John and I knew we wanted to stay between the Falls and Niagara on the Lake, a cute town on Lake Ontario. Our hotel was the Hilton Garden Inn at Niagara on the Lake. I did a lot of searching around for B&Bs (there are literally dozens in the town and surrounding area) and other hotels, and we were glad to have chosen the Hilton Garden Inn. The dates of the vacation were strategic; we knew it would be either the last week of April or the first week of May. In order to be budget conscious, we wanted to go during the week, instead of the weekend, and to avoid May because it's the official start of tourist season. The prices for hotels and a lot of other things increase that week, and the same hotel room we had would have been $50 more per night after May 1st!
The room was your standard hotel room, and we enjoyed the convenience of the hotel's location. It was 16 minutes from the falls, easily accessed from the highway, and about 10 minutes from downtown NOTL, and all the wineries that surround it. I'll cover the wineries we tried in the next post, but seriously, it seemed like every road had a sign for at least 4-5 different wineries. We also picked up a pretty helpful map of NOTL and the area at the hotel.
Here are some pics of the town itself.
Lots of pretty stores and restaurants.
That's the swanky Prince of Wales Hotel and Lounge.
We had some time before our dinner reservation so we looked around for a bar and had a drink at Corks. They had a nice selection of beers on tap, including some local ones, and a lengthy wine list, featuring wines from the region. I would have been happy to eat dinner there. It seemed like there were a lot of options, if our original pick for dinner had fallen through.
I spent some time looking through restaurant reviews on Yelp and TripAdvisor for a dinner place, and even though it had mixed reviews, we settled on the Olde Angel Inn - and I'm glad we did.
They had tons of great dinner choices, especially for a pescatarian like myself. The veggie options included broccoli/cheese quiche, and vegetable curry. Since I'm still eating fish, I went with the fish and chips, and I wasn't disappointed.
John had steak and onion pie (with puff pastry on top - mmmm), and he liked it pretty well.
One of the things I really liked about the Angel Inn was that the bar was full of people having a great time watching the hockey game, but we were able to sit in an adjacent room that still felt lively but was quiet enough to talk. It's sort of a pet peeve of mine: I HATE being the only people in a restaurant, but I also don't like it when it's so noisy that I can't have a conversation. This place had a nice balance, and the food came out quickly.
(That's what she said.)
One of several pictures that I thought looked like an album cover. Maybe this one is for folk music?After dinner, John pointed out that we were only a couple of blocks from the lake, and that it'd be nice to take a walk there.
The shoreline there is beautiful. You can see one of the historic forts near by (this one is Fort George, I think? But maybe not?).
If you squint, you can see that tiny grey outline on the horizon - it's Toronto. I screwed with the lighting in this photo to make the city more visible.
Gorgeous biking/walking path.
Another album cover shot.
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