Nous sommes arrivées, as the almost-locals say. We caught a relaxed flight from Glasgow to Hamilton in Tuesday, with some notable and pleasing departures from our usual travail arrangements: no leaving before dawn or sleeping in airports on this trip, with the added bonus of a rental car that didn’t offend by automotive sensibilities (a Golf, since you ask). The lone regrettable fly in the ointent was sitting beside a friendly but malodourous old gent on the plane for seven hours, but hey: beggars can’t be choosers, at least when it comes to seating on no-frills airlines.

After we’d landed and picked up the car, we aimed for Niagara Falls, about an hour and a half away through a homogeneous (and isotropic, come to that) plain of farmhouses, grain silos and cornfields. Some of Ash’s family lived on our route in Fonthill, a quiet little town of wooden bungalows and local shops — Moe’s Charcoal Emporium, Uncle Bob’s Twine & Hats, that sort of thing — and we stopped there to say hi to her relatives, then fuelled up on coffee and doughnuts* before hitting the road again.

We hit the outskirts of Niagara Falls around 6.30 PM. It wasn’t quite what I expected: strip malls yes; strip clubs, not so much. Giant billboards pointed the way to casinos, wax museums and Ripley’s Believe It Or Not with far more enthusiasm than the stiffly official road signs announcing “The Falls”. We found and checked in to the laid-back and rickety Lyon’s House Hostel, and the manager gave us a rundown on the town. “Niagara Falls is a cross between Disneyland and Vegas,” he drawled, and went on to warn us about the panhandlers and general unsavoury types we could look forward to meeting. We trotted off in the fading light towards the Skylon, cutting an omnipresent ’60s dash in the skyline.

Along the way to the falls, we stopped to watch another bizzarely theatrical spectacle: Jay Cochrane, a 63-year old wire walker, does a 330m tightrope walk from the Skylon to a neighbouring casino twice each day. We sat rapt for about five minutes. Shortly after that, the realisation dawned on me that short of plummeting to a messy death in the car park below, he was unlikely to do anything more spectacular than occasionally stand on one leg, backed by the theme music from Superman. Just like Monty the croc in Brisbane, the attraction isn’t in the skill of the performer but in the secret, guilty hope that something hideously awful goes wrong. I felt like a bit of a fraud after that (and frankly, we were bored), so we took our leave and walked on down to the falls.

They were alright, I suppose.

I jest a bit. The falls are an awesome spectacle: the American falls crash down on the jagged remnants of two rockfalls from last century, while the Horseshoe falls generate a massive pall of mist that makes the air heavy with moisture. The only problem is the same as that of the Grand Canyon; yup, the falls are very, very high but unfortunately the gorge itself is much wider, so the relative scale makes them look that bit less impressive. Another odd thing is the predisposition of those companies eyeing tourist dollars to build observation towers that rival the gorge itself in size — the Skylon on the Canadian side and the Prospect Point observation tower on the other. Why can’t we just stand out on the edge of the gorge, damp with the spray, and take it all in as it is? I wondered if we even needed the wall along the promenade…surely we, as a relatively successful species in whom evolution has instilled a healthy distrust of cliff edges, can be trusted not to accidentally throw ourselves over the edge, and anyone determined enough could scale it in seconds anyway. All the steel and reinforced concrete just seemed to get in the way, literally and metaphorically.

Anyway, despite all this ranting it was well worth going to see. We took the Maid of the Mist out into the river the next morning, and spent the rest of the day trying to work out why Niagara-on-the-Lake is so popular (going to see where the rich people live and where you’ll never be able to afford a house must constitute a valid tourist activity). For all my whingeing, it’s been a pretty good start to the holiday. Canada is growing on me!

* Tim Hortons — serving Canada doughnuts, coffee and grammatical ambiguity since 1964.