Day 1 ~ Driving to the Falls

We're off! These blog posts are going to be really fun for me to write!

We made the decision to drive for this vacation. It was actually a pretty easy decision to make - not only did we want to visit two cities, but plane tickets were really expensive. Passport cards are also cheaper than passport books. Something we should have budgeted for? Toll roads. Yikes, Illinois and Indiana. We spent $14.40 in tolls to get to Ontario. On the way home, we used the GPS to avoid tolls; the only unavoidable toll was the $3.50 at the border crossing. I should also mention that avoiding tolls did not add any additional driving time AND we ended up avoiding some traffic in Chicago. Bonus!

We woke up early and left at 6:00. We tried to wake the kids up, so they could wave to us from the driveway but they were snoozing pretty good. All we got was muffled good-byes from little faces mashed into pillows. You're welcome for not posting a picture of you in your jammies waving to us, Mom! Thanks for being a good sport and getting out of bed to see us off!

We made great progress until the Chicago rush hour parking lot. Geez. Lost an entire hour here.

LOOK! We're at the border!!! I was Kid-on-Christmas excited. Seriously.

Love the maple leaf to mark the highway on the GPS. 

Hey, we can go 70 on the 402! Oh wait. It's not MILES per hour; it's KILOMETERS per hour. 

Accounting for the time change, it took us 13-14 hours to make it to the Falls. I'm honestly amazed how well this picture turned out. Tim was driving about 100 on the 402. HA - km/h people. Settle down. (Ignore the previous picture; the speed limit had gone up over 70 km/h.)

We were extremely fortunate on this entire trip. We had rain only once - overnight - and we rolled into Niagara Falls AFTER a big rain storm. (Pretty cloud!)

This was our first peek at the Horseshoe Falls after dinner at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse. (Gotta love Groupon!)

After dinner #selfie :)

Next post - exploring Niagara Falls!

- becky