WILSON, NY: Time for Updates, Part 1

The Daisy Barn Campground is a pleasant place to stay. The sites are a little close together, but with the full hookups, good free WiFi, over-the-air TV reception, nice residents, and the beautiful view of Lake Ontario, it's easy to like this place.  We like it so much, we're staying until Wednesday, Aug. 26.

Last Wednesday, we went to the small town of Wilson which was larger than we expected. It has a shoreline 'touristy' area with many small shops and eating establishments, as well as a small amusement park for small children, a large city park also on the shore, and the usual small town commercial and residential areas.


  This is the marina area with a couple of good size restaurants.

 Boat making its way to Lake Ontario









 




We continued exploring other nearby towns like Olcott, Newfane,and Ransomville, before enjoying an early dinner at Ray's Tavern  west of the campground.

Thursday, brought occasional rain showers so we spent the day indoors. In the evening, we walked to the shoreline and visited with some of the other campers.
 
Friday dawned partly cloudy and much cooler, so it was a good day to do more exploring through parts of Amherst with lunch at Outback, through North Tonawanda, the city of Niagara Falls and in Niagara Falls State Park.

  

 We parked in parking lot #3, (not shown on the map) and purchased trolley tickets ($3 per person). The trolleys travel throughout the Park, stopping at the various attractions and giving out information along the way. There are paved walking trails all around the island as well. Our first stop was at Horseshoe Falls. Unfortunately, they are renovating the viewing area at Terrapin Point so we couldn't get as close to the side of the falls as you could in the past.

This shows the closest edge of Horseshoe Falls just behind the yellow construction vehicle, and the far side of Horseshoe Falls.










Our next stop was at the American Falls next to the Maid of the Mist area.  The best views of the falls are from the Canadian side, but we don't have passports so a border crossing is not in our future..






Here we had our best view of Niagara Fall and the boats below (blue slickers from the American side on Maid of the Mist on the left,, red slickers from the Canadian side on Hornblower on the right)

Both vendors load the boats to the max!! This is a Canadian boat.

American falls in the left foreground and Horseshoe falls in the distance.

Click HERE for a short video.
(May be slow to load)







All together, we stayed in the park about 4 hours. None of the other attractions interested us, but you could easily spend all day and evening taking in the various attractions. There were large numbers of people there from all over the world, but the traffic in and out of the area was much less than we expected, and the wait for the trolleys never seemed very long.