Long weekend, ending july4 2006

This time, we decided to conquer one of the world wonders, the wonder that shines across US and Canada, Niagara falls. This is our 2nd wonder visits, we were done with TajMahal and now it was Niagara

Me, Rajani and her friend's family decided to trip together, we rented a Nissan Pathfinder SUV to accomodate 5 of us and also excess baggage, started our journey towards Niagara on a saturday morning, it took me 2hrs just to getout of Chicago, now you can imagine the amount of traffic on 90 ! The weather guys had predicted rough weather with thunder storms all along the east coast and we were taking a risk [if you watched this movie called The Weather Guy, you will understand why Nicholas Cage gets assaulted often, this turned out to be the case with us too].

There were no stoppings once we got out of Chicago, we did stop over near Cleveland for our Lunch, from then on we were headed to Buffalo, reached Buffalo around 2am and checked into the Hilton right across the Buffalo international airport, hit the bed and woke up by 9, enjoyed the complimentary brunch at the hiltons, clicked some pictures and we were all set to hit the Niagara state park, approximates a 30 min drive from airport.

Reached the Niagara state park around 12pm, circling around to find a place to park, the parking was incredibly full and some how managed to get into a MLP.

As we walked around the lakes, Rajani and I were growing impatient as we could not wait anymore to see the fall, Rajani's friends had seen this place more than once, our wait was finally over when we saw the falls and its beauty, we did a boat tour called maid of the mist, got into cave of winds, stayed back until late evening to see the Niagara falls lighted, and followed by firework show right above the falls.

It was about 11pm when we got off the state park and hit the roads, our next destination was Pittsburg, we planned to goto Venkateswara temple at Pittsburg, I drove the next 3 hrs and finally fell so sleepy, called my friend Venu to drive us to the extended stay at Pittsburg, cant recall how we got there, hit the bed and woke up at 10am, had a quick breakfast and drove down to the temple, this temple aint that big as the one in Aurora, it was a devine experience to visit the US based indian god, ate pongal, tamrind rice and some upma, we even did a to go and hit to roads to the next stop at Wheeling in West Viginia, this is a place called Palace of Gold, which was built in memory of Prabhupada, founder of ISKON and its preachings across the globe. The temple was built by his desciples and was a sceneric place amidst a hill top.
It was almost 5pm and we had our 9hr drive back home to Chicago.

Madhuri, Rajani's friend got behind the wheels, I was initially little scared, but later convinced that she drove well even on the interstate.

Just when we thought every thing was so fine, we had to pull over for some coffee at a McDonalds, Rajani was screaming, Venu, his mom and Madhuri were on their run towards the exit, I had no choice but to run behind them without knowing what was the reason behind this, all of us got into our car and drove away, Rajani was still in a shock, after a 2 minute panic, Venu told me that a black pointed a gun towards him, this was when Venu pulled his wallet to pay at the cash register, he ran and so was the panic around me. We were lucky that things were not messed up.

Continued our drive back home and reached park Butterfield at 5am on July4th.