Sridhar and Gomathi are doctors from Madras working in United Kingdom . Sridhar isa Registrar in Cardiothoracic Surgery in Birmingham and Gomathi is a Paediatric Registrarin Manchester.They have a lovely two and a half year old son Akhash who loves to sing Bharathiyar songs.They both enjoy travelling and writing and have combined their love for writing with their love for each to write as Srimathi.

This is about our breathtaking trip to Niagara Falls in December 2002. Nobody in their right minds would do what we did. But never did Gomathi and me say we are right-minded people we are just light-minded and like-minded souls who enjoy a bit of adventure and our little son Akhash is following our path as well.

When we told my friend Ramesh we wanted to go to Niagara he was very enthused and he said yeah its only 5-6 hrs from Pittsburgh. The only problem was the cold arctic conditions and we had a two year old with us.

The weather predicted a sunny day though the temperatures were in between 0-3 degrees centigrade. We started at 8.30 am in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania in Ramesh’s Civic with an assortment of Tamil MP3s adding melody to our moods.

It was a six-hour drive through Pennsylvania, bits of Ohio and New York State. It slowly dawned on us that the weather may not be our friend as we headed north because the sun was playing hide and seek and the temperature was dipping to zero. We rang the travel desk and they said the park was open but the rest of the facilities were closed. What do you do turn around others would have done that but not Sri & mathi. Ramesh was thrilled too and he insisted on driving, as we weren’t accustomed to driving on the wrong side of the road. By the time we reached Buffalo it was becoming very cold.

Niagara is in the New York state between the Erie and Ontario Lakes in the US Canada borders.

The roads gave us a feel of what was in store the moment we left the freeway as the car hit black ice and snow it just wanted to do a skating serenade. But luckily it stopped short of the bollards. Ramesh is a quick learner he slowly ambled into a parking space the outside temperature was –5 degrees. It was so cold that the saliva felt like freezing we wrapped the little one and walked into the foot deep snow. Luckily they had a path cleared for the unlikely visitors like us.

The roar of the falls was so impressive even from a distance. It was like a battle rumble or thousands of elephants trumpeting together. At first all we caught was the smoky fumes rising from the deep gorge and when we went near lo behold there was Niagara in all its majesty. In a background of snow everywhere the water was pouring and the foam rising like fumes of vapour from the icy cold water.

The boats were not floating anymore they were standing in the ice. Apparently the falls itself has frozen once before. We were surprised to see tourist mostly Japanese even in such horrid conditions. I had a dejavu of being on the top of Jungfraujoch in Switzerland when there was a snowstorm.

We took some pictures Ashu enjoyed the most pushing his hood away and catching the wind in his face. Though we wanted to stay there forever we had to move out because as soon as the sun hid behind the clouds it became freezing.

We walked around the national park taking some pictures and me and Ashu made a snowman. He was thrilled at the touch of snow and was saying cold..Cold. It was awesome to see the trees all bereft of leaves covered in snow with bright red fruits. The contrast was wonderful.

I wanted to stay behind and watch the fireworks but Gomathi insisted that we do it next time in the summer. From the Canadian side. It was not a perfect tourist trip but we wouldn’t get a good view of nature in its fierce beauty if we wanted to be comfortable isn’t it.

We slowly headed south. Thus began our first trip to the USA border to border spanning the whole of USA. From Niagara we worked our way downwards to Cleveland, Cincinnati, Lexington, Indianapolis, St Louis, Memphis, New Orleans and back to STL and flew to DC and London. In one trip we had covered twelve states (Virginia, DC, Pennslyvania, Ohio, NewYork, Kentucky, Indiana, Missuori, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana) except the trip from STL to DC the rest were all by car. That’s another story…