Sorry I haven’t posted for a while but you’ll see that I’ve been traveling a bit and doing a lot. I’ve also collected a few really funny stories to share. The global stuff follows these vignettes and there are travel notes this posting including top hotels in Washington DC, visits to Vitznau, Switzerland and Portofino, Italy, and Niagara Falls.
My 6 year old son Jeremy has a keen sense of humor. He said that he wanted to eat in bed, and we told him that he had to eat in the dining room and by the table. So he brought his bed and a small table into the dining room. Kinda reminds me of my college speech class where you had to present your speech with a jacket and tie, and some guy was said to have shown up only wearing a jacket and tie.
At the Passover seder, one of the ceremonies known as “karpas” is to dip a potato or celery or something similar into salt water. Jeremy decided to be a human karpas. He took a mixing bowl, filled it with water, yelled “karpas” and stuck his head in it. I’ll bet that hasn’t been done in 2,000 years.
We ate dinner out and my hamburger wasn’t cooked right so they did it again and got it wrong again. To make good, they sent over chocolate fondue with fruits for dessert, something my kids wanted but which we didn’t want to order. Last time I ordered it my son was jumping on the table. My 8 year old daughter Elizabeth said to me afterward that she was glad that my burger sucked because she got the dessert that she wanted. I said that it was only a matter of time before she thought about killing me to benefit from the life insurance policies. She said that she didn’t understand what I meant but that it sounded funny. For now at least.
Here’s another Jeremy story you’ll love. We were at the ocean on Miami Beach and my brother brought along this huge inflatable swan that took up half a room. He was out far in the water and the thing was bigger than he and he kept being dunked under the swan. Jeremy looked at all this from the shoreline and yelled at me “He is the stupidest fu**ing idiot.” Jeremy has some speech issues so the words come out sounding really funny when he says it, which is great, because when he lets loose like a sailor sometimes I don’t have to worry that the people around him will understand what he said. … The picture at the left shows Jeremy setting up a small bed on a kitchen counter. Talk about having breakfast in bed….
I am so proud. My kids presented me with a model hotel and resort built with Legos that they designed. This past week they have designed the Roman Coliseum and the Old City of Jerusalem. Out of the blue, Jeremy told me that his favorite city is Chicago, a place we visited last summer. He said he liked the architecture. You can see that all this travel pays a dividend.
I saw this kid playing catch with his dad and I complimented them on how well his 6 year old was catching and throwing a baseball. Silly me for thinking that dad was spending a lot of time coaching his kid. Turns out the kid goes every week to get instruction by a famous baseball coach. Nothing is simple anymore.
If I were king, I would ban children’s birthday parties and dogs in cities. Also neckties, which are really bad for your health. I just saw a big ad in the New York Times from a doctor advertising his practice based on the ill effects of wearing neckties. Both are good things about Iran – their diplomats don’t wear ties and they don’t allow dogs.
It’s been a good 2 months since we disconnected the cable TV box. The kids didn’t really mind; Jeremy was happy because Elizabeth tended to make him watch her programs. They’ve been doing tons of arts and crafts projects and doing other things such as dancing to songs from the Grease album. We find them much less crabby and more engaged and cooperative when there’s no TV, especially on Sundays. More cleaning but the house just runs better. You keep reading about all these kids with attention deficit disorders – I’m telling you: Get rid of the remote controls, hand-held video games and take away Internet access and you’ll see how much attention span you can develop. But here’s what gets you – the monthly cable bill doesn’t go down when you disconnect the cable. If you have phone and internet, it’s the same price. The only good thing about the TV is that because they just sit on the couch, there’s less mess around the house. I’ll accept the mess as the price for creative kids that are not comatose.
I wanted to buy some pajamas at Macy’s and some underwear at K-Mart (just plain white briefs from Hanes, in case you were interested), and in both stores they didn’t have what I wanted, so I bought the items online. Basic stuff, right? More often than not, I find going to a store a waste of time and usually more expensive than using some online coupon and/or getting free shipping rather than paying for the transport to the store. Gap doesn’t give you a coupon for free shipping if something you want from them is not available in the store. That really makes it a waste to go to their stores.
I’ve been on the search for a good pair of nail scissors. Everything I buy in the US is lousy in this department. My wife went to Germany and came back with 3 pairs hoping one would be good – the best of which was a Japanese brand made in Taiwan (I couldn’t read the brand because all the writing was in Japanese). The German brand was 20 Euro and was close enough to the Japanese brand which was 5 Euro. The Japanese brand was selling below its weight because it was in a Japanese department store in Berlin where nobody other than a Japanese reader or someone being helped by a helpful sales person could realize what its value was.
On Sundays we do lots of fun things in the city. We went to Bryant Park (a park run by a private foundation) where they had games set up such as minigolf and some Viking game where you toss wood blocks across a grassy area. We went to a kids theater to see a pre-passover show, a rock concert for kids in the garage of the Streits matzah factory, and took the kids to dinner at the restaurant which was the site of our first date. If I were in the suburbs, I guess it would be birthday parties, Little League and shopping malls. I prefer the city. One other thing about the city – you can be behind 30 people in the supermarket but on the express line you get out of there in 3 minutes. On Sunday afternoon it’s a scrum at Fairways supermarket on the upper west side – legalized rugby with pushing totally allowed and expected. One cashier said that some people come shopping just for that. I’m totally OK with pushing and being pushed; it is no place for buttheads parking double strollers in the aisles. Outside the city, you can be behind 2 people in line and you sit there for 20 minutes with the cashier yacking away about her café con leche. It’s hard to go back to that once you get used to this.
Here are three travel stories that indicate you need to watch your back. I checked out of a resort in the Bahamas a few months ago and the chief butler comes up to me and asks me if I have tips for the staff. Despite a 20% service fee on top of all my hotel and food and beverage bills, he says to me that the staff doesn’t get any of the money. He starts giving me envelopes for the various employees of the hotel. After I returned, I called up the general manager who was absolutely aghast and assured me that every penny of that 20% goes back to the employees as a matter of law.
In Miami Beach, after dinner at a local hotel, I got a bill with a suggested tip amount and left a tip. The next morning at checkout I noticed the bill was higher than what I signed for. Turns out they added a 20% service charge to the bill after I signed it. The front desk took it off but I’ll bet they do that a lot to unsuspecting tourists; lots of foreigners stay at that hotel and probably don’t notice it.
Then I had this babysitting agency take 3 days of fees up front and despite me cancelling one of the nights on 24 hours notice, they told me that the fee of $40 a day was nonrefundable. The fact that all these hotel chains outsource their babysitting to agencies who charge you a fee on top of the babysitter’s rate is bad enough, but not to be reasonable is worse. All the Hilton branded hotels in the US (including Waldorf Astoria for example) use Nanny Poppinz as an agency. These agencies have 4 hour minimums for example, which is almost always more than I need. They told me it was in my contract but when I registered on their website I initialed a blank page that had no terms and conditions on it. I complained with the hotel chain and a manager – the hotel refunded me the $40 as a courtesy and said they would take up the issue with the Nanny Poppinz chain. I am sympathetic to the fact that people in hotels hire babysitters and then simply don’t show up or deny that they hired them when the sitter arrives. But a 24 hour cancellation policy is reasonable and is in fact the industry standard.
In the Global Thoughts department, I would like to know how South Korea turns out to be at the same time a very disciplined country and a place that very much needs distance between regulators and business because they can’t be trusted to take care of safety. It’s just one disaster after another with that country, the latest being with the ferry. There are more airline crashes involving South Korean pilots than any other country and that’s no accident.
We used to think of Japan as buying up America. It looks like the opposite is happening. Foreign ownership of companies making up Japan’s stock market is now 30%; up from 4% in 1989. You may recall that Japan had pretty bad luck when it did buy a bunch of American companies a generation ago. Lots of those companies wound up being sold back to US owners for a fraction of what they had been bought for.
Cautionary Tale for Tax and Spenders: Most of Europe is in economic recovery, but not France. They thought they could solve their problems by raising taxes on businesses and the wealthy to levels that drove high-producers to the exits. The strategy clearly hasn’t worked. The new leftist government is pledging to reduce them.
It’s a shame that Egypt’s Sisi has to be on a power trip and try to knock out all competing strains of thought inside that country. If he would be a class act, he could get his way in the country as it is and get the rest of the world to play ball and give the country a lot of money, business and good will. Same deal with Erdogan. But instead they want to seemingly have it all and wind up alienating the countries they most need help from. The Americans are about to eat crow and back up Sisi anyway because they have no choice and Sisi is already getting more than he needs from the Emirates and Saudis with the US pouting on the sidelines and having little influence. Russia’s Putin may be winning popularity contests at home but there is more capital fleeing the country so far this year than all of last year and, for several years running, nobody the country needs for its future sees a future there. Same deal in China. At the end of it all, capital runs to America, London and the rest of the West when things go sour everywhere else. The Russians are being blocked in the Ukraine due to the negative ramifications in the financial markets, not based on any vote of the UN Security Council or actual sanctions by the US or Europe.
The fact that Iraq is falling apart is no surprise. Maliki seems to be a jerk, propped up (and threatened) by the Iranians and willing to ignore everyone else. Military action by the US will not solve this problem; if Maliki or someone else would work to build coalitions in that country they could get more with honey than vinegar. Meanwhile, the Kurds are coming out ahead from this and the various troublemakers such as Iran and Russia are having to all gang up with their enemies such as the US and the Saudis to bring these Sunni religious extremist movements to heel because a caliphate in the middle of Iraq and Syria with tons of cash and oil will just be trouble for everyone down the line. Even Syria’s Assad which has tried to use the militants to its purposes has become wary of them.
I don’t know why Hamas decided to go and kidnap Israeli teenagers in the West Bank just as they are trying to get the world to recognize their new national unity government. Makes no sense. I assume they have factions in the government that want it to fail or else they were so fixated on getting bargaining chips for their own prisoners through kidnapping — warnings have been aired for months now by Israeli intelligence. The Israelis are certainly getting the opportunity to arrest a bunch of people and put the screws to them and it appears they are going to make Hamas pay for it. I’ve asked a few people in Israel to try and explain this situation to no avail, and ultimately in hindsight that makes the most sense. Because, one of my sources turned out to be correct — he said the whole thing made no sense and his assessment based on the facts and circumstances was that the boys were probably killed soon after they were abducted. Netanyahu insists Hamas is behind this — as of this writing the full story is yet to be known.
Here’s a thought: Do you know why Israel offers a lot of free wi-fi in public spaces? Because, a security expert tells me, the government monitors the traffic and learns a lot. They probably offer companies incentives to offer the service for free knowing that people will use it. So consider as you enjoy free wifi around the world the privacy you are giving up in return from governments who might be encouraging you to use it in order to listen in.
Consider this: Today July 1, 2014 there are 7 nonstop flights running from Tel Aviv to New York City, and these are not small planes flying that route. To compare, there are 6 nonstop flights from Frankfurt and Tokyo to NYC, 5 flights from Hong Kong, 4 flights from Mumbai, 2 flights from Beijing and Dubai and 1 flight each from Cairo and Riyadh. Incidentally, there are also 5 nonstop flights running from Tel Aviv to Frankfurt (and 3 from Dubai and Cairo to Frankfurt). This week they announced in Tel Aviv that they are going to have an experimental hovercraft network installed in Tel Aviv by the end of next year so that people can experiment with the idea of commuting Jetsons-style to work. The Chinese this past month bought two major Israeli companies such as their dairy company which is trusted, while the Chinese dairy companies are in scandal over tainted products. It was written last month in the Jerusalem Report that might not be a single science laboratory at MIT and Harvard that doesn’t have an Israeli researcher in it. I am always reading of the Israelis’ need for PR. The Israelis don’t need a propaganda ministry — who could dream up this stuff?
New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio is probably going to be remembered as one of the worst mayors in modern history. He is doing his best to turn the clock back on things that Bloomberg did to make the city more livable by taxpayers who pay the bills around here. For instance, he is freezing gifted programs which kept white people in the city and in the public schools. On the news they mentioned that the value of his retirement account is $43,000. He is 53 years old. Something struck me. I have a question: How good could a guy be as mayor of a city of 8 million people who has managed only to save 43k in his retirement account by the time he is 53?
I saw the video of President Obama working out at a hotel gym in Warsaw, Poland. Funny thing is that I do a heckuva lot more in the gym than I saw on the video. What disturbed me was just watching him stand there looking at the weight rack trying to decide which one to pick. For me that’s a no-brainer. I’m just wondering how he goes about making decisions as head of the free world, and so far we know that he doesn’t appear to be very decisive.
Such are the profound thoughts and news you find only on this website.
Today I was in the NYC subway and noticed when I exited the station 2 large suitcases filled with stuff against a wall of the station with nobody claiming ownership of it. I left the station and actually went back down from the street because I found this disturbing and considered that a train full of people exited the station and nobody found it alarming. Again I found nobody claiming ownership of it after asking around in the immediate vicinity. I saw 3 subway employees passing by who didn’t think anything of it and then asked them if they would call it in. One said he would. Situational awareness in NYC is below zero and a certain part me thought myself reckless for going back into the station to be concerned about it.
Strange thing going on here on Manhattan’s upper west side. Over the years I’ve tried to buy an apartment; I would go looking around and decide after looking at various apartments that the price was too high. No matter how much I saved, the price kept going up even faster, even with the latest recession. Now I’m willing to pay a higher price after saving my money, but there is hardly anything to look at and of course the prices went up. I went to 3 open houses and saw one listing by appointment and was then told by my real estate broker that there was nothing else to see in the neighborhood that was suitable – and my criteria was pretty plain. I’m just looking for a standard family-sized apartment. I called another broker and was told the same thing. People are just not putting units up for sale because there is no place else to move. The competition remains Wall Street people – foreigners may be buying real estate in NY but they are buying condos. The family apartments are still co-ops and foreigners can’t buy them because you can only buy a co-op if you plan to live in it. Foreigners are buying investment properties they don’t plan to live in. Also, shady money is a no-no with co-op boards. I was surprised to learn this; I thought it was foreigners running up our real estate market. They are running up the $100 million condos but not the apartments that are the maintstays of the local market. Whether the market is a bubble or not is beside the question – right now there is nothing to buy and real estate agents are finding it hard to make a living. It’s now been several months of me looking at apartments, and I can tell you that very few apartments are on the market, and a good number of the ones that were put up a few months ago have not sold, even though their asking prices were reduced. It’s just a very stuck-up market.
By the way, Jeremy has turned out to be good at looking at floor plans; he comments about apartment floor plans and shows us how he would redesign the apartments.
I had been thinking that Hillary wouldn’t run if Jeb Bush ran because I expected that Bush would have a cakewalk to the presidency. The Wall Street Journal, which could be expected to look favorably upon his candidacy, doesn’t agree. Their polling a month or two ago showed that Clinton’s support is much more solid among more demographic groups that you would expect would support Bush, and that Clinton is more likely to get a Democratic nomination than Bush is to survive the Republican primaries. The inkling I am getting is that she is going to run and probably has a good chance to win in 2016 at this point. If Governor Christie of New Jersey is her opponent, I think she will trounce him. He does not make for an attractive candidate at all. I just think that Hillary ought to be smart enough not to run for president, but her ambition defies common sense. One caveat about Hillary — over the past month or two her negatives have gone up to about 40% and her favorability ratings have gone down as her book came out and people saw more of her. It is almost axiomatic in politics that someone with negatives above 40% is unelectable and I really have my doubts about her candidacy. I think someone like Governor Cuomo in New York would make a good candidate and perhaps if people in the next year stop viewing Hillary as inevitable he might step in.
I read an interesting Economist article from their “Intelligent Life” magazine insert on the science of light, and it says that if people get good light especially blue light in the morning, they will be happier. So push back those curtains and let the sunshine in.
Now some travel thoughts. Washington DC Hotels Pick – I’ve tried the Park Hyatt, the Four Seasons and the Hay Adams, over the past 2 years, which are some of the top tier properties. I think the Four Seasons runs the best all around show.
A few international travel observations. I just don’t find myself getting jet lag any more. I think that is an ailment you grow out of when you have small kids. Also, here is a secret. There are a lot of deals out there for first class air travel that are surprisingly reasonable. Basically, if you can buy a business class ticket, you can probably get upgraded either on points or with a good travel agent. A lot easier than trying to buy a coach ticket and get upgraded to business, which everyone tries to do. I tried to get an upgrade to business class for my visiting Australian relative 6 months in advance asking for any flight during a given month, but from business to first you could get anything you wanted. Adjusted for inflation, the price of those tickets hasn’t really gone up in the last 10-15 years. If you own a private plane, it would cost you 50k to go from NY to California each way. For 3k, you could get yourself first class tickets round trip. Why buy the plane? I visited a NetJets display last year. Those planes are really cramped and anybody nearing 6 feet tall has to crouch down while moving around the plane, and the plane itself is cramped. Commercial flights today have beautiful cabins with great service, tons of space and great airport facilities, and some airlines will provide you with ground transfers at no additional charge. I don’t see white men in suits going first class these days; I do see a lot of middle-to-older age women flying. You might see 2-4 people flying first class in a cabin built for 8-12. There are some good deals here and I am scratching my head trying to figure out how airlines make a profit from offering this service. I think it is more a PR thing these days than anything else, with a good number of carriers eliminating first class service. I do think though that business class and premium economy are profitable lines for them, but United’s new planes are 2:4:2 in business class – what the hell is that? Who wants to be in a middle seat that is 4 across in business class? Isn’t that called cattle class?
TRAVEL NOTES VITZNAU and LUCERNE SWITZERLAND, and GENOA and PORTOFINO ITALY: My mother in law came to visit from Australia for 3 weeks, so I went to Switzerland to plead asylum and then ran off to Italy. Here are some notes from my visits to Vitznau and Portofino during June 2014: As I rode the tram at the Zurich airport and heard the cows mooing, it struck me that every 2 minutes or so this recording gets played to people entering and leaving the country and these cows get no royalties. I hope they at least get fed well. Taxis in Switzerland are expensive at 4 swiss francs per kilometer so a 40km transfer is a $200 deal at the current rate. A friend of mine has a lovely house across from a lake in a suburb 25 minutes by commuter train from central Zurich. It is just gorgeous pastoral land really close to a city; even better is that he lives 2 minutes walk from the train station. Went to a restored hotel known as Park Hotel in Vitznau, a small town halfway between Zurich and Lucerne. 
You can take a train from Zurich 35 minutes to nearby Rotkreuz and then 25 minutes by car, or a boat on the lake that leaves from Lucerne that stops about 8 minutes walk from the hotel. The hotel is superb and is owned by the same group that owns and restored Palais Coburg in Vienna. The property has a lot of art and the various rooms pay homage to various philanthropists, capitalists and artists. The spa is also beautiful and the setting along the lake with the mountains in the background is exceptional. A really inspiring place which would also make for excellent corporate retreats. Food is also excellent. The blood orange sorbet was worth the ticket. The rooms are all different from each other; mine had everything except a standing shower and the air conditioning was poor (it comes from the ceiling and it is one of those things that are for the pleasure of the environment but not for you) although most of the year you don’t care. I assume that some day I will fall in a bathtub standing under a faucet at an angle; standing showers really need to become the standard. If you stay here, only get a room with a lake view. One of the anachronisms I enjoy in Switzerland is Radio Romansche which has oompa-pa music and folk tunes from some of the rural areas. Another anachronism is first class on virtually all trains inside the country, even the suburban ones. I didn’t really find the prices here to be insane; they are high but you get what you pay for, and NYC is not really any cheaper. Food was innovative. A great breakfast item was “Scodella Dmitri” (cold custard with berries and ice cream all mushed up) and churros with chocolate sauce; yes, kids come here too. Swiss service is at a more sophisticated level. They don’t ask you if you are still “working” on your food, and they tell you that “my colleague will bring it to you” when you ask for something. This town was made famous a century ago by its nearby mountain Riggi where people would go up to see the sunrise over the lake. Nowadays you can take a cog railway up the mountain. The view from the top is nothing special but it is a nice ride half an hour each way. An hour along the lake on a ferry takes you to the city of Lucerne which has a very pretty old town and good shopping (ie: Globus, Petit Bateau and C&A). You can also take a train and a bus in about the same time for a different perspective at ¼ the cost of the ferry.
I’ve had it confirmed that in Italian you say Buena Sera for Good Day, rather than Bona Sera which is what I hear in Italian restaurants in the US. (Unless it’s a matter of regional accents.) From Zurich, you can reach Genoa, Italy by air transferring through Munich. It is about 3 hours trip total from airport to airport, and Genoa is rather pretty from the air. 45 minutes in taxi gets you to Portofino via a beautiful highway and then through some coastal towns with winding roads and cliffs. You have to make things clear with the taxi driver at the airport what he will charge you. The meter read 70 Euro and he jumped it to 110 Euro at the end of the trip. Another driver took me for 60 Euro from the center of town (just a few miles from the airport), and drivers in Portofino wanted anywhere between 100-150 Euro for the return trip because there are only 3 licensed drivers in Portofino. At the end of 24 hours I was calling out to him in the town square “Ciao Roberto.” I actually walked around town asking various hotels what it cost to get a transfer to the airport and it was the same everywhere; it is a total mafia. On the other hand, he told me that the “season” there runs 4 months a year and otherwise it is dead. So you gotta make hay when the sun shines. You can take a train from central Genoa to nearby Santa Margherita for a few Euro but then they will charge you 45 Euro to or from the train station. Italy may be less expensive than Switzerland but it is actually more expensive because everyone is trying to rip you off. The Hotel Splendido in Portofino is an Orient Express (now renamed Belmond) property atop a cliff with sea views, but frankly I thought it was pretty underwhelming. Reid’s Palace in Madeira Portugal or anything in Ravello, Italy would be more striking. Food was designed for Americans who want to eat Italian except that locals probably wouldn’t like all that sauce. The food was more authentic at the sister hotel in town “Splendido Mare.” Lunch on the terrace at the Splendido overlooking the sea was damn expensive at 80 Euro for a pizza, water, salad bar and an ice cream sundae, but it was really excellent down to the cheese, cream, berries and tomatoes. It’s a bit cheesy there with some guy wearing a purple flaming jacket singing songs with drunk Americans in the lobby at night. The whole thing feels like a tourist trap but they get a lot of repeat business from tourists who like the jet-set environment (paparazzi wanabees) and those who think this is the Italy that they love. Hotel has a salt water pool and a rather small gym. I’ve been surprised at how small hotel gyms are in Europe and people don’t seem to feel they need more than what they get. From the hotel it is an 8 minute walk to town (or use the hotel shuttle because the walk back is uphill), and you can take a ferry for a 30 minute ride to San Fruttuoso, stay half an hour and then return. It is a nice 10 Euro way to get some local water color although I would rather ride the opposite direction to Santa Margherita instead of just seeing some cliffs and a beach with a monastery. In Genoa, there is a downtown with a small Rinascente department store, you can walk along Girabaldi Street and see some UNESCO-recognized properties that are old palaces and churches and serve as art museums and gardens with some city views at the top. There are some pretty piazzas and various cathedrals around town. I spent 3 hours in town (half of it shopping) and it was enough. I never took the train to and from Portofino because I was there only a day and it just didn’t pay, as I mentioned above. In the evening, there was a bunch of race cars parked in the port area of Portofino as they were having a dinner during a driving tour of Europe. It was rather hot there in mid-June. Lots of Russians with pretty ladies – it seems that outside Russia I’ve never seen one that wasn’t pretty. I guess they reserve the best ones for export. Lufthansa has a nice Airbus 330 from Munich to New York. My wife complains that you can get old Boeing planes on the Frankfurt-NY run; the flight attendants told me they only use Airbuses from Munich. On the flight they had this presentation of pretzels, cheeses and various desserts from the Australian Alps called “Summer in the Mountains”, part of their Special Moments program meant to put something behind their advertising campaign that has as its slogan “All for that One Moment…”
We went to Niagara Falls with the kids and to nearby Niagara on the Lake. We previously visited this place a few years ago but now they go without baby strollers and we stayed for a weekend at Niagara on the Lake, about 30 minutes away by car. The hotel we stayed at, The Oakes, overlooking the falls, was good for the money – a 2 bedroom site for $250, but if I were returning I’d rather stay at the Fallsview Casino or the Embassy Suites, where you get a much better facility and similar views for the same price or a bit more. Here the shower curtains fell down, a live spider visited my bed, the TV had only a few channels, there was no real gym, you get the idea. The Famous Deli inside the casino hotel galleria is a good place for breakfast, and the Water Mark restaurant atop the nearby Hilton is a good dinner, and the Elements Restaurant in Table Rock visitors center is a good lunch. Good food is hard to come by at this destination, so make note of these recommendations. Buffets at the Hilton and Skylon Tower are both lousy. The Adventure Pass which gives you 4 nice attractions on the Canadian side does not include the Aero Car ride over the whirlpool part of the Niagara River a few miles from town, but it is worthwhile. At Niagara on the Lake, we viewed 3 nice hotels (among them Prince of Wales and Queens Landing) and felt we chose the right one (Pillar and Post). This one had a nice relaxed country ambiance and was a compact property as opposed to the Queens Landing which felt like a conference center, and the Prince of Wales which felt chintzy and stuffy. Food was decent but not great; they have a nice spa, indoor and outdoor pools, saunas, and the gym was rather good. They had good babysitting services and it is a 10 minute walk to town, and they have a hotel shuttle on demand which takes you wherever you want to go. We enjoyed the property and would go back. We spent about half an hour crossing the border into the US on Sunday morning about 11am (crossing into Canada usually takes no time) and visited the Niagara Falls park on the US side, also compelling. Has a nice observation tower and you can look over the rapids, and they have this Canyon Walk which we want to do next time where you walk along the falls and get real wet. Also next time the kids want to go on the Whirlpool JetBoat tour which goes to the rapids and you get wet (there is a dry version but they don’t want that); from the Canadian side it leaves from Niagara on the Lake. About 24 hours in Niagara Falls is enough if you just want to do the main activities and not start going around looking for other things to do such as water parks and game rooms. Niagara on the Lake also has its Bernard Shaw Festival, which actually runs from April to October. It has theater almost every night and there are several choices. We saw people coming for a week who saw 6-7 shows. We saw 2 shows over 2 evenings and liked them both. They have musicals and non-Shaw shows as well there. This was very good because it gave us something to do at night. The town also has nice small independents stores selling interesting upscale goods and some nice gelaterias and bakeries. Prices were quite reasonable and JetBlue flies to Buffalo airport, a half hour drive from Niagara Falls. At the airport we picked up our rental car to make this trip and the 3 day rental cost less than $150. You can make a nice 3-4 day weekend combining these two spots.
Hope you have a great summer. I hope to be back either before or after our summer vacation scheduled for mid-August.
