A stag'n'doe party in the honeymoon capital of North America

My friends Rich and Deb are getting married next weekend. Since Deb has only three female friends, one of whom is in Europe right now, Carol (her sister/maid of honour) decided to throw them a combined bachelor party. The plan was to meet up at Deb's parent's place in Flamborough and then drive to Niagara Falls for a night of revelry. She asked me to take the GO to Burlington, where she would pick me up. It seemed easy enough, except that I'm not familiar with the GO at all and have certainly never taken it to Burlington before.

While I was on the train to Oakville, I was staring at my ticket and realized that they need to be cancelled (whatever that meant) before boarding the train. I hadn't cancelled the tickets I'd used for my prior two train trips on the GO so it was probably lucky that nobody had performed a ticket check either time. However, I did get this ticket cancelled upon boarding the bus to Hamilton at Oakville. Now, the Burlington stop is the first one on that route. However, thanks to an inexplicable chain of illogic, I somehow began to think that I was supposed to meet Carol at Hamilton and so took it all the way there.

Naturally, nobody was waiting for me at the station. After waiting around for a while, I called Deb's place. They had sent out a pair of search parties to look for me at various GO stations between Burlington and Toronto! It hadn't occurred to them that I might have slipped under their very noses at Burlington. The worst part is that Carol almost got onto the bus at Burlington to see if I was on it when I never stepped off it. If only they had, we would have avoided a two hour delay. Oh well.

The first thing we did in Niagara-on-the-lake was to eat dinner at one of the many restaurants there. Most of them had people standing outside beckoning passers-by to eat there. One place even handed us a menu with the encouraging words, the prices are in Canadian dollars. I should bloody hope so, given that they're conducting business on Canadian soil! I ordered a medium-rare 7 oz bison steak since I'd never had bison before. It tasted similar to beef, although I could distinguish between the two by taste. During conversation, it came to light that Rich'n'Deb do have a gift registry—they simply hadn't thought to tell most people about it! Rich lived up to his reputation be polishing off a 20 oz porterhouse steak and then eating half of Deb's meal too.

After dinner we split up and some of us went to look at the falls. The last time I saw the falls was seven years ago. They haven't changed much. I did, however, discover that what I previously thought was a permanent rainbow is actually faked using powerful strobe lights that project a rainbow onto the great mass of swirling mist that hangs above the falls. That mist is very thick; thick enough to fog up my glasses as we walked through it. We saw some people attempting to shield themselves from the mist with a brolly. Apparently it hadn't occurred to them that this would be ineffective against water that was hanging in the air as they walked through it rather than falling down from above.

Once we were tired of gazing into the never-ending torrent of water and our clothes had begun to turn uncomfortably damp, we headed into the casino. None of us had ever been into a casino before so we were expecting something out of the heist movies. Reality was somewhat disappointing. There were people smoking everywhere when we entered, which was rather disgusting until we found out that there was non-smoking floor lurking beneath the main one. Deb and I wandered around watching people gamble as we kept an eye out for the others. The tables were actually rather boring. People were winning and losing hundreds of dollars without looking remotely excited. Neither Deb nor I spent a dime, being painfully aware of the statistical futility involved with gambling. However, upon regrouping with the remainder of our company, we discovered that carol had won $150 before losing most of it again to end up with $60; not bad for a $5 outlay.

The hockey game was just going into overtime when we left the casino so we stood in front of a TV at a nearby patio and watched as nobody scored anything for the first OT. There was some pretty intense karaoke going on beside us, fuelled by a string of reliable 80's hits. Some of the singers were surprisingly good. A few of them were rewarded by people dancing to their songs. Deb's friend Brian was wearing a Tampa Bay jersey, which drew a more than trivial number of jeers. I was rather disappointed to see the Flames lose in the first minute of the second OT.

The last thing we did in Niagara was to visit one of the many haunted houses there. It had a Dracula motif and offered three levels of fright: normal, brave and insane. Of course, we all had to pick insane. It wasn't as scary as they made it out to be. They did have people inside the maze to jump out an effort to scare us but one of them got inadvertently poked in the eye by Rich's best man. Taking it upon myself to give the rest of our party their money's worth, I forged ahead and crouched down in wait. When they came around the bend, I sprung up with a scream that almost knocked a few people over. [I would make such a great tiger.]