Vacation-On Our Way!

Kurt and I went away for a few days in October. After discussion, we decided to head up towards Niagara Falls, making a few stops on our way and on our trip back home. I wanted to try and avoid too much interstate driving, thus instead we did most of our driving on local roads.  That worked out well most of the time :)  On Wednesday when we left Niagara Falls to work our way down to Watkins Glen, our back road driving got us to Watkins Glen much later than we had hoped.  More on that later.

These first three pics are from a scenic stop off point on route 6 on our way up to Corning, NY:

This is one of the main streets in Corning, NY:

We had lunch at this restaurant.  We both learned what the word gaffer meant :)  Do you know?!?!

Heading out of Cornell, on our way to Niagara Falls.  The foliage was sort of bizarre.  There were some areas that the trees were bare...there were other areas, the colors were brilliant...and some, just in between...

Gas was mostly all over $4/gallon in most of New York:

Some neat sky pics:

Going over the bridge onto Grand Island, which is just before entering Niagara Falls:

One of the first sights...Seneca Casino.  At first, I thought it might have been our hotel ;)

(It wasn't):

One of the several bridges going into Canada.  We needed to be sure we didn't make a wrong turn...or I might have never been seen again...LOL! 

Whirlpool State Park:

(That's Canada on the other side)

Learned that these black squirrels are indigenous to Canada.  Guess they don't need passports to get into America:

Power plant:

We got to Niagara Falls ~ 4 pm-ish, found our hotel, but before checking in, opted to do some sightseeing before it got dark.  We looked on the map and found if we drove about 10 miles up the road, we'd come to Lake Ontario, which I thought would be a fun thing to do since we were so close.  As you can see it was getting dark, so we took a couple pics, but decided to come back the next day: 

This was the casino all lit up:

And this was Kurt using trying his hand at the poker slot machine.  We came back to the hotel with an extra $35.50 that we hadn't gone in to the casino with :)