The Trip to Upper New York State
Niagara Falls, Finger Lakes, Cornell University, Thousand Islands...
(Jumping to the photos directly)
While interning at the Holmdel, NJ site of Bell Labs Advanced Technologies
in summer 2002, I had the chance to travel around in the northeast area.
On the Independence long weekend, I went on a trip to the upper New York
State with two Chinese collegues that are employees of Bell Labs Shanghai
but came to U.S. to work at our site temporarily. It was a very nice trip.
We started out early morning July 4 (the Independence Day of U.S.), driving
the car that Lucent rented for my collegues, and after 8 hours we arrived
at the Niagara Falls. We watched one of the greatest falls in the world
from a distance, took some photos but not really felt much excitement. There
are two falls, one on the U.S. side, the other between U.S. and Canada.
We didn't get the visa to Canada, so were not able to view them from the
Canadian side, which was supposed to be a much more beautiful view according
to the people that had gone to the Canadian side to see the falls. But the
real exceitments began when we went down for a boat ride to get closer to
the falls in the river. The real surprise was to see the big rainbow. I
immediately realized that we came at the right time: it was late afternoon
and the sun was shining from the west side (the Canadian side) of the river
onto the American fall. That's why when the boat got to the right direction
facing the falls we could see the high beautiful rainbow. Everybody
was screaming and jumping when we suddenly discovered the rainbow. It's
really amazing. As the ship went from left to right in front of the fall,
we could see the partial rainbow growing from the left to right until forming
a complete arc, then disappearing from left to right again until we were
too far away. All this happened before the background of the deafening waterfall
that pours down thousands tons of water every second from 70 meters high.
We were at least 100 meters from the fall when we passed it, but the waterdrops
came all over us like it's raining hard. Everybody got a raincoat before
getting on the ship. We had to risk the cameras if we really wanted to take
photos...
The bridge between U.S. and Canada was called "Rainbow Bridge." It's after
the boat ride that we realized where the name came from, hehe.
After the boat ride, we wandered around a little bit and then sat down
on a lawn facing the river, waiting for the the night's firework show, since
it's Independence Day. We were thinking about going to dinner after the
firework show. What we didn't expect was the sun seemed to be too excited
to set itself down. We waited from 8pm to 10pm until the night was finally
all dark and the firework began. By then we were already hungry to half
death...We didn't dare to leave the lawn to find something to eat in the
process, as there were more and more people coming from all directions to
the bank of the river waiting for the firework. We were afraid we wouldn't
be able to find a place to stand again if we left for food. In the end the
firework began, but...yawn, we're very disappointed. It's really so so, if
you've seen the real fantastic fireworks in China...If we had known about
it earlier, we would have left for dinner for sure...
The second morning we went on a tour to really touch the fall. It's a trail
of man-made stairs starting from a safe place, extending and zig-zagging
and in the end reaching right in front of a point of the reall fall. We again
each got a raincoat before this tour, but it's pretty much useless. The
fall produced a wind blowing so overwhelmingly that, once you got close
within about 20 meters, it would almost cretainly turn your raincoat inside
out if you didn't hold your raincoat tightly with both hands...Everybody
got soaked up in the end, and enjoyed it! For those of us that wore glasses,
the glasses were all waters and there's no way to see it clearly. But those
without glasses couldn't even open their eyes when they were directly in
front of the fall. (Afterwards we were joking that we should invent small
automatic rainwipers to be used on our glasses, just like the windshield
wipers on cars...) We had to shout at the top of our voice to be heard
by each other. It's so shocking to be so close to the tremendous power of
the nature. To some degree, we are actually within the fall. And when we
turned back to face the river, we saw rainbow again! This time it's because
the time was in the morning and the sun was shining from the east (the direction
of the fall), and since we were right in front of the fall, we were seeing
the rainbow formed by the reflections of all the tiny water drips floating
in the air on the river. See, we went on both tours both at the right times
to see the rainbows! :)
Sigh. I'm already getting too tired typing these long paragraphs. Anyway,
after the Niagara Falls, we visited the "Finger Lakes," which are about
10 long lakes extending from north to the south, just like human fingers
on the map, each about 100 miles long...:) We also visited the campus of
Cornell University on the way, one of the most beautiful university campuses
in U.S. It's indeed breath-takingly beautiful. Much much much much better
than the campus of my own university, the Georgia Tech. sigh.
Then we also went to the Thousand Islands tour, which was a group of about
2,000 islands in a lake area between U.S. and Canada. We took the boatride
that circled the islands, with the tour guide introducing each interesting
island. It's a great view seeing so many islands, big and small, long and
short, high and low, round and cornered, all crowded within one area. But
the most interesting part is the "millionaire" legends: in the early 1900's,
about 100 millionaires came to this area, each buying one or more islands
to build their home or summer houses, showing off their wealth and luxury,
intentionally or unintentionally competing each other...Most of those islands
are still owned by private parties. But some of them have already been sold
to the government, and one of them contained a group of unfinished castles.
We wandered around in the unfinished castles, admiring the luxurious life
style of those capitalists. The guy that built these castles renamed the
island from "Hart Land" to "Heart Land", and terraformed the island to make
the shape of the island actually looked like a heart, hehe...
OK OK, I'm really too tired now. Following are my photos. Note: we took
quite some pictures for the scenes themselves, but the disk quota of this
website is really limited, and you can see the beautiful photos all over the
web anyway as long as you know the place name. Therefore I'm only showing
my pictures here, since you won't be able to find them elsewhere on the web.
:)
This is me standing on the bridge close to the Niagara Falls.
This is me that just came off the boat ride and standing beside
a small corner of the Horseshoe Fall, the fall between U.S. and Canada.
Some friends told me this picture looked faked because the borderline between
the fall and the sky seemed too clear. Well we also noticed the dark green
hue of the fall when we were at that angle. It looked like real ocean. But
we never expected the effect would look like a faked picture...:(
We were driving along one of the finger lakes and came across a road sign
that said "to the fall overlook." We were curious what other waterbody
so close to the Niagara Falls could also be called a "fall," so we went
uphill all the way to this place. And indeed a great view. The beauty lies
in the lack of water and the abundance of naked rock...:)
This is on a balcony of the old Boldt's Castle on the Heart Land.
Can you see the termites on the chandelier behind me? hiahiahia....
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