next stop on ye old road trip: niagra. thats what you see when you first run out to catch a glimpse. the building on the right are actually in canada. who knew they had buildings?

walking across the bridge, you get a slightly better view. there's a crazy tower on the US side for viewing the falls, there on the left.

i've always heard that the view is better from canada and i never really found out why til i got there. but once you see it, it's blatantly obvious. the falls are falling on the US side, so to see them, you have to go across to see the best of it. that last picture, you can see all those rocks piled there, apparently that's man-made. somebody in the 20's or 30's thought it would be good to blow a chunk out of the falls a bit. i'm not too sure how accurate that news is, but i guess it would explain the rocks. there are actually two falls to niagra, this other one, is the one i'm assuming to be the one which people choose to go over in a barrel due to the lack of pointy rocks at the bottom.

getting closer to the falls it seemed like it was raining. this shitty flash picture shows the spray. i was getting pretty drenched. walking away from the spray, i thought it had actually started to rain cuz the mist kept falling. but i just had to keep walking to see that it would eventually stop.
this is the closest i got to the falls. fairly impressive.

from here, started the humdrum that is the midwest. we booked through Ohio, hitting all the "big C" cities: Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati. then down to louisville, Kentucky.
Ohio was flat, Kentucky was actually green and hilly, a cool landscape.

then we made a stop in southern Indiana, in Princeton. one of my dad's brothers lives there, so it was a good place to stop. some sort of weird brother ritual. don't got one, so i can't attempt to explain it.
my uncle has two golden retrievers. one is shy, the other a bit more outgoing. this is joshua, the extrovert. you can see timid isaiah is always in character on the right there.

next, was more movement west to St. Louis, Missouri. and here, i momentarily faced my childhood nemesis.
The Arch.
this structure was instrumental in helping me learn of my fear of heights. you get onto the elevators, and as you go up, you have to occasionally go horizontally (as it is an arch and not a tower). so you go up a given amount of feet, and then the elevator has to click over to go up higher in elevation. that click swings the whole elevator back and forth for a few excruciating seconds. but for me, that wasn't the worst part. once you get up to the top, me with my short stature had to lean over to catch a glimpse of the cardinal's stadium and river below.
i freaked. started bawling my eyes out (i guess i should mention i was like 7) and was forced to go down below. my parents think today that i can't go up in tall buildings, but i can. it's not so much the height that bothers me, but the nothing below me feeling. like i'm on a cliff. see, the empire state building didn't do much to me, but overhanging balconeys at the mall kick my ass if i focus on it too hard. anyway. that was a St. Louis driveby.

next in Missouri was Hannibal. the home of Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain.
they kept Hannibal's downtown as a quiet tourist trap with a museum dedicated to the famed author. i'm not too sure Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were real people, but there were definite places where Twain would draw from for inspiration. if you can't read the sign.

Hannibal is right on the Mississippi River, only being separated by a couple of dykes in case of flooding. but in the river you can see the islands that Huck and darkie Jim hid out on for a while. i believe one is jackson island, but i might be making shit up.

we had to then head west traversing all of Missouri. and like all good endings, we headed off into that blazing, yet serene sunset.
so i guess that means more tomorrow. . . or whenever.