Olessia received her official green card in the mail on Thursday, April 19th, 2007. This was of course, very exciting. This expands Olessia’s rights in the United States. For example, US citizens can travel to a bunch of countries without a visa (Canada, Mexico, most of Europe) and her green card grants her this privilege.
So on Friday, I checked the weather. It has been down right cold and snowy here in Cleveland for quite some time. This weekend was going to be in the sixties and seventies! Ah yeah! Finally! I checked with Olessia and we had no plans for the weekend. Roadtrip! The plan was to go back to Niagara Falls, but this time visit from the Canadian side. Olessia found a deal on a hotel room so we made a 2 day trip out of it.
The trip was great. We left around 9:30am and we were in Canada around noon and at our hotel at 1pm. We checked in, unloaded (luggage and went to the potty) and headed out by foot to the Falls (the hotel overlooked the Falls). We spent Saturday walking around. Towards the late afternoon, we returned to our hotel to rest up a bit and get changed. We then went to dinner at Skylon which is the big Tower seen by the Falls. The dinning room rotates so everyone can see the Falls and the city. We were seated just before 8:30pm and that is when they light up the Falls. We tried getting some pictures, but it was too dark and we were moving. We did stop up on the observation deck, but we weren’t dressed to go on the outside part of the deck. The hotel shuttle picked us up and back to the hotel we went. It was a great time. We got to see a bit more of the city on our way back.
Sunday, we lazily got up from bed and made it to breakfast. Then from there we were going to go to the Butterfly Conservatory. We ended up stopping at an overlook for the Whirlpool. Then we went and viewed a dam which is one of Ontario’s power stations. From there, we went and visited the flower clock. THEN we went to the Butterfly Conservatory. Wow, there are a LOT of butterflies! They would be flying all around you. You literally had to watch your step, there were so many they would be on the ground.
Once we had our dose of butterflies, we headed off to America. We opted for the Rainbow bridge for our crossing and it was pretty backed up. We got past customs just fine. Olessia’s green card worked great! I think Canada customs gave her a harder time then the US. About 4 hours later we were back home.
Video (most of these average about 8 to 9mb in size and are AVI flavored):
Butterflies7 (group)
Rapids (29mb!)