#132. Niagara Falls (Saturday, June 19, 1999)

#132. Niagara Falls (Saturday, June 19, 1999)

What was your best day of…staying overnight at a place that was not yours?

One of the most universal, underrated sources of joy for any young child is staying overnight at a house that’s not theirs. Whether it’s a friend’s sleepover or a family trip, there’s just something undeniably cool and visceral about having your surroundings twisted so much from their usual status, that this new unfamiliar state lasts all the way until the literal end of the day.

This was not my first hotel experience, not by a lot. My parents took me travelling surprisingly often in my first years—a month in Shanghai, and a few bus tours to Chicago and the Northeastern U.S.—which I have no physical memory of. But prior to this date when I was almost nine years, I had not been in a hotel for almost four entire years (about 44% of my life to that point)—since we stayed a night in a Howard Johnson while moving from Toronto to Ottawa in the summer of 1995. And I barely remember that one either.

So yes, this weekend trip to Niagara Falls with my dad and my maternal grandparents was indeed a novel experience. Only elevated by the fact that my dad had just returned (permanently) after eight months at Eli Lilly in Indianapolis, and my grandparents would head back to Shanghai in two months. Though, for whatever reason, I did not feel excited at all in the lead-up.

The Friday before we left was very much like the “Thrills and Spills” Friday from six months earlier (that immediately preceded my dad’s first visit back home, #94). It was the second-last week of third grade, and once again, I recall a chaotic energy to the whole day; the details of this one escape my memory even more. All I remember is that we had just completed a very fun math unit on “mapping”1; which was all about… well, reading maps and understanding road signs.2

And on Saturday morning, as the four of us loaded up into our new Honda Accord to made the trip down Highway 416, it must’ve been those signs that got be excited from the jump. The whole trip I was enthusiastically pointing out all the traffic signs and highway markets that I now recognized so well. And for the seven hour journey down there, including a stopover Toronto Chinatown of course, my anticipation just kept building. I was actually travelling somewhere I’d never been to before, hundreds of miles away from home, and staying the night at a real hotel! (Adding to all that, my dad and grandparents were just babbling in Mandarin to each other3 the whole time and mostly ignoring me, so it legitimately felt like I was travelling on my own.)

At Niagara, we went on the Maid of the Mist tour of the Falls—pretty cool. Then we went to a McDonald’s (where, for the only time ever, I had a chicken burger that was actual chicken breast and not crispy chicken and thus sucked). That’s pretty all that sticks out from before we finally checked into our hotel.

Or rather, motel. It was one of those cheap-looking complexes with a bunch of two-story buildings surrounding a parking lot. It was clean enough, I think, but definitely the furthest thing from luxury. Still, my eight-year-old mind couldn’t tell the difference. I was staying overnight in a hotel! How cool is that?

And it was especially cool that night, because just across the river in Buffalo, the Sabres and Stars were playing Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Finals. Oddly, I recall absolutely zero hype about it in my surroundings (and didn’t even know at the time the game was so close). But still, once I settled in my bed and turned on the TV, that critical hockey game took over my dad and I’s attention for the rest of the night.4

And, well… the rest of the night turned out to be a very long time. Because this was the infamous No Goal game, which went into triple overtime and ended when Brett Hull flipped a shot past MVP Dominik Hasek while his skate was controversially in the crease. Unfortunately, eerily similar to my last championship game extra-time experience a year and a half earlier with Game 7 of the 1997 World Series (#97)5, I lost consciousness shortly after overtime began. (The literal last thing I remember being them bringing out the actual Stanley Cup, two full periods before finally awarding it.)

Except this time, the whole experience—already one-of-a-kind and insane in its own right—was heightened many, mnany degrees by me watching the whole thing from a bed and an entire geographic surrounding that was completely new and I still could not form a conscious conception of inhabiting.

  1. Which all the kids, including me surprisingly, found infinitely more fun than actual math.
  2. Then, that night, I was excitedly explaining each sign from my dad’s driver’s handbook when he randomly took me to play basketball at the nearby court. Except the court was full, so we just tossed the ball at each other for an hour. Then we got home to watch an intense Jays game, where they lost by one run against the Royals with the bases loaded in the Bottom of the 9th, causing me to go to bed in an extremely foul mood.
  3. In hindsight, they must’ve been talking/arguing about the ambiguous circumstances under which my dad came back from the U.S. a month ago—enough fodder for the whole trip, I see now.
  4. I’m not sure about my grandparents. Just like so many other Chinese people (#130, #41), they had been struck by the novelty of the sports, but I think they were too old to care.
  5. Also similar in that the team I badly wanted to win—Dallas here, because Buffalo had knocked out my two favorite teams (Senators and Leafs, #46) that year’s playoffs—took an early lead and lost it late.