The breathtaking beauty of the Niagara falls and the company of the fantastic four made this journey an amazing one :) ... The gigantic volume of the milky white liquid, the ever rising mist from the falls, and the multiple rainbows from the mist and the sunlight, bring down heaven to you (Remember the old godly movies where the heaven is filled with white mist and lord Shiva is meditating !).
Mine, Maan's and Tej's journey began on July 1st at 5.45 pm (PST) from SB to LA. From LA we boarded our flight to NY after a layover time of 3 hours. Well in those 3 hours we managed to watch a movie (finished it in an hour, you see the fast forwarding button helps so much in time saving :P), had our dinner and an awesome dessert of molten chocolate cake at Chilis. As soon as our second flight took off Maan and Tej slept off, I tried watching what was being played on the TV but eventually I too crashed. It was 5.30 AM (EST) and I could see the 'Big Apple' from the flight. There it was NY and I was very much excited to be there:) ...
We landed in JFK, took the Airtrain to the Federal circle station and waited for Kuba and 'S' to pick us up as we had to rent the car from JFK itself. S had reached NY the night before from Dallas at 12.00 AM and as always he had an interesting story to narrate ;) (he had lost his carry on luggage during his transit in Milwaukee :P, I will spare the details Karthik :P).
We rented a car (Hyundai Elantra) from Avis car rentals by 8 AM and drove to Kuba's house. This was my first trip in NY and I was amazed by the similarity of NY with Bangalore in terms of traffic. People do not follow any traffic rules! and the cab drivers are the same as our rickshaw drives ( no road sense at all), after coming to US I have been in Califonia and Washington and in both the states I have seen people following all the traffic rules. Since I recently gave my DL written test and had to read a lot of traffic rules :P, NY's traffic was nostalgic. I and Maan kept on comparing NY to Bangalore and Kuba was scolding the drivers on the road all the way :P (which is even better to remind you of Blore).
We reached Kuba's house at 8.45 AM, all of us got ready by 11.30 AM and left for our next destination 'The Dosa Cart' for Dosas of course. After a putting a lot of fight to find a parking spot we began our adventure to spot the dosa cart, even though we found it eventually we did not get any dosas and went in search of 'Sarvana Bhavan', there too we did not get any place, had a waiting time of 20 mins minimum so finally settled for a brunch buffet in 'Madras Mahal', the food was average but all of us were super hungry which is sufficient to eat to your stomach's conetent :P.
Next stop NY downtown, and a stop at 'Goldman Sachs' (or as BK- Snadeep says ಬಂಗಾರದ ಮನುಷ್ಯ ಗೋಣಿಚೀಲಗಳು' :) ) where Maan got her new first name: Chenni :) from the receptionist, saw the new 'WTC' construction in action, Tej stayed back to sleep in the car as he had seen NY before and we four headed for the 'Wall Street' (well, ಗೋಡೆಬೀದಿ), on the way saw the fmaous Bull (Maan and I wanted to call it ಗೋಡೆಬೀದಿ ಬಸವ, but sadly it is not on ಗೋಡೆಬೀದಿ - wall street), I liked the NYSE building, but could not capture the entire building, then we went for the Hudson river tour where we took the shark speedboat ride. Saw the Manhattan skyline, statue of Liberty from very close, Brooklyn & Manhattan & Williamsburg (BMW) bridge and got ourselves thoroughly wet. It was almost 6 PM, Tej picked us up from the Hudson river harbour and we went to LaGaurdia Airport (LGA) to pick up S's lugguage which had finally arrived in NY :P. After a change of clothes at LGA (as we were drenched), we left for our main destination the Niagara Falls (NF), Tej drove this time, I Maan and Kuba slept off peacefully for two and a half hours until dinner at BK (Burger king). After dinner, Kuba took over driving, stopped for fueling at Syracuse which turned out to be a very shady place, after searching for half and hour we found a gas station and left the place for good. From Syracuse to Buffalo, we played Anthyakshari and Taabo which turned out to be superfun and reached the hotel in Buffalo at 3.15 AM and all of us crashed on our beds, S took the sleeping bag. Maan was the first one to wake up the next day at 9 and I woke up at 10.30. The boys woke up later and we got ready watching the Wimbledon finals, cheering Jdokovic ( we are all Federer fans you see, except Maan who is a Nadal fan) and yes Jdokovic won :) ... We started at 11.30 for the falls, had our brunch at Chipotle (planned to have at IHOP but it had a waiting time of 20 min minimum). Buffalo was nice with a lot of greenery and huge houses. we reached Niagara falls at 2.15 PM, had to put lot of fight to find a parking spot which we finally got at the 'Falls Parking lot' , S was very much amused by the name :P. Man, there were so many Desis, it felt as if I had come to India, evrywhere I could see women in saaris and salwar, people speaking Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and many more indian languages. Worst of all, the traffic rules were thrown out of the window and people were crossing roads however they wanted (it was worse than NY). There are even Punjabi Dhabas on carts!
We had to rush for the rides as Kuba's cousin had told that they waited for 3 hours to get into every ride. Our hope was that we had bought the Niagara Discovery Pass and did not have to wait in the queue to buy them and also that we could join Kub's cousin in the queue as they were already waiting :P. It did not make a difference as we reached the place only at 3 PM (Met Kuba's cousin but they were too ahead in the queue for us join in between :P ) so we ended up waiting for 2 and half hours for the 'Cave of the winds' :P ( we have some joke on this name too). We split up to see the horse shoe falls as one or two of us waited in the queue (well Tej ended up waiting the longest :)) while Kuba and Maan tried to check out the queue for the 'Maid of the Mist' ride. We had gaint ice-creams while in the queue (Butterscotch flavor was the atraction, S said it is very rare to find butterscotch flavor in the US, he even took a pick of the menu :P, Priya we will send you the pic). We were given slippers and yellow ponchos for this ride. The American falls and the Bridal Viel ( 2 of the 3 original falls in Niagara, I say original becuase Tej found the 4th one :P that day! which we named 'Tejaswi's Falls' ;) ) consist of the 'cave of the winds' ride. There is no cave now as the rock which formed the cave earlier has fallen off. First, Maan, I and Tej went near the falls and we were more than happy to get drenched in the lashing waters, while Kuba and S went after us and came back in less than 5 min. I and Maan went again and we thoroughly enjoyed the water :). So one ride was done and it was around 6 PM, we planned to go to the Maid of the Mist the next day as time was scarse, while we planned to finish off the other attractions of the falls on our pass that day.
We went near the Horse shoe falls for some more time, took some interesting pics (of Tej rolling down the small hill for the first time :P), and then we left for the 'American falls and the Bridal viel view' from the top, also saw the Niagara river on the way . One more intersting incident happened here, Tej drank Pepsi! and was ready to break rules, in the sense, walk on the road without the pedestrian walk sign (Well this is huge you see :) ). After some more pics of the falls we left for the discovery center movie about the legends and the history of the Niagara Falls, here the waiting time for the next show was 40 min, so we started playing 20 questions it was more like any number of questions in one min, which turned out to be ultrafun, we laughed and laughed and I will remeber this for a long time :). The movie was like an anti-climax to our game, it was boring, poorly directed and acted and very poorly connected from story to story. I was trying to sleep, Maan was trying to be awake, Tej slept off, S was like 'why have they shown this guy walking on the pole for so long', Kuba was like 'The so called Maid of the Mist was like a zombie when she was running away her marriage', so the moral of the story is do not go to watch this movie when you visit Niagara. Our next stop was for the lighing of the falls and the fireworks from the observation deck. The falls lighted up and looked beautiful but the process of changing the colors was very slow and after a point it became boring. we saw the lighting for some 40 min and left at 9.10 PM to go for dinner and come back again for the fireworks at 9.45, but the fireworks on that day started at 9.15 itself and we had to see them from where we were standing.
So with that we were done for the day, all hungry we went in search of the Punjabi restaurant which Kuba's cousin had suggested, but with no luck after half an hour and still hungry we settled for a Punjabi Dhaba on a cart. Food was bad and we were still hungry, so we entered a mall but none of the shops there accepted cards so we started to get back on road as it was getting late and we had to make it early the next day morning. On the way to the parking lot we found the Punjabi restaurant, had roti, Panner subzi and Kofta and happily left for the hotel in Buffalo. It was a 45 min drive, I Maan and Kuba slept off with Tej driving and S guiding him. As soon as we reached the hotel, we hit our beds. Maan was the first to get up at 6.00 AM the next day, follwed by the rest of us, we had the complimentary breakfast in the hotel and started at 8.00 AM for the falls, Kuba drove, we reached the falls at 8.45, went to the Maid of the Mist ride had to wait for very little time and we got into the boat at around 9.45 with blue ponchos this time. the boat took us to the centre of the horse shoe falls and it was really amazing. I and Maan were humming the song 'America America' from the kannada movie 'America America' the whole time both the days, especially the line 'ಕಾವೇರಿ ಕೂಡ ಅಸೂಯೆ ಪಡುವಳು ' meaning 'Even kaveri will be jealous after seeing the Niagara' and it cannot see why Kaveri will not be jealous :). I took few photos putting my Camera's life in danger but it was worth it. After the ride we went to the rainbow point and saw the rainbows bieng formed, we even got pictures of double rainbow. With a picture of all of us and the rainbow over us, our trip to the Niagara ended.
So with that we started our journey back to NY, actually New Jersy to see the July 4th fireworks. Kuba and Tej drove again, we palyed Taboo on the way, the drive from Niagara to Binghampton was nice, it felt like we were in some European setting, with the lush green fileds and huge houses, we even saw a place called Warsaw :P, we ate our lunch in Binghamptom, it was a really shady place and we were happy to get out of there. I slept off at 5.30 and I had no clue as to what happened till 8 pm till we reached NJ and parked our car at Kuba's friend, Vinayak's place. NJ too is full of Desis, this trip was an unplanned desi rush (even though I am not proud of it, I was happy when our flight from LA to SB had only 2 desis, I and Tej :P) Accompanied by Vinayak we went to Hoboken to watch the fireworks. It had a beautiful view of the Manhattan Skyline from this side of the Hudson river. After the fireworks we waited for dinner from 'Naan King', with that we headed back to NY to Kuba's place. It was 12.15 am when we reached and we all crashed, S's flight was cancelled so Maan, I and Tej were supposed to leave by 3AM on July 5th to the airport to catch our flights at Newark and LGA. Kuba dropped us at that time of the morning, he also had to drop off the rental car at JFK airport after that. I and Tej reached SB at 2.10 PM after layovers at Houston for 1.5 hours and LA for 3 hours. Maan reached SB at 11.15 AM after layover at Denver. S got a flight back at 3 PM to Dallas.
It was a suuper trip and all thanks to the fantastic four Chenni :), Kuba,Tej and S for such an awesome trip.
