The Niagara Falls are one of the prominent memories of my childhood tours around America. I remember them as one of the most impressive natural wonders I’ve seen up to that point in time and together with the general high of the visit to the American wonderland, the falls proved a memory to last.
I obviously remember them bigger. It’s natural, I guess, since it’s been 22 years since I was last there and so much has happened in the meanwhile.
But it’s perhaps also due the different way I approached the falls and me coming in from the Canadian side. I took the train from Toronto down to the Canadian side of Niagara falls and from the train station walked along the river valley towards the falls. It’s interesting that along the ridge there are occasional markings for where the fall used to be in different years, and I was puzzled by the notion that the falls are "falling back" south. Small and harmless at first, slowly increasing in size, noise and air humidity, the grand Niagara Falls came into full range…
So I got closer…
… and realized that even though they’re really spectacular and a gorgeous natural sight, they would never match the grandness of how they appear in my childhood memories. That’s not the only thing that was off… I also vaguely remember my dad flying around the waterfalls in his special waterproof superhero costume throwing down fireworks at the foggy rocks, but that didn’t quite seem to be happening the same way… (the fireworks he did this time were more like firecrackers :P).
They were, oddly enough, other things to make up for that…
Or maybe I imagined that as well… 😛