From Manhattan to the Mist: They Joy of Riding Around Niagara Falls

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Hey everybody welcome to episode 94 of the Arrival live podcast I'm Len
coming to you from Canada and Niagara Falls, Ontario,
Canada I am just near the horseshoe falls near the Visitor Center Niagara Park
visitor center and I rode up here from New York City a couple of days ago to
Niagara Falls and today we're gonna talk about what I learned and I've been riding
for what 25 27 years but he's still learned a lot of things especially when you go
on tours what I learned on the tour what went right what I could have changed and
improved upon and we'll talk about a bunch of fun stuff and If you are anywhere
near Niagara Falls on the Canadian side, and you have a passport or the enhanced
driver's license, depending on what state you're from, you definitely should consider
taking a few days at Niagara Falls. It's calming yet exciting.
You will meet people from all over the globe here. And while the roads may not be
canyon carvers, there's a road that goes along the Niagara River where you can
follow the falls, you can park near the falls, you can take some great pictures and
with a little social engineering and some politeness and friendliness you can get
your motorcycle in an area where almost nobody is allowed to to get to and take
some really good photos to send back to the folks at home and I'll talk about that
a little later on in the show. Right now I want to thank the folks over at the
Heyman law firm. If you go down, they will bring you up. If you need a personal
injury attorney, call 1 -800 -HAY -M -O -N -D.
No matter where in the country you are, they can help you. And now, let's get on
with the show.
We're here in the Big Apple, episode 92 and today we're gonna recap my trip to
Niagara Falls, all the things I could improve on, all the things I did right, some
highlights from the show and all around how to make it happier and safer and and
and that's it and if I would have put this trip on a scale of one to ten I
think it would be a nine it was about a thousand miles round trip leaving from New
York City the first day I left was as cloudy of a day as you can have it was a
little bit of a mist on the road and I left Manhattan but I knew it was kind of
gonna open up I left about two hours later than I wanted to that's kind of all on
me but But,
you know, things happen for a reason, and one of the good things that happened from
that is that my first stop was Binghamton, New York, and I rode around the campus
of SUNY Binghamton, which is probably one of the better state schools in the United
States. I have a few friends that graduated from there. And, and the fun thing
about you know having you know quasi communication on a vacation is that you can
actually text your friends and if you're in a city that you don't know and your
friends are familiar with that city they graduated from there they live there fall
let me look it up here real quick it's called the speedy rib pit or might be
spidey sp i e d i e rib pit and It's right near University of Binghamton.
If you are ever near the University of Binghamton, just Google it, Spidey Rib Pit,
excellent ribs, excellent service, and you're gonna feel like you're in the late '70s
because there's no electronic ordering kiosk. There's no menu,
the menu is up top where the woman and the server is at the cash register and it
has like the little pegs where you actually put the pegs, you know, ribs, R -I -B
-S, and then you have a dollar sign, it's plastic, and you put it in there. But
let me tell you, the food was great, the ribs were so tasty, everybody was
friendly, and it was great, and it was a wonderful way to kind of cap off a good
first evening. And you know what, if you're ever in a university area, and I know
most of our riders or our listeners are 35 to 65 years old,
so if you ever find yourself in a town that has a university and you can ride
around the university or inside the university, I would definitely recommend it.
Whether you went to college or not, it'll bring, if you did go to college, it'll
bring back some great memories. If you didn't, it's just really fun to look to look
at these 18, 19, 20 year old young adults, I'll call them,
just going about their lives and going about their business. And, you know, riding
through the Binghamton campus, there was actually one motorcyclist there. Think he
was, I said a quick load of him at a stoplight. Think he was on a Honda, think
he was on a Honda. And I can't tell you, I got two, when I stopped at a
crosswalk, I got two people that said, "Hey, nice bike." And these are coming from
students, and that's a little foreshadowing 'cause I got that a lot later in the
trip as well. So the first night in Binghamton was fairly uneventful and then
leaving for Rochester the next day to have lunch with a friend of mine.
And we actually went to another rib joint called the dinosaur rib pit.
And it's actually an old train station in Rochester, New York.
And I wrote a review on Google. I wrote a review on both of these on Google. You
can look it up under my name. But this one was also great. It was a little bit
different, more traditional, waitress service, bigger place. They have live music, they
have a bulletin board,
and one of the chefs, Justin, has a Honda Shadow. And I just saw it parked in the
lot and I asked one of the waitresses,
who's bike is this? She says, "Oh, this guy, Justin, he's the chef. He's working on
the brisket. I'll ask him if he can come out." I said, "No, it's no big deal, but
wouldn't you know five minutes later?" Justin came out And we had a nice little
chat about bikes and what made him go to Rochester, where the riding season's about
three weeks. But you know what, when you have this niche
passion, hobby,
you connect with people a lot easier. Justin could have been anybody, a politician.
He could have been a singer, a songwriter, a famous person. We all connect over
motorcycles, and I told him what I was doing, and he was like, "Oh, man, this is
great. You're going to Niagara Falls," and so we had a really, really nice time.
And unfortunately, some of you may have heard about this, but from Rochester to
Niagara Falls, well, there was a tour bus bus from Niagara Falls to,
I was going to New York City on route 90 which goes east and west in that part
of the the state and unfortunately the tour bus crashed and there was some loss of
life and it doesn't look like it was the wrongdoing of the of the bus driver but
there were Filipino Indian Asian people there's a woman from I think she was a
sophomore be a university. And I believe she may have passed on due to the
accident. I think there were maybe seven or eight fatalities. And it was sad. And I
actually rode right by it. I didn't see the crash. I probably passed by it maybe
25 minutes after it happened because I did see the police close all of Route 90 in
the opposite direction. And I didn't even know what it was. I just thought, oh, it
was just an accident. But then after I got out of lunch, the GPS told me to go
around and go up into Canada, basically through side streets.
My GPS took me through some of these wonderful roads. It was kind of like mid to
high 80s, which normally isn't that bad. And, but there was this one road,
route three in way upstate New York and it goes east and west and I was going
west go west young man as they say there was not a cloud in the sky which you
would think that's good but the Sun was setting it was about 645 and the Sun was
setting in the West like it always does and
that Sun was setting directly in my eye in my directly in my eyes for two hours.
And even though I had my scorpion helmet with the shield, with the drop -down, smoky
shield, I mean, the astronaut's smoky shield would not have helped in this case,
right? It was just very bright. When I got back to my hotel room, I had like a
tan in the shape of an oval around my face. But that part was And I want to talk
about that. I want to talk about being fatigued, because that part of the ride was
not so fatiguing. It was just having the light of the sun in your face was very
fatiguing. So I stopped a little bit more than I would have. But I stopped when I
should have. And I just rehydrated, stopped on the side of the road. I'm going to
post some photos from the trip on the show notes page so so so keep an eye out
for that I got some good pictures but yeah other than that I made it into Canada
and you hear all these crazy stories about going into Canada it's gonna take you 20
minutes gonna take an hour and a half it's gonna take you a while for whatever
reason probably because I came up through the back roads it took me about seven
minutes to get over the border. And I went into my hotel, and I was greeted by a
very nice man, I believe from Ghana named Freddy, at the Holiday Inn in Niagara
Falls, Ontario. It is not in the centre of the city, which is great.
If you've ever been to Niagara Falls, you know, it's okay, but the centre of the
city has, you know, It's like being on the strip in Vegas. You don't want that. We
were just like two blocks off of that area and my room had, I was on the 14th
floor and I had a view of Niagara Falls every single morning and it was beautiful
and it was unobstructed and it was a great way to wake up and it was a great way
to go to bed. And every morning I would either just walk down to the falls,
or I would ride my motorcycle along the Niagara River and along the waterfalls over
there. And I would have-- there's a lunch place where you can overlook the falls.
And it's not that expensive. It's not that expensive. And everything, if you're an
American, the dollar is so strong, it's about 28%, 30 % difference.
So Something that's like 20 bucks is really gonna be like 14 bucks, 14 .50. So I
went there for lunch twice and I will say that you're not gonna be a speed demon
around Niagara Falls. You don't want to be a speed demon around Niagara Falls
because number one, the smell and the fragrance and the aroma of the fresh water
from the falls hitting the ground, hitting the rocks, gives you the negative ions,
right? Whenever, it feels like the day after a rainfall, when you get that really
good kind of feeling of smell, and it energizes you, so it energizes you. So,
but you can drive and ride alongside the falls and you can do it a couple of
times. They do have police there and crossing guards and all that thing. You
definitely want to be slow and respectful.
But I tell you, I think at least four people from four different countries came up
to me and they said, hey, nice bike. Nice bike. And one of the photos that I
posted,
you'll see in front of the Falls area, it was taken from a very nice woman from
Brooklyn. I stopped this woman and I said, "Hey, would you mind taking my photo?"
And of all the, you know, one thing about Niagara Falls is there are people from,
you know, scores and scores of different countries there, especially in the summer.
And if wouldn't you know, the woman that I asked to take my photo is from Brooklyn
and she lives about three blocks away from one of the places where we have the
motorcycle meters. But let me, you know, I kind of got ahead of myself a little
bit. I want to talk a little bit about packing. But before we talk about packing,
I want to give you a little quick message.