I spent the next morning looking at the falls from the American side of the border. The atmosphere could not have been more different from the Canadian side. There were not very many people in the state parks on the American side, something I found much more pleasant. I walked across the bridge to Goat Island, the state park in the Niagara River between the American Falls and Horseshoe Falls. The statistics on the falls are that more than 80 percent of the volume of water goes over Horseshoe Falls, sometimes called the Canadian Falls, but the fact is the border is around the half way point in the falls.

Horseshoe Falls is the side people have famously gone over in barrels and in a few cases survived . The drop is sharp and water apparently deep at the base of the falls. The base of the American Falls though is a jumble of gigantic boulders that even the craziest barrel rider wouldn't go over unless certain death was the intent.

I spent a few hours doing the look and photograph activities but didn’t feel any desire this time to go on one of those Maid of the Mist boat rides or to go down to the wooden boardwalks near the base of the falls to try to relive those experiences I had as a ten-year old with my family. I did a number of things like those in 2003 at Iguazu Falls in South America, but paying to repeat those commercially-run activities here didn’t excite me much.

The city of Niagara Falls, New York isn’t much to look at beyond the parkland along the Niagara River. It’s a one of the poorest, most depressed cities in the country, and most polluted too as the site of the "Love Canal" chemical dump Superfund site. A few blocks of driving through a rough neighborhood not far from the falls was enough to make me say “Get me out of here!”