Friday/Saturday October 10th and 11th, 2025 Niagara Falls weekend - Bruce Lake loop - Niagara-on-the-Lake ON - 6.3 miles about 500 feet elevation gain

Through a series of family events we ended up being offered some credit at HTR resorts Niagara that the family from North Carolina wasn’t able to use as they had planned.  We looked over our calendar and chose this weekend to check it out. We drove to Niagara after work Friday night and it was an easy trip thanks to some Google Maps offering some clever alternatives to the very busy I-90 and US-20 obvious routes.  It was a pretty good drive.

HTR resorts gets a passing grade from us for sure.  The grounds are meticulously clean, the bathrooms are really clean and well equipped and there are a ton of activities from bonfires to zip-lines, all of which are, I think, included in the stay price.  Which is good because this was, by about 2x, the most expensive Yurt we’ve ever stayed in.  I think our total for 2 nights was over 360 dollars, some of which was gifted to us but some we paid ourselves.  Being a nice fall weekend, there were a ton of families with children but everybody quieted down well before the official quiet hour of 10 pm on the 2 nights we were there.

After settling into the Yurt we headed out to dinner on Grand Island (a decent sized island in the Niagara river with 21000 residents which the resort occupies a tiny piece of) and really lucked out eating at The Village Inn.  This restaurant is, at least from what you can see at night, in a very unlikely location near a historic ferry launch.  It was very odd to suddenly see 2 businesses right near the end of the road, both busy and very alive.  We were seated at a tiny table in the very full dining room but really we were tickled to get a table at all without waiting.  I had a pork loin dinner served with a mountain of beautiful sautéed squash.  Brian had a beautiful broasted half chicken with garlic mashed potatoes.  Brian’s chicken was amazing but my pork loin was excellent also.  We both had desert afterwards so we certainly ate a little more than was ideal.

The next morning we headed across the border into Canada.  I’d found a hike on AllTrails called the Bruce Trail at Queenston which has lovely pictures.  On the way we ate a pancake house in Niagara Falls Ontario.  I had a breakfast poutine which was a fun breakfast take on a Canadian classic.  The pancake place was strangely dead with just 1 table seated when we arrived but it seemed fine to us and did pick up somewhat by the time we left.  The park was easy enough to find and is actually very near a major Ontario highway right at the border crossing into the US.  With a fair amount of noisy traffic going by just a few hundred feet away, it wasn’t an immediately captivating location.  Paying for parking (by the hour no less) was kind of a pain since the parking machine didn’t work for me but Brian was able to pay via phone eventually.  

The hike quickly redeemed itself beyond our expectation.  Combine fall colors with dramatic geology, some industrial history including a large quarry and mix in a wonderfully marked and well maintained trail network and even some pretty good ups and downs and you have quite a walk for what starts out looking like a city park.

We crossed back into the US for a while during the afternoon but came back to Canada in the evening for a visit to the historic Niagara Power Plant at night.  Night time is an unusual time for a historic museum to be open but this is the new Power Station at Night by Niagara Parks Commission.  You could call it an exhibit or an attraction or even a spectacle, it really covers all three.  We’d never been to the power plant before and the night time aspect is very new.  They have very extensively outfitted the very long turbine halls (in the above ground building) so they can control how much light comes into the main space.  They have installed millions of dollars of projection systems and sound systems in to provide a ‘standing inside the diorama’ type experience with images on the floors and all the walls.  Allegedly some parts of the light projection are dynamic (reacting to your movements) but maybe there were too many people there to be able to appreciate it or something because I couldn’t tell it was doing anything in reaction to me.  Still, it was an impressive audio visual experience and well set up for the mass numbers of people that attraction must get at peak times.  Since the turbine hall is verrrry long and linear, it allows them to just let people in constantly and there is enough ground to cover from end to end that it didn’t really FEEL crowded but when you looked back or when you walked through the very long parking lot outside it was apparent there were many hundreds of people inside at the same time.  

After walking the turbine hall, we headed to the elevators.  The very long express elevators that they put about 35 people into and send down some 200 feet to ‘the tunnel’.  As the elevator is going down you can see the myriad of mechanical equipment that it took to make the power plant work for almost 120 years.  Then the doors open and you walk 2200 feet through the tunnel which used to return water to the Niagara river after it made its vertical trip through the power plant driving turbines.  Now the tunnel has been paved and beautifully lit with color changing LEDs and a smattering of soundscapes as it leads gently downhill, ending eventually at nearly river level with a one-of-a-kind view looking directly across and up at the US side of the falls which are gently lit at night.  

It was really a wonderful experience and we didn’t begrudge them the 32 Canadian dollars per person cost for the tickets.  What was irritating was the parking.  We bought our tickets online. And when you buy them online there is an add-on offered that doesn’t sound great. It’s an offer to pay 33 dollars for all-day any-site parking at Niagara Parks Commission operated parks.  Little did I know that we’d be visiting 2 parks that day, that both would charge for parking and most of all, that the power plant parking is 36 dollars no matter how short or long your visit is.  And you can only get the parking deal as an add-on.  Buying it after the fact or from either park was impossible.  So, I guess the Canadians have learned well from the US side and made sure they get their pound of flesh from every visitor.  Overall we loved our visit but the parking thing felt like a scam for sure.

After the power station we had some better than average Chinese food in Niagara Falls Ontario before heading back to our Yurt.  On the way back across into the US I thanked the US CBP person for being there and expressed my hope that they get the government shutdown resolved ASAP.

Our Saturday was pretty packed with activities. Sunday we could have tried to jam some more fun in but we really were satisfied and wanted to get home to the cat and boring stuff like laundry to prep for the next week.  Since Niagara Falls is less and 90 minutes from home we don’t have to try and do every attraction in one visit.  It was a really great fall weekend with a nice variety of activities.