Wed August 19th: Tonawanda, NY

WE MADE IT AND DIDN'T GO OVER THE FALLS!!! My recurring nightmare lately has been that we miss the opening to the canal that runs alongside the Niagara River - and over the Falls we go :( The current in the Niagara River runs 15-17 mph flowing north. Our boat goes a max speed of 10 mph so if we missed the turn and had to turn around and go against the current to get where we needed to be ....... do the math :-) The Peace Bridge is the one we usually took when going into Canada. It was very strange to be going under it instead.

Once around Buffalo (so we are going North - the direction the Niagara River flows) we found the Tonawanda Creek and the entrance to the Erie Canal. Only problem was that we still had the mast up and couldn't fit under either of the two bridges that we had to go under! Not the plan but we ended up quickly dropping the mast as we sat in the middle of a small open area outside the Creek. Quickly is relative of course as dropping the mast means removing the boom, undoing two of the four cables holding it up, pulling the pin that holds the mast to the deck and finally laying it down (Steve slowly lowering it down by holding the ropes and me holding the end until we can move it to the flybridge deck). Once we were docked, Steve packed it up and it is now cozily laying on the flybridge and out of the way.

We found a carrousel museum in town. Very fun - learned all about the making of the figures as well as the music that is played and how it all works. Amazing technology for the 1920's. Adults were warned not to waste their $.02 on the ride and besides it was "evil" to ride on these things!

The price of admission included a ride on the #1 carrousel made by this company in 1916! (My horse won by the way :-))