Notes from the Golden Gate

Category: Travel

  • …and they’re off

    Yesterday we put Ed on a Greyhound bus to Niagara Falls and then followed him in our tank. After arriving in Niagara at around lunchtime we walked a few miles into town and ate in a restaurant called only ‘Family Restaurant’. We mostly had pasta dishes of one variety of the other, each served with an identical, slightly disgusting tinned tomato sauce. They did bring Andy’s dessert out with candles in the top, though, to celebrate his birthday (and one of the last opportunities to eat deep fried brownie for the next 4-5 weeks).

    We then headed to the falls themselves, which I had been pre-warned about not being as tall as one would imagine. It’s true that they aren’t the tallest waterfalls in the world, but they are almost certainly the most magnificent. The raw, uncontrolled energy of the water tumbling over the American and Horseshoe Falls takes the breath away, and the spray from the falls travels high and wide. Apparently, 20% of the world’s fresh water flows over Niagara Falls, which is mind-boggling.

    After taking photos from every possible angle, we bought our tickets and went into the tunnels behind the waterfall. The plastic ponchos that they hand out are essential, as one of the viewing platforms takes you just feet away from the torrent of water, soaking you from head to foot. The tunnels extend 200m behind the Horseshoe Falls from the Canadian side, so I suppose we were briefly in no man’s land.

    Our thirst for getting soaked by the world’s most powerful waterfall was not yet quenched, so we handed over $14 each (in a mixture of US and Canadian currency; a combination of being so close to the border and the exchange rate being almost exactly 1:1 means they are interchangeable in Niagara) and boarded the Maid of the Mist vessel.

    The boat first cruised reasonably close to the American Falls before moving right into the heart of the Horseshoe, practically within touching distance of the falls. Again, we were equipped with ponchos and they were perhaps even more useful than earlier, as the spray made good visibility a pipedream and gave us a better shower than a budget chain motel could ever manage.

    Later that evening, after returning to the motel for a rest, we drove back into town (with Andy following on his bike) and ate huge hamburgers (called Baconators – two burgers, four strips of bacon, cheese, mayo and ketchup) at Wendy’s. There was a strange novelty in eating at a fastfood chain that for some reason has never made it to the UK.

    Niagara Falls as a town is a bizarre, seedy place. The centre is a brightly lit strip of hotels, motels, casinos, tacky giftshops, museums and crap restaurants. It’s almost as though the Niagara Falls authorities thought, “Hey, we’ve got one of the great wonders of the natural world right here, so lets build Blackpool next to it.”

    Our appetite satisfied, we wandered down to the falls and observed their magnificence when lit by floodlights (incidentally, powered by the falls themselves via the huge hydroelectric plant upstream). If it were possible, they looked even better than they did during the day.

    This morning we rose early for the raison d’etre of the trip: the cycling. Shortly after 7am Leo, Neil, Andy and Alex left the motel on two wheels, stopping only for photographs at the start of the bridge across to the USA. All being well (apart from the gear problems that Neil’s just discovered), they should now be pushing on through New York state towards Rochester. Me and Ed will cross the border in an hour or two, joining them en route for their midday rest break.

  • This is a cycling event, honestly

    Yesterday we went back into downtown Toronto, leaving our car, bikes and possessions in a multi-storey car park (we’d checked out of one motel and were waiting to check into a new one). We made a beeline for the CN Tower and took the elevator up to the viewing platform at 330m above the ground, where we walked across the glass floor and took in the views. Neil, Andy and Leo then joined the queue for the elevator to the Skypod at 447m. Me, Alex and Ed meanwhile went for a wander around Toronto.

    Toronto is a nice city, with its safety and cleanliness standing in contrast to the US cities we’ve visited, but it’s just a bit… well… dull. The CN Tower is cool, and there’s a lot of impressive buildings and a great harbour front, but it just doesn’t have that simmering excitement that we found in Chicago.

    Anyway, after wandering through Toronto University’s campus and then through Chinatown, we headed to our new motel for the night. The Knights Inn in Richmond Hill is wonderful. We booked it as it was the cheapest one that the website we use could find, but the rooms are nicer than any we’ve seen elsewhere, one of them featuring a sofa. Last night we ate takeaway pizza and Chinese and drank a few bottles of beer. Ed, wasted after sniffing the beer, went to collect the Chinese and returned with a woman who wanted to meet the ‘mad English guys who are cycling across America’. She left after a few minutes and then her friend turned up: a man who also wanted to meet the cyclists so that he could tell his friends when we were famous. I took his advice (and that of the Chicago moteliers) and sent details of our trip to the local and national media over here.

    In the next hour we leave for Niagara Falls, with the cyclists beginning to face the reality of what they have ahead of them. Tomorrow morning we get up early and cross the border into the States, and then the challenge begins at last.

  • Put your hands up for… Flint, Michigan

    Since I last blogged we’ve travelled almost 600 miles from Chicago to Toronto. On our first full day in the States we took the train to downtown Chicago and checked out a food festival. Me and Andy befriended an anti-Bush activist and Andy is now the proud owner of an Impeach Bush flag. Then, by an enormous stroke of luck, a passer by identified us as being from out of town and recommended a restaurant that did fantastic steaks and also directed us to Buddy Guy’s Legends blues bar where those of us over 21 spent an immensely satisfying two hours being entertained by the finest blues in Chicago.

    The next morning our plan was to leave town for Detroit by 11am. Unfortunately, it turned out that the tubes of the bike frames were too large to fit the bike racks (which were themselves too small for the roof bars, so were tied on with rope and duck tape), so me, Andy and Alex went to buy a back carrier while Neil and Leo sat in the motel carpark. Three hours, seven stores and two bike rack purchases later, we were finally ready to leave the windy city.

    After realising that we were running too late to see Detroit (assuming there is anything worth seeing there) we took a detour to get closer to the Canadian border. We pulled into the town of Flint, Michigan for the night, only to find that the Super 8 there was fully booked. According to the GPS, there was a Travel Inn 1 mile away. At first glance it looked a little like a prison camp and it wasn’t immediately obvious whether the fence was for keeping people in or out. After paying just $70 for two rooms we examined our lodgings. It can’t be denied that the dirty sheets and towels, and the mysterious splash marks around the sides of the bed (blood or mud, we weren’t sure), left us a little apprehensive about where we were staying. Regardless, it was 11pm at night and we hadn’t had any tea, so we headed to the McDonald’s down the road.

    Upon arrival, the staff waved from the windows to indicate that it was closed, but the sign said ‘24 hour Drive Thru’, so we walked round the side and stood in the queue of cars waiting to order at the little microphone panel. A couple of minutes later a woman came out of McDonald’s back entrance, apparently concerned by our loitering. We told her we were just looking to order some food, but she told us that we weren’t allowed through the Drive Thru without a car. We left the premises quickly, anticipating the shotgun/guard dogs that usually accompany such an eviction in the movies. We rejoined the grass verge at the side of the busy road (there are no pavements in Flint – walking is clearly for failures, Communists and those who dislike Big Macs) and found ourselves a petrol station with an alarmingly rough clientele where we bought a pack of microwaveable burgers each, heating them there and then and eating the soggy messes on the way back to the motel. The night passed mostly uneventfully, apart from Andy sprinting from his bed to the window in the early hours when he heard a car ignition that sounded like ours.

    Funnily enough, none of us were too keen to hang around Flint much longer, so we were on the highway by 8am this morning. An hour later we reached the border, where Canadian immigration quizzed us about our intentions for a good ten minutes. Shortly after crossing the border we grabbed breakfast at Burger King before hitting the long, straight road to Toronto.

    The (thankfully pre-booked) Super 8 at Toronto is a wonderful contrast to the Flint Travelinn: clean sheets, a working TV, an indoor pool and wireless internet access. After collecting Ed Smith from Toronto Airport we caught the train downtown and had a slap-up meal in a restaurant with crayons and drawable table cloths. We then had a wander round the water front before heading back to the motel. Tomorrow we’ll be heading back in with the intention of going up the CN Tower and checking out the city when things are actually open.

  • Ignore anything I ever said about SUVs

    We’ve discovered the perfect cure to jetlag – confuse your body so much that it has no idea what time zone it’s in. Yesterday was quite literally the longest day of our lives; it began in Heathrow airport as we tried to make a game of top trumps stretch from midnight to 5am. At roughly this point, we received the delightful news that somewhere along the line STA Travel had failed to book three bikes onto the plane TWICE. In the end we got them on, but it was quite a scare.

    Fast forward two airports, many hours and lots of timezones, and we find ourselves queuing for permission to enter America with our Spanish-language visa forms in hand, hoping that we hadn’t inadvertently declared ourselves Nazi war criminals. Unfortunately, Neil had obviously ticked the ‘Si’ box next to the international terrorist question, causing him to be whisked away into an interview room for a while. In the meantime, Al had to have all his bags searched after he was caught by a sniffer dog trying to smuggle a ham sandwich into the land of the free.

    While the others waited for Neil’s interrogation to be completed, I caught a bus across the airport to the National car hire centre. Knowing our problems with bikes, bike carriers and roof racks, and the fact we had significantly more luggage than any boot could hold, I enquired about an upgrade. For $16 extra each day, I’m now driving what I would normally politefully call a Chelsea Tractor. In Britain it would look huge, though it fits in quite nicely on the streets of Chicago. Sadly, our cycle carriers won’t fit onto the roof bars that come with the General Motors beast, so that’s still a problem to sort tomorrow.