#133. 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 a young child is staying overnight somewhere that isn’t home. Whether it’s a friend’s sleepover or a family trip, there’s just something undeniably cool about realizing that these unfamiliar surroundings won’t disappear when the day ends—you’re actually going to sleep there.
This was far from my first hotel experience. 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.—none of which I remember. But by this point, when I was almost nine years old, I hadn’t stayed in a hotel for almost four entire years (about 44% of my life to that point)—since one night at a Howard Johnson while moving from Toronto to Ottawa in 1995. And I barely remember that one either.
So yes, this weekend trip to Niagara Falls with my dad and my maternal grandparents was a novel experience, made even more unusual by my dad having just returned (permanently) after eight months working in Indianapolis.
The Friday before we left had the same chaotic energy as “Thrills and Spills” six months earlier (#99), though I remember even fewer details. What I do remember is that we had just completed a surprisingly fun math unit on “mapping”, which was basically about reading maps and understanding road signs.
And on Saturday morning, as the four of us loaded up into our new Honda Accord to make the trip down Highway 416, it must’ve been those signs that got me excited from the jump. The whole trip I was enthusiastically pointing out all the traffic signs and highway markers that I now recognized so well. And for the seven-hour drive, including a stopover in Toronto’s Chinatown, 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! (Also, my dad and grandparents were just babbling in Mandarin to each other 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 got a chicken burger made with actual chicken breast and not crispy chicken, and thus it sucked. That’s pretty much all that sticks out 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 around us, and didn’t even realize the game was being played so close by. But still, once I settled in my bed and turned on the TV, my dad and I spent the rest of the night watching the game.
And, well… the rest of the night turned out to be a very long time. Because this was the infamous No Goal game, which ended in triple overtime when Brett Hull scored past MVP Dominik Hasek while his skate was controversially in the crease. Unfortunately, just like my previous championship-game extra-time experience a year and a half earlier with Game 7 of the 1997 World Series (#97)1, I lost consciousness shortly after overtime began. (The last thing I remember was them bringing out the Stanley Cup, two full periods before they finally awarded it.)
Except this time, the whole experience felt even more surreal because I was watching it from a strange bed in a completely unfamiliar place—one that my eight-year-old mind still couldn’t quite believe I was actually going to sleep in.