4-Apr-2009: Road Trip to Montreal

From New York City, we picked a hire car and headed north, destination Montreal to catch our onward flight to London. Our first stop was the city of Rochester in up state New York, an old mate of mine from uni days, Brad. Brad's been living in Rochester a few years now (so pretty much a local!), and is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Rochester - doing very well!! We crashed at Brad's place for a few days and saw some of the sights - one being Niagara Falls, about an hour's drive away.

Niagara Falls was a bit sad and a little disappointing to visit... firstly we didn't realise that the falls would be found situated in the middle of two cities which kind of spoils the nature aspect of it. Secondly, the US city of Niagara was not unlike a ghost town when we visited (we didn't get to go over to the Canadian side to view the falls as we didn't bring our passports with us that day!), tired and old, with many of the restaurants and businesses closed down.

The falls themselves were beautiful, and it was interesting to visit when we did (end of winter) as we got to see the ice bridge that forms during the cold season across the river downstream from the falls, due to the mist of the falls. The actual magnitude of the falls didn't quite live up to our expectations - perhaps had we not visited Iguacu falls earlier on in the year, we might have been more impressed. Still worth a visit though, another place we can tick off our list :-)

Our next stop was Adirondacks State Park, in the mountains, where we got to see some beautiful scenery and our first frozen lakes! Now that was impressive! The weather although sunny, was still so cold - I couldn't imagine how it would be in the middle of winter!


We stayed in resort of Lake Placid, the city that hosted the 1932 and 1980 Winter Olympic Games. We visited the Olympic bob sled run and watched several international teams train, including Brazil! Yes they have a bob sled team! They were super fast... almost vertical on some of the bends!



We also got to watch the USA Women's ice hockey team train - I never realised how fast and rough ice hockey is... an awesome spectator sport!


The last meals of our trip in Montreal, at a french restuarant for dinner and delicious chinese for lunch, were memorable ones. We couldn't believe our big trip that we had planned for so long was now over! By that time we were ready to head back to London again though - had such a great time on our adventures away, ready to hit reality again :-)