and spent the rest of the night there. There were so many young people there that I thought we’d accidentally stumbled into a blue light disco.
We finished late, not a great idea when you have to catch an early bus the next day.
Day 22 – Niagara Falls to New York to New Jersey
The night before we’d some how figured out that that day was Friday, so if we caught a bus we’d be able to spend Saturday night in New York City. As it was going to be around a 10 hour bus ride, we dragged ourselves out of bed before even the early bird gets up to catch his worms and dragged our tired bodies and bags to the bus station.
The bus arrived 30 minutes late, and then was delayed even further when some freak who looked like Billy Bob Thornton out of the movie “Sling blade” who had got on the bus at Toronto now decided he wanted to catch the bus to Buffalo so he had to get off the bus and buy a ticket (run Billy Bob! Get out of the country before they find that body!). The news that we were going to be even later annoyed a different crazy old freak (the crazy old freak spent much of the time from Niagara Falls to Buffalo ripping up newspaper) who asked the bus driver if she could make up time. She’d had a bad start to her day, so she in no uncertain terms asked the crazy old freak how she could do that and reminded him that he wasn’t travelling on an airline. As Brad and I sat opposite the crazy old freak, my first priority of the day was making sure the crazy old freak didn’t slip his drugs into my bag as we crossed the Canadian/US border.
Once at he border I was greeted by some fat ugly 4-eyed troll of a woman (it’s all right, I feel comfortable insulting her as she was an absolute bitch) at customs. She kept asking me my destination address in the US. I had bugger all idea as all I’d agreed with Danielle was to stay with her somewhere in New Jersey. The customs bitch who’d just climbed up from under the bridge she was guarding wasn’t happy with New Jersey as an answer and wanted a more specific address. When I said I didn’t have one she asked me for an address again. The stupid hunch backed bitch must have asked me the question 4 or 5 times and each time I gave the same response of I don’t know. It was like this ugly walking Picasso picture faced bitch was stuck in a loop and I was going to spend the rest of my day answering the same question for the next 4 or 5 hours. Thankfully, I could remember the address of the HI hostel in NYC so I made up an answer and said I was staying on Amsterdam Avenue. This awoke the great beast from her infinite loop and I eventually crossed the border not before being slugged $6.
Not long after crossing the border we got to Buffalo. It was there the bus company had the strange ritual of asking everyone to take their bags off the bus, then putting them back on the bus. F#!k me this was turning into a weird day.
At Buffalo we also received a new bus driver, who had most likely failed in getting his pilot’s license as he felt an overwhelming need to give a commentary on everything from estimated ETA to any sights we might see. He stopped just short of saying something like “We’re cruising at approximately 15 feet at 55 miles per hour”. This enraged the crazy old freak, who by now was writing random words and then using random highlighters to colour in the page, to the point where he was yelling at the bus driver to shut up.
As we headed to the next stop in Syracuse the crazy old freak was so desperate to make up time he spent some time at the front of the bus trying to convince the bus driver that the next break should be skipped. God bless the US citizens approach to unilateral decision-making, we know how well that works. Thankfully, the bus driver must have been Canadian so he put the option to a vote around the bus. We comprised on having only a 10-minute stop, instead of the scheduled 30 minutes. Once at the Syracuse bus station I noticed an Amish couple with a child. I didn’t know greyhound offered a horse and cart service. I suppose it’s all about supply and demand. The customer is always right.
We eventually got into NYC just before 6pm. I gave Danielle a call and she told me to head to Penn station and catch the New Jersey Transit to Middletown. This seemed simple enough so we walked a few blocks to Penn street and down into the subway. Whilst not being an expert on the NYC metro, I was looking at my map of the metro and it didn’t look like they went to New Jersey, so we asked some unpleasant metro employee how do we catch the New Jersey Transit train and she told us to walk across another block, so we walked to 33rd street and entered the subway there. We asked some brother behind the glass how to catch the New Jersey Transit train and his eyes rolled back in synchronisation with his head swinging back before swinging forward and gave us a look of “You fucking knuckle heads” before telling us we needed to go to the station on 33rd street. This only confused matters more given we were on 33rd street and at a train station. Baffled and confused we stumbled out of the subway to finally find what we were looking for; a big sign saying Penn Station. God looks after old folks and fools.
We ended up catching the 7:07 to Middletown where we were picked up by Danielle and her friends Lauren (a marine biologist) and Greg (don’t know where he worked, just that he’d been mixing alcohol with his prescribed medicine and was now quite jolly). They took us out to dinner at the Outback Steakhouse, a place that describes itself as “The true Aussie experience”. Funny, because in all my time in Australia I’d never ordered a Budweiser at a restaurant or been allowed to take home food in a doggy bag due to health regulations. Dare I say something to the proprietor of this fine restaurant? Maybe steer him in the right direction and give him some hints and suggestions about making the place more Aussieified? In the end I decided against it, and instead spent much of the night thinking about the episode of Seinfeld where George pretends to be a marine biologist to the point where I bought it up in conversation.
After dinner we headed back to the house where we would be staying. Danielle, Lauren and another friend were renting it for the summer and had proudly furnished the living room with $5 of décor after doing their shopping on hard rubbish day, or as they called it “Icurbia”. We played some drinking games before they introduced us to Family Guy. Awesome.As it was I that hooked up the free accommodation, Brad let me have the couch that folded out into a Futon, while he spent the night on an air cushion.
Air conditioning and a large Futon, absolute luxury after the first 20 odd days of bunk beds.
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