I had a wedding to go to in the Rochester area this past weekend, so I loaded up the bike and made a trip out of it, heading up to Niagara Falls afterwards. The trip started promising, I loaded up my '03 Honda Shadow 750:
...with my luggage, strapped my laptop to my back and headed out into the sunny blue day.
It quickly turned bad just west of Albany, however, when I ran into the first of a set of 3 thunderstorms that would plague me that day:
...one of which even included hail. I finally made it to the hotel nine and a half hours after I left the house, the delay from having to stop and wait out the storms at rest stops every few miles. Upon arriving and showering the sweat and hail from my body, I promptly decided that this would be the last trip over 200 miles I was going to take without first buying a proper touring machine. The wedding was nice, and mostly uneventful other than regular wedding stuff. I got to better know someone I used to work with and made some new friends. I do regret not being able to spend more time with each of them, but the road called for all of us, and there is no stronger siren than the call of the long road.
The next morning I headed out to Niagara Falls.
I stayed in the Sheraton:
...on the Canadian side:
...which had a great view of the falls.
Really I was paying just for the view, because while the bed was comfy, the toilet ran non-stop (took me a while to figure out that this wasn't some clever Niagara Falls marketing gimic) and the bathroom was tiny. It was cool though because you could open one of the windows and leave it open to the sounds of the falls. The weather couldn't have been better, I actually slept with the window open and let the roar of the falls lull me to sleep.
I walked the falls three times, twice during daylight and once at night when they lit up the falls with these huge spotlights.
It was really cool in a highly-commercial Japanese tourist sort of way. There was this street filled with all sorts of attractions that had a carnival or street festival feel to it, and money exchanged hands everywhere. I was a bit turned off by the commercialism of it at first, but it sort of settles in on you. Plus, they've got some beautiful parks as well that seem to take you far from the marketing.
As you get closer to the horseshoe falls, you start to encounter a mist that slowly soaked everything.
It was quite cool, and at night made for some great lighting effects.
The trip home the next morning was an excercise in boredom and tolerance, once I left Niagara and the cool-ass water intake buildings.
See, the problem with the New York State Throughway is that it is excruciatingly, mind-numbingly boring. Wait, no, that implies that it is in the same realm as such extreme-leisure activities such as watching grass grow or American Idol reruns. The New York State Throughway grabs your soul by the balls and sucks your life away, mile by mile. It's a special kind of hell on earth reserved for those unlucky enough to live east of Albany who want to go west of Buffalo, or the opposite. At least on my venture west on this forsaken strip of asphalt I was occupied with sheer terror as the winds from the 18-wheelers combined with those from the thunderstorm to push me to and fro across the rain-slicked blacktop whilst simultaneously pelting me with dine-sized hail pellets. I never thought I'd risk falling asleep riding a motorcycle, but on a bright and sunny day the boredom of the New York State throughway is capable of removing any aspect of fun from anything that you may have found thrilling anywhere else.
If there was anything to see at all, or any turns to keep you occupied, that might be something, but it's straight as an arrow and surrounded by very little else than soy or corn fields. Somewhere between Syracuse and Albany, the mountains start to crop up again and I felt like I was home.