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Waves, Wolves and Water Parks:
Getting soaked in Niagara Falls
© By Sherri Telenko
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Every minute, six million cubic feet of water plummets over the crest of Niagara Falls. So it's about time people started getting wet - for the fun of it. The recent addition of three major waterparks in Niagara Falls gives us three more reasons to visit one of the most popular wonders of the world. Move over honeymooners, this town's big on family fun.
The elegant European-style Americana Conference Resort and Spa was the first to open an indoor waterpark in 2004. At the time, it was the only one of its kind in Niagara Falls and it made indoor pools look like bathtub puddles. Called Waves Indoor Waterpark, it hosts a beach-like wave pool, kiddie zone, hot tub and tube and body slides extending three storeys into the sky. Despite appearing intimidating, kids five and older love the slides. Who knew jumping on an inflatable donut and sailing through a dark tube of harrowing twists and turns could be so fun?
This park's reasonable size allows parents to see kids easily from a seat along the parameter or in the middle of the action near the café. The hotel provides waterpark passes with most hotel stays but allows day access to the park as well for $19.95 to $29.99 per person, along with Tidal Wave birthday party packages starting at $24.95 per person. With the addition of Senses Spa last year, the Americana is equal parts adult and kid creature comforts.
In 2006, the first Great Wolf Lodge opened in Canada. Owned by Ripley's Niagara Water Park Resort, this Canadiana-gone-mad themed-resort is more than a waterpark, although splashing about is definitely the highlight. Complete with spa, mini golf, ticket redemption arcade and five feeding options including pizza and a casino-style all-you-can-eat buffet, a Disney-esque resort like this one designed to keep guests (and their money) on site is long overdue in Niagara Falls.
Decorated to look like the inside of a massive wilderness retreat, the Great Wolf Lodge wows guests the moment they step into the lobby. The main entrance is dominated by a mega-fireplace and realistic-looking animatronics. A moose and bear that talk, tell jokes and offer morning and evening 'shows' greet visitors. This hotel is all about amusing family members, particularly the most fickle: young children.
Of course, no on-board experience is complete without a good soak. So don your swimsuit because the Great Wolf Lodge waterpark is huge
and you'll spend your time trailing the little ones or risk losing them. The park has 13 waterslides - four of them massive tube slides that weave in and out of the lodge walls, each slightly more daring than the previous; a four-storey waterfort with interconnecting ladders and walkways (with rail mounted opportunities to spray those underneath using hoses, buckets of water and mega spray guns); and the mandatory beach entry wave pool that barrages swimmers with walls of waves about every 30 minutes. A giant tipping bucket high on top Fort MacKenzie periodically dumps 4000 litres of water on unsuspecting victims below and, frankly, startles the bejeezes out of toddlers. But they can scamper into one of three kiddie pools or the more traditional activity pool with basketball nets.
One month after the Great Wolf Lodge opened its freshly whittled doors, Niagara Falls had another waterpark; this time claiming to be the biggest. Owned by Canadian Niagara Hotels, the Fallsview Indoor Waterpark is stacked atop the parking garage beside Casino Niagara in the heart of tourist activity. Fallsview services several properties including the recently renovated Skyline Inn, Sheraton on the Falls and Brock Plaza Hotel.
Open to the public on a first-come-first-serve basis (in other words, when the park isn't at capacity with hotel guests, passes are available), this facility caters to bigger kids and those too big to be kids. Complete with wave beach, one outdoor pool and tanning deck, climbing decks, 1000 litre dumping bucket like the other parks, this one adds eight slides several storeys high and eight more a whopping six storeys high.
Clearly, this is not the place for the slide shy. Here, you can plummet down vertigo- inducing body slides, race with a friend along side-by-side tubes, ride a sled-like rubber mat down a few others or raft slide along three more, including one that resembles a giant toilet bowl.
Finally, note that at these and any waterpark, the chlorine levels are high. It's recommended that you shower regularly during your water fun, especially if you are extra sensitive to chemicals. Sanitation aside, the ever expanding Niagara Falls now has more places for wet, wild, humid fun than you can shake a hose at.
Sherri Telenko is published regularly in Southern Ontario regional lifestyle magazines and won NATJA's Best Resort Article Award in 2005.
Photo Credits
Sherri Telenko: Americana Conference Resort and Spa, Great Wolf Lodge
If you go
Americana Conference Resort and Spa: www.americananiagara.com;1-800-263-3508
Fallsview Indoor Waterpark: www.fallsviewwaterpark.com; 1-888-234-8408
Great Wolf Lodge: www.greatwolf.com; 1-800-905-9653
Wikipedia: http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niagara_Falls
Wikitravel: http://wikitravel.org/en/Niagara_Falls_(Ontario)
What's happening, money, distance, time?
Media Guide: http://www.abyznewslinks.com/
Currency conversion: http://www.xe.com/ucc/
Distance calculator: http://www.indo.com/distance/
Time zone converter: http://www.timezoneconverter.com/
Transportation, visas, health, maps and temperature
Airlines (Wikipedia): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airlines
Embassies/Consulates (Embassy World): http://www.embassyworld.com/
Health precautions (WHO): http://www.who.int/ith/en/
Maps (Mapquest) U.S. & Canada: http://www.mapquest.com/maps/main.adp
Maps (Mapquest) World: http://www.mapquest.com/maps/main.adp?country=GB
Temperature (Temperature World): http://www.temperatureworld.com/
After the Falls: Niagara's Freedom Trail
© By Ann Campbell
If you're standing at the guardrail ogling world-famous Niagara Falls when a spry 75-year-old woman approaches and invites you to visit her church, I strongly recommend you accept. "I just want to tackle visitors sometimes," says Wilma Morrison with a mischievous smile. "I want to run up and say 'Have I got a story to tell you."
Morrison knows that most visitors to her hometown focus on the falls (actually three falls, the most spectacular being Horseshoe Falls). And rightly so. They are awesome, whether viewing from below on a Maid of the Mist boat ride, descending in elevators to see from beside and behind in the Journey Behind the Falls or simply standing on the rim at the Table Rock Complex. Even away from the falls there are umpteen diversions, from an engaging Butterfly Conservatory and worth-the-price IMAX film about Niagara Falls to a row of tacky museums and fast-food outlets on neon-lit Clifton Hill.
But there's another story in this town, one that Morrison and others are eager to tell.
It is the story of African Americans -- fugitive slaves, indentured workers and British Loyalists -- who came to this corner of Canada, across the Niagara River from the cities of Niagara Falls and Buffalo, New York, in the 19th century. Historians estimate 40,000 fugitive slaves crossed the international border, the majority by steamboat, ferry, and rowboat or by swimming across the Niagara River. Their rich history is captured in part through a collection of historical sites, interpretive markers and plaques known as Niagara's Freedom Trail.
My first stop on the Trail is Morrison's church, the Nathaniel Dett Memorial Chapel British Methodist Episcopal Church. "This church is the only thing that really states we've been here so long," says Morrison. It is a simple building, constructed by former slaves in 1836 on a site that was so bleak and windy that the congregation nicknamed it "The North Pole." In 1890, the building was rolled on logs to a more suitable parcel of land donated by Oliver Parnall, a parishioner who had swum the Niagara River to freedom years before. The church now designated a National Historic Site, still rests on those logs.
Next door is the Norval Johnson Heritage Library, a former cottage that now houses a 1,200-volume lending library and genealogical database where people can search for information on ancestors who may have escaped to Canada.
Morrison, a highly-respected authority on the region's Black history, acknowledges the challenges faced by those trying to find branches of their family tree in the tracks of the Underground Railroad. "Nothing was written down - that would have been unsafe for the escaping slaves and for those who helped them. To add to the difficulty, slaves took their master's last names, so when they were sold to a different plantation owner, their names would change." Still, many people find clues to their heritage in the library's records. Plans are underway to put the genealogical database on the library's Web site.
Following the advice of my guidebook (Owen Thomas' Niagara's Freedom Trail: A Guide to the African-Canadian History on the Niagara Peninsula, $7.20 US plus postage, call 1-800-263-2988 to order), I drive upriver to the town of Fort Erie. Here, steps from the river's edge, sits a plaque entitled "The Crossing." It commemorates the thousands of fugitive slaves who first arrived on Canadian soil, and so first tasted freedom, on this riverbank.
Although free, fugitive slaves were still in danger of being captured and returned to the southern states by roving slave catchers. My next stop, Fort Erie's stately 170-year-old Bertie Hall, is said to have been a "safe house" on the Underground Railroad, a place where refugees could hide until arrangements were made to move to safer quarters inland, away from the border.
It's difficult to imagine such a noble past when I first step through the front doors, for the main floors of Bertie Hall house the Mildred M. Mahoney Dolls' House Gallery, the largest dolls' house collection in the world. I wander past some of the 140 opulent houses filled with miniature crystal chandeliers and tiny antique oil paintings then descend a narrow staircase to a very different reality.
Here the air is dank, the floor covered in gravel, the space dimly lit. On one rough-hewn bedrock wall, a burlap sack marks the spot where, if you believe the old stories, a secret tunnel to the riverbank used by escaping slaves and smugglers once stood. A collection of utilitarian furniture - a bunk with worn, wool blankets, a small table, simple chairs and a pot-belly stove - sit in silent testament to a time when freedom-seekers hid in this underground room. I'm told that visitors are sometimes moved to tears or to song. I understand why.
I follow the Freedom Trail inland to St. Catharines and Salem Chapel, a British Methodist Episcopal church constructed in 1855 in the style of a southern Baptist church. The Chapel, now designated a National Historic Site, has served as a spiritual centre for the region's Black community for over 150 years. It was to here that Harriet Tubman, the courageous Underground Railroad conductor known as "Moses" (because of her repeated journeys south to collect slaves and then guide them to the Promised Land of Canada) brought many refugees. And it was here that Tubman worshipped for eight years prior to the start of the U.S. Civil War.
Rochelle Bush, the historical director of the church and a descendant of fugitive slaves from Virginia on her father's side and South Carolina on her mother's, is passionate about the men, women and children who had the intrepidity to run. "Our ancestors were the defiant, the rebels, the courageous," says Bush. She invites me to Sunday service at 11:00 a.m.
The next day, strolling beside Niagara Falls, I'm reminded of something else Bush said about the responsibility we all share to honour those who came before: "We are the keepers of the culture. We are the speakers for the dead."
I'm sure Wilma Morrison would agree. And truth be told, when I spy a group of camera-touting tourists stepping off a sightseeing bus, I want to run up and shout, "Have I got a story for you."
Ann Campbell is a freelance travel writer, based in Vancouver, BC. Her award-winning stories (she's received four travel writing prizes in recent years) appear in newspapers and magazines across North America including The Vancouver Sun, Oregonian, Georgia Straight, Globe & Mail, Western Living, AAA Living, Canadian Family and more.
Photo Credits
Ann Campbell: A safe house, one of the Underground Railroad sites on the Freedom Trail in Niagara Falls, Wilma Morrison, a local authority on black history, in front of her church that was constructed in 1836 by former slaves, Bertie Hall is said to have been a safe house for escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad.
If you go
Bertie Hall: www.angelfire.com/biz/DollHouseGallery/, call 905-871-5833.
Nathaniel Dett Memorial Chapel and Library: www.norvaljohnson.com call 905-358-9957.
Historical Fiction: Children visiting Niagara Falls will be entranced by The Last Safe House: A story of the Underground Railroad (Barbara Greenwood, $9.95 US, Kids Can Press, 1998). This fictional account of a St. Catharines' family who helps a young runaway slave offers up historically-accurate information, illustrations and engaging activities.
Salem Chapel: To organize a tour, call 905-682-0993.
Underground Railroad: Historical and touring information on sites throughout southern Ontario, including Niagara's Freedom Trail: www.ontariotravel.net, search "Black Heritage Route."
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When travelling to the Niagara Region, you may wish to investigate the following
links:
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This Destination