We’re finally doing it… making a trip to Niagara Falls! We’ve been talking about making this trip for years, but so many other trips and places always seem to get booked and we forget about Niagara Falls. It’s our first time flying to this part of the country, so I will try and share a few of my trip tips along the way.
Based on my research, I expected we would arrive at Niagara Falls right at sunset and hopefully be able to snap some banger Niagara Falls sunset photos before we get settled in our AirBnb. We didn’t quite make it for sunset because the rental car they gave us had all kinds of errors and a check engine light as we left the airport. So we circled back and exchanged it for something else. As we got closer to the falls we could see the mist rising above the horizon and I was super bummed we weren’t going to make sunset. We got to the border right as it got dark. Oh well… we grabbed a quick dinner and headed to our Airbnb to get some rest, it’s a long trip from SLC to Niagara Falls and we were exhausted.
Seeing Niagara Falls
The next morning (Sunday morning) we got up and moving and checked out of our Airbnb by 8:30ish. First stop coffee. We hit a Starbucks close to the falls and then headed to the Power Station and parked at Lot A. There are a lot of different options for tours and access to different parts of the falls, with many different price options. We decided on the Power Station self-guided tour which included The Tunnel which we thought looked like one of the more interesting things to explore here.
The Power Station + Tunnel was about $30 USD per person and parking was $30 for the day. All of which we purchased online, it’s cheaper that way!
We walked around for a bit, checked out the Power Station, and went down in the tunnel to see the falls from below and that was about it. Cool to see, but not near as pretty as our waterfalls out west!
Where to Fly To
I researched and compared flights and travel options for a few days before deciding to fly to Buffalo, New York. At just 20 miles away, it’s much closer to Niagara Falls than Toronto, Canada, which is about 80 miles. We really want to visit Toronto too, so that wasn’t the biggest deciding factor. The biggest reason we chose Buffalo over Toronto is cost. Round-trip flights from SLC > Buffalo are about half the cost of SLC > Toronto. It was $400 per ticket into Buffalo vs almost $800 into Toronto. With three people traveling, that’s a lot of trip cash to spend elsewhere!
Of course, we need to rent a car either way and it was about $100 more expensive to rent a vehicle in Buffalo vs in Toronto. This still leaves us with more trip cash at the end of the day.
Where to Stay
We landed in Buffalo at about 6:30 pm and decided on skipping anything in Buffalo altogether. Is Buffalo known for Buffalo Wings??? Maybe we’ll spend a little time here on our way back. We grabbed our rental SUV and headed off to Niagara Falls.
We ended up grabbing an AirBnb on the Canadian side. A renovated house that’s noted as the closest residential address to Niagara Falls for about $200. Everything on the American side that was similar was about double and quite a bit further away from the falls. And, from what I can find everyone says the Canadian side of the falls is way prettier. I agree after seeing it!
In Toronto…..
