The Smith Family Adventures

Our adventure continued on the shores of Lake Erie. We wanted the boys to be able to dip their toes in the water. The beaches were closed for just a few more days until Memorial Day, but we didn’t actually want to swim anyway. Just dip our toes. The day was beautifully sunny, but there was a pretty frigid wind coming off the lake. And the lake itself was absolutely freezing. But dip our toes in the water we did!

I was a little worried with no sand toys and no swimming that the boys would get bored. That was silly of me! With rocks and sticks around, who needs toys? The boys hunted out the best rocks to throw into the waves.

Everyone got into it.

After playing on the beach we found a nice park with a playground for a picnic. The boys had fun testing their skills on the big boy play equipment.

Next, we drove down to Pittsburgh to catch a Pirates game. Nathan has always wanted to see PNC Park.

The boys really enjoyed watching the game, and got a kick out of shouting “Let’s Go Bucs!”

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to witness a Pirates win, but we stayed eight innings and got to witness many home runs, including one that cleared the entire park! We got back to the hotel extremely late and tried to rest up before the next leg of our trip…Ohio and my brother’s wedding!

There we were waking up on the 37th floor with the beautiful Niagara Falls right outside our window. We decided to take it easy. We would go sight seeing, but we also would make sure the boys had some normalcy. Naptime/quiet time. Normal as possible meals. Relaxed schedule. We slept in, ate a leisurely breakfast, and then finally headed out to see the falls up close on the Canadian side. We decided to try to use the Niagara bus system. Here is Elias learning how to read the schedule.

When we had seen the falls on the American side, the boys had seen the boat tours down on the river. We decided to do the Hornblower Cruise first since the boys were so excited about it. The timing was perfect and we walked right on the boat, bright red ponchos and all.

The boat tour was pretty amazing. We got to get very close to the falls and hear the water pounding. There was a ton of mist. Here is our first family picture of the trip with the American Falls in the background.

After the tour, it was already time for lunch since we had had such a leisurely morning. We stopped at a food court-ish place where the food was terrible but the views were amazing.

After nap time, we decided to take the boys on the incline railway for fun. Basically, it is a glass case that rolls down a nearly vertical track with an excellent view of the falls.

The view from the railway car.

We hopped at the bus at the bottom and went to Clifton Hill, which has a ton of entertainment and shops. The Rainforest Cafe was our destination. We ate a yummy dinner, and then let the boys have some fun in the arcade. Simon even hit the bonus on one of the games and got 500 tickets at once! Those tickets were coming out for a really long time!

Then we just had to visit the Hershey’s store. Who wouldn’t?

Then Simon did this which I thought was both really cute and really gross at the same time:

Finally, we headed back to our hotel for an evening of swimming and relaxing.

That concluded our first full day in Canada.

The next morning we woke up a bit earlier in order to drive to Toronto and visit the zoo. We were excited because they host a few animals that we’ve never gotten to see in person before. The day was beautiful (Nathan and I even got slight sunburns), and Nathan got some real Canada driving under his belt. The boys enjoyed seeing the animals, but overall were still pretty tired and insisted on riding in the stroller…which was a problem since there were two boys and one stroller. They were innovative, however:

We got to see pandas, gorillas, kangaroos, wombats, and many many more interesting animals. The boys were also thrilled to see some of the more common animals such as lions, giraffes and rhinos.

We got stuck in a bunch of traffic on the way back to Niagara, which put me in a terrible mood since I am pregnant and did not have access to a bathroom. However, we made the best of our situation, and got in an early bed time for the boys. Finally!

Our final morning of our time in Canada was also a beautiful day. We decided to head back down to the falls and take the “Journey Behind the Falls” tour. It was cool to see the falls so close, and walk through tunnels behind the falls.

We had a bit of driving to do that day to reach our next destination, but we decided to stick around for a few more great views and lunch before setting off.

As we pulled out of the parking lot, the boys were yelling “Bye bye water!” They had a wonderful time, and overall we wished we had more time to explore the area. We were off, though for the next leg of our trip…Pennsylvania!

After such a long travel day, what did we have in store for us when we woke up the next morning? More travel! We rented a car and drove to Niagara Falls! The drive is only about four hours from Cleveland. The boys did really well in the car for the first three hours, but we were glad that my parents had loaned us their ipads for the last hour or so.

We drove through the very top tip of Pennsylvania, and a bit of New York. I had never been in either of those states. The scenery was pretty but a bit repetitive. Deciduous trees. Lots of deciduous trees. Although, there was a long stretch of the New York thruway in which the entire first row of trees along the freeway was just dead. It was very creepy and made me dub New York as “The Land of Dead Trees.” I’m sure that’s not all there is, but it’s what we saw.

Before crossing into Canada, we decided to see the falls from the American side. We had heard from many people that the Canadian side is much better, but we still wanted to see it. Plus the boys needed a break from the car! The day was overcast so we didn’t get the most beautiful pictures, but the falls were just as majestic as ever, I’m sure.

Here is our first view, standing next to the river just above horseshoe falls.

We wandered around looking at the falls from different angles.

The boys really enjoyed looking at the falls, the tour boats down below, and most of all running around.

Who can look at the falls when there are rocks to jump off of?

Or wet ground to get dirty from?

Here is our first view of the American Falls.

Walking around the state park was great. We got to stretch our legs and see such beautiful sights. There was hardly anyone even there.

However, it was quickly approaching dinner time, and we still had to cross the border, get to our hotel, and get all the luggage inside before finding something for dinner. Luckily, the border crossing was uneventful, and we made it to our hotel.

We stayed at the Embassy Suites and had a gorgeous view of the falls right from our room.

We were glad to finally be at our destination. We were looking forward to a few fun days in Canada!

We just returned from nearly two weeks of exhausting, fun and family filled vacation. If the criteria for knowing you had a fun trip is being completely and utterly exhausted, then I’d say we fulfilled that one hundred percent!

Our trip included two countries, four states, five hotels, 1300 miles of driving, and a big, beautiful family wedding.

We always tell ourselves after this kind of trip that we’ll never do it again. We’ll never try to cram so much in to one vacation. Yet we always fall into the trap because there is so much we want to see!

It all started with my brother. When he was a pilot in Arizona, he gave a tour of the Grand Canyon one July day, and the woman in the front seat of his helicopter introduced him to her daughter (who was in a back seat). She was moving to the area and needed friends. A year and a half later, he got engaged to that very girl and wedding planning began.

Since we knew we’d already be spending thousands of dollars for airfare, hotels, rental cars, and all the other wedding related expenses, we decided we’d just take a little family trip first to get our money’s worth. While we were already all the way over in Ohio, we may as well see some other stuff before wedding festivities began.

We left on a Thursday morning, and our first flight landed in Phoenix. Elias was extremely excited to be there because he has never been to Arizona before. He kept talking about how he could color it in on his travel map when we got home. Nathan and I aren’t counting it because he was only in the airport…but if you ask him, he’ll say he’s been to Arizona. Even though he hasn’t “officially” been there, I decided to take him to an airport gift shop while we were killing time in the airport. I thought I’d get him a sticker book or something to do on the next flight. However, he latched on to this cactus that said “Arizona.” My first thought was…”no way” but then I thought it was so cute that I just caved. I told him to pick something for Simon, and he picked a funny looking triceratops. Since then, Simon has latched on to that thing and brought it on all our adventures. It is quite cute how much he loves it.

We flew into Cleveland, Ohio and our adventures began right away. Our flight was late, and in fact arrived so late that our hotel’s shuttle van had stopped running. We had to haul our massive load of luggage all around the airport looking for a way to get to our hotel with two extremely tired boys. Imagine having two adults and two little boys, and needing enough clothes for 12 days including cool weather, warm weather, sight seeing, and nice clothes for rehearsal dinners and wedding attire. We had diapers and food and all sorts of stuff. Anyway, we finally found a taxi driver who was comically rude to us about the amount of stuff we had.

Despite the reluctant cab driver, we did make it to our hotel at a little past 1:00 in the morning. We even started out exhausted! When I was trying to check in, I told the boys to go sit on the couch in the lobby. I thought they were pretty exhausted, but they still had enough juice in them to cause a little bit of mischief. I looked over at them to find them standing on the couch, having removed the backing cushions to use them as sumo-wrestlingish weapons. I couldn’t believe my eyes. What in the world were they doing?

We cleaned up the lobby, finally made it into our room, and got as much rest as we could before we set off early the next morning for the real start of our adventures. More on those to come. For now, I need rest!

Now that baby James is over a month old, I’ve been talking up things like “singing to James” or “sitting next to James” or “hugging James” with both of the boys. They have both talked about their cousin a lot. Simon walks around holding the baby doll and calls it James. But neither of the boys has shown much interest in actually interacting with him much.

Tonight was our turn to bring dinner, and Aunty Kristy wanted to try to get some cousin shots, so I really turned on the “sit with baby James” burner. And it worked! Elias was very excited to sit with me and James, and then eventually wanted to hold James himself. Eventually, Simon followed suit since he wants to do everything Elias does. This provided us with many cute photo ops, and many very sweet moments between the boys. Both Elias and Simon did really well holding James. They were gentle and loving. Elias wanted to hold James over and over. I almost felt like I had to fight for my baby time.

Elias’ first time holding James.

He was so proud.

He got in some kisses too:

Simon was curious.

Cousins!

Matching binkis!

After dinner, Elias wanted another turn.

It was very heartwarming and fun to see the boys interact with their baby cousin. We never really got to do this when Simon was born so I’m glad the boys are getting to get close to their cousin when he is so young!