I see Canada!

At the beginning of June Matt, his parents and I drove the 5 hours for Albany to Niagara Falls, NY. We had a quick stop near the start of the Erie Canal in Lockport just outside Buffalo. Originally there was a series of 5 locks there but now is just one giant lock (was bigger than any in the UK that I have ever seen)!

The original Erie Canal lock system (without the actual locks it's just waterfalls)

Me and Matt at the locks

After Lockport we drove the rest of the was to Niagara Falls and found a hotel right by the rainbow bridge (i.e. the main crossing over to Canada). My mum and I went to Niagara Falls way back in 2000 (I think, or was it 2001) and the hotel we stayed at was in Canada almost exactly opposite this hotel in America.

We spent the day walking around the parks on the American side, including a trip down to the base of the American Falls that involved more seagulls and seagull chicks than I've ever seen, a delightful yellow poncho and a nice pair of souvenir sandals. I took my turn on the hurricane deck and yes, I got very very wet. I'm glad I was wearing shorts!

Fashion statement

We then headed along the park towards the horseshoe falls. The view of both falls isn't quite as good from the American side but due to various passport related issues there would be no Canada on this trip! For anyone else paying Niagara a visit I recommend the Canadian side :-)

Horseshoe Falls

View downriver from the Horseshoe Falls. You can see the Rainbow Bridge and the American Falls on the right

We (well, Matt) drove all the way back to Albany the next day. A long trip for one night but we doesn't enjoy a giant waterfall?!

Here's us!

Boston Part II and III

Okay so maybe you remember my "last" blog post about our trip to Boston over Memorial Day weekend (see it here). Well, we had another day and a half in Boston and here is my very brief summary and pictures of what we did.

On the Sunday we took a boat trip to one of the harbor island (Spectacle Island). It was a really hot day and we both ended up getting some color (the red kind sadly) but the views of downtown Boston were great and it was a nice little island to walk around and sit on the "beach".

View of downtown Boston from Spectacle Island

I also figured out how to use the panoramic setting on Matt's camera so expect a lot more pictures like this!

Panorama of Boston from Spectacle Island

After lunch on the island we headed back on the boat and went back to our hotel via the Science museum which was right by our hotel. We didn't have a lot of time there as it closed earlier on Sundays but we still got to see the lightning show (yes I am a nerd) and explore a lot of the exhibits which were really good (especially for science geeks like us)!

Science in action - don't try this at home!

For dinner on Sunday we went to the North End of downtown Boston, which is basically the Italian part of downtown. The streets were absolutely packed with people visiting all the Italian restaurants and bakeries. It was easy to identify the two "famous" canoli places - they had huge queues of people waiting to get a delicious treat. Even the restaurants had hour + waits for tables and well, we just don't have the patience for that. We ended up walking down a little side street, got a canoli from a little bakery and got seated at a restaurant in about 20 minutes. It was delicious!! Some gelato on the way home was great to.

On the Monday morning we stopped by Harvard to walk through the campus. There must have been a big 25th reunion that weekend as they were in the process of clearing away a lot of banners, tents etc. We didn't know where we should go so just walked around. It was quite different to Yale (here) and I can absolutely see why people would want to go to school there.

Harvard

The faculty club at Harvard

Of course a trip to Harvard wouldn't be complete without a stop by the law school...

Legally brunette?

It was a great weekend, and I will certainly go back to Boston again. I know there is still a lot of things to see and do that we weren't able to. I recommend Boston to those who haven't been - especially those who like Italian food and American history!

Boston and us

Look who's here!!

This is the first post from my shiny new laptop!! After my birthday last week (thank you to all for the birthday cards/gifts/messages) I finally bit the bullet and paid a visit to the Apple store yesterday. Look who came home with me...

My birthday present!! Excuse the mess, it's clean now.

I'm in the process of getting all my old pictures from my old laptop hard drive and uploading all the pictures from the past few months. I'll write some more blog posts (which will be more like photo diaries so I apologize in advance for that) this afternoon.

Two great weeks are over

I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to do with myself now the Olympics are over (apart from get lots of work done of course). I enjoyed every minute of it and wish I could have been there. Anyway, congratulations to everyone and anyone that was involved and to the whole of Team GB!!

I added a picture to my previous blog post here like I promised. It will still be a while before I get to adding pictures from the past couple of months though and I have a couple of adventures planned for the next month too!

Back to the real world I go....