| rev:text
| - We booked the "Niagara by night" tour which promised hotel pick-up at 1PM and departure from the Falls around 10:15PM after the fireworks. The tour was efficient, in that we were able to see Niagara-on-the-Lake, do a winery tour, check out a few vantage points by the falls, do the steamboat ride, and catch the fireworks at night before making it back to Toronto by midnight. That is certainly a good quality to look for in an organized tour. The value was also quite good, at around $100 CAD for a 10-hour tour (we left a 15% tip for our guide). And that's about where Zoom's merits end.
We were picked up 15 minutes late from the hotel, I guess understandable given traffic during the day; we then made a fairly long trip to pick up other members of our 12-person tour from the airport hotels by Pearson. The van was comfortable enough but a bit cramped for such a long ride (2.5 hours including traffic).
Our guide "double D" was nice most of the time, but gets a bit annoyed when people are late to return to the bus due to a cramped schedule. DD's accent was thick in French and it was a bit difficult to make out some of the things he was explaining over the van's microphone. Our group was a bit quirky in that EVERYONE was back on the bus 5-10 minutes BEFORE the scheduled meet-up time; maybe I am just a lousy American but typically getting to the meeting point at the specified time is not going to get an annoyed greeting from your seatmates.
It seems like the problem with the tour is that too many things are planned in a short amount of time, resulting in an extremely tight schedule when there are issues with traffic. For example, we had exactly 30 minutes to walk around Niagara-on-the-Lakes; granted it is a small one-street town, but you barely have any time to explore some of the quirky shops and sample the olive oil before having to rush back to the bus. At the winery we were given a boom-boom-boom tasting of 3 wines before being hustled back into the van, and didn't really have enough time to explore the wines for purchase or walk around the winery itself. This is not the problem of the guide who did a relatively good job making sure we saw the items promised by the tour; perhaps it is a bit better however to remove 1 or 2 things on the agenda, such as the winery tour, or extend the duration by an hour to make sure things are done in a comfortable way.
My personal preference for the future would be just to rent a Zipcar from Toronto and drive here myself, taking time to explore the places I am the most interested in.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)