I was still walking through Queen Victoria Park, past a family posing with a selfie stick and a guy selling glow-in-the-dark necklaces, when this low rumble started building in my chest. Not my ears — my ribcage. Like standing too close to a subwoofer at a concert except there's no music, just raw geological force.
Then the mist reached my face, and I rounded the curve, and Horseshoe Falls opened up in front of me like someone had torn a hole in the earth.
Friday Evening: Arrival and First Impressions
I drove from Toronto. The QEW highway is 130km of suburban sprawl and Walmart parking lots until suddenly — vineyards. The Niagara Escarpment sneaks up on you. One minute you're passing a Costco, the next you're driving through Niagara-on-the-Lake's heritage district, all 19th-century storefronts and garden gates.
I'd booked a room at a B&B on Ricardo Street in Niagara-on-the-Lake because the hotels near the falls wanted CAD $250/night for rooms that look directly onto the Hard Rock Cafe. My B&B was CAD $145/night, included breakfast, and had a wraparound porch where I drank coffee the next morning while watching a horse-drawn carriage go past. Different vibe entirely.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. That first evening, I drove the 20 minutes south to the falls for the illumination. They light up Horseshoe Falls every night from dusk to midnight — the colours rotate, and it sounds cheesy until you're standing there watching millions of gallons of water turn emerald green, then deep purple, then gold. The mist catches the light and you get this glowing fog effect that makes the whole gorge look like a film set.
I stayed until 10PM for the fireworks. A dozen rockets launched from the gorge rim, exploding over the falls while the illumination kept shifting. It was July — warm enough to stand there in a t-shirt, wet from the spray, perfectly content.
Saturday: Into the Thunder
Breakfast at the B&B. Scrambled eggs, real maple syrup on thick sourdough, and a conversation with a couple from Belgium who'd driven up from New York. They told me the American side was disappointing. "You look at the falls from the side," the wife said. "Here, you look at them from the front." She wasn't wrong.
I got to Table Rock Welcome Centre at 7:30AM. The parking lot was maybe a quarter full. By 11, it would be chaos. I walked to the railing and just... stood there. Horseshoe Falls is 792 metres wide. The brain doesn't process that number visually. It just looks infinite. Water arcing over the lip, dropping 57 metres, and the sound — god, the sound. It's not a roar. It's a hum. A vibration that gets into your bones.
At 9AM I did Journey Behind the Falls. CAD $23. They hand you a yellow poncho and take you down through tunnels that were blasted through the rock in the 1940s. You emerge on observation platforms that sit directly behind the curtain of water. The noise in those tunnels is indescribable. I tried to record it on my phone and later it just sounded like static. You have to be there.
The lower platform puts you at the base where the water hits. I got absolutely drenched. Not "a little wet" — drenched in the way where your shoes are making squelching noises for the next two hours.
By 10:30 I was on the Hornblower. CAD $35. They give you another poncho (red this time) and the boat pushes right into the basin at the foot of Horseshoe Falls. Standing on the deck, looking up, there's this moment where the mist is so thick you can't see anything in any direction. Just white. And the sound is physical. And then the boat turns and you catch a rainbow arcing through the spray, and everyone on deck just starts cheering.
I get it now. I understand why 12 million people come here every year. It's not a tourist trap that happens to have a waterfall. It's a geological event that happens to have tourists.
Saturday Afternoon: The Civilized Part
I needed to dry off. So I drove north to Niagara-on-the-Lake and spent the afternoon doing something completely different: wine tasting.
The Niagara Peninsula has over 100 wineries and I had time for three. Peller Estates (beautiful grounds, excellent Pinot Noir), Trius (their brut sparkling held its own against anything I've had from Paris), and Inniskillin — the place that essentially invented Canadian icewine.
Icewine is incredible and incredibly expensive. Grapes frozen on the vine, harvested at -8C, pressed while still frozen. The resulting wine is syrupy-sweet, intensely concentrated, and costs CAD $40-80 a bottle because the yield is tiny. Worth trying at least once — a tasting flight at Inniskillin was CAD $12 for four pours.
Dinner was at Treadwell Cuisine on Queen Street. Farm-to-table, seasonal menu, and they paired wines from vineyards I could literally see from the restaurant window. Pan-seared Lake Erie perch with herb butter. CAD $42 for the main. Not cheap, but this wasn't Clifton Hill.
Sunday: The Quiet Side
I almost skipped the Whirlpool Aero Car. I'm glad I didn't. CAD $17 and it's this antique cable car from 1916 that carries you 76 metres above the Niagara Whirlpool. The whirlpool is downstream from the falls where the river does a sharp 90-degree turn, creating class 6 rapids that spin in a massive circle. From the cable car, you can see debris — logs, branches — circling in the vortex. Some of it's been stuck there for weeks.
After that, I walked a section of the Niagara River Recreation Trail. The 4km stretch from the falls to the whirlpool is flat, paved, and runs through parkland with views into the gorge. I passed maybe a dozen other walkers. This is where Niagara stops being a theme park and starts being a river cutting through ancient rock.
I ate lunch at Weinkeller on Victoria Avenue back in town — schnitzel and local Riesling, CAD $28 for the plate. A welcome antidote to the CAD $22 burgers on Clifton Hill.
Driving Home
On the QEW heading back to Toronto, I kept thinking about that moment on the Hornblower when the mist swallowed everything. How something can be that powerful and that beautiful at the same time. How 12 million tourists a year haven't diminished it even slightly.
Niagara Falls doesn't need your Instagram post. It was doing this long before you arrived and it'll be doing it long after you leave. Three thousand tonnes per second. Every second. Right now, while you read this.
I think that's why it works. Not because of the boat rides or the tunnel tours or the wine country (though all of those are excellent). It works because the falls are genuinely, unapologetically, stupidly enormous. And sometimes that's enough.
