Niagara Falls and back in one day

I’m out the door at 4:32 a.m. on a Sunday and heading for the highway, praying that AM radio can keep me awake. From Chicago I’m going 90 miles west, to Rockford, where I will catch a 7 a.m. flight to Niagara Falls, a place I’ve never been.

Along with 130 good Midwesterners I’ll spend eight hours at the falls and then fly home. We will have slept in our own beds hours before the trip and will be back in them hours after we’re done. No one is sure what to expect of this instant vacation.

Chicago Rockford International Airport has offered eight of these day trips to stimulate interest in its barely there airport, and results have been either smashing or disastrous. Three trips to Niagara Falls sold out, as did two to Michigan’s Mackinac Island (one to Indianapolis nearly did). Visits to Mt. Rushmore and Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky were canceled for lack of interest.

My first reaction to a long-distance day trip was swift: That’s dumb. The best travel isn’t about snapping photos, then saying you’ve been somewhere new. It’s about replacing your routine with the unknown: new people, new sights, new smells. It’s about absorption, transcendence.

Rockford’s day trips have been suspended because the airline chartering the flights, Southern Skyways, has dropped service to the airport. But, buoyed by interest, airport officials hope to resurrect the flights with another airline. Until then, anyone can create a day trip with a little work--say, eight hours in New York, Cleveland or even Niagara Falls via Buffalo (out of O’Hare)--for less than $300.

But surely travel is not a sprint ... or can it be? Can a great destination be appreciated and understood in a handful of hours--a business-trip timetable for leisure? I decided to find out.

6:03 a.m. (Central) Arrival at RFD. That sweet golden morning sunlight spills across the parking lot as fellow travelers arrive with half-full backpacks. Here are the things I delighted in leaving home, despite facing 1,200 miles of transport: a suitcase, phone and camera chargers, toothbrush, a change of underwear. Risky, I know.

Beyond the obvious (phone and wallet), here’s what I did bring: a raincoat, a camera, a book, a notebook and a couple of pens. The end.

6:44 a.m. Everyone is checked in and waiting at the gate. We are handed itineraries that remind us that we’ll need documentation (a passport or birth certificate) to get into Canada -- dang it, forgot mine. It’s a pretty middle-aged crowd, and most seem optimistic. Richard and Cornelia Gary, a retired couple from Rockford, have traveled the world, adventures including 18 cruises, two African safaris and a bus crash in Switzerland. The day trip is as novel as anything they’ve done.

“I’ve never heard of anything like this,” says Richard, 62, who has been to Niagara Falls twice. “But I don’t mind not carrying luggage or staying in a hotel.”

7:07 a.m. We board, and sitting next to me in Row 3 is Sue Ryan, 47. She’s disabled, awaiting double knee replacement surgery, and lives with her parents (who sit a row ahead of us) in Mt. Morris. It’s not just her first time to Niagara Falls. “First time on an airplane,” she says.

The vacation would be her first in three years, and the day trip made it easy: no packing, no hotel, no rental car. All are tough on disability. As the plane roars up the runway, she swears she isn’t nervous about the flight. “I’m kind of surprised I’m not,” she says.

9:34 a.m. (Eastern) We file off the plane 19 minutes late and head for a pair of buses that will take us to the falls. I sit in the front row and introduce myself to the woman beside me. She says I will be interested in what she has to say.

“I lost my daughter four years ago,” begins Diana Williams, 58, of Dixon. “She was 29 and worked as a flight attendant for Southwest. We had always planned to come to Niagara Falls but never did. So I’m doing this now, for both of us.”

The trip has been on her mind since her daughter, Gina, died of lung cancer.

“This was the most economical way,” Williams says. “And I’m by myself, so this is the best way for me to do what I need to do.”

10:23 a.m. Inside Niagara Falls State Park, three of my first sights are a casino, a Hard Rock Cafe and a mustachioed man snapping a yellow flag to scrounge up cars for his parking spaces. Only a Wal-Mart seems missing.

At the visitor center, which is small, poorly laid out and grungy, I buy a “Niagara USA Discovery Pass” that allows visitors to do most everything the park offers: the Maid of the Mist boat ride, the walk past Cave of the Winds, a viewing of “Niagara: Legends of Adventure” (on IMAX, naturally) and trolley rides.

For $30, it seems fair.

10:54 a.m. I settle into the IMAX theater in the visitor center basement and the film flickers on. It’s not good.

In place of relevant facts about the falls--like the science of why they exist--the movie is long on ponderous scenes depicting their so-called most legendary moments: A Frenchman (in white tights, of course) crossing the raging waters on a tightrope. A schoolteacher becoming the first person to survive going over in a barrel. An American Indian woman journeying over rather than marrying a man whom the narrator tells us smelled “of a bear in the springtime.”

It seemed best targeted to 4th graders. Moving on.

11:56 a.m. As I follow a short path from the visitor center to the Niagara River, it starts raining. I pull on my raincoat and pass a series of white-capped rapids before coming to my first view of the falls. It isn’t stunning--simply lots of water, about 20 feet away, spilling over a shelf of rocks and tumbling into the chaos below. All the fuss is for this? But I keep walking and the falls unfold more and more, their scope becoming larger and wider. They seem to grow with every step until finally, in the distance, comes the real winner: Horseshoe Falls, named for its shape.

It’s a mighty sight, a 2,200-foot wide, 170-foot-high semi-circle of tumbling water. Nearly 682,000 gallons of water spill over every second.

Though the American side affords a decent view, it’s obvious Horseshoe is best seen from the other side of the river, in Canada. But those in the know swear that the legendary Maid of the Mist boat ride, which guides visitors to the base of Horseshoe’s violent splashing, will grab the same view with more intensity.

12:16 p.m. A disaffected teenager pulls the Maid of the Mist ticket from my book, and I line up with dozens of tourists to wait for an elevator down to the river. Once there we are handed see-through blue ponchos--basically garbage bags with holes for a head and arms. We look like a band of river Smurfs.

The ride is no more than 20 minutes, but, true to legend, gets us just below the raging wall of water that is Horseshoe Falls. We come in on one side of the U-shape, turn into the center of the thunderous splash, drift along the other side and head back to the dock. Everyone is wet and giggly. Can’t do that in Rockford.

1:25 p.m. At Top of the Falls restaurant, the park’s version of fine dining, what should be a fantastic view of Horseshoe Falls has been turned by rain into a huge shroud of mist that resembles smoke from a great fire: massive, languorous and unstoppable.

I skip the salmon ($19.95), the jambalaya ($19.95) and New York strip ($27.95) for Beef on Weck, a “western New York staple” of roast beef on a salted caraway roll. All the staple did was make me long for a meal that offered a flavor other than blinding saltiness. But with five hours to go, all I needed was some sustenance.

3:12 p.m. At the Cave of the Winds tour there is no cave. There was once, running behind Bridal Veil Falls, Horseshoe’s smaller neighbor. But it was destroyed by a pair of rock falls in the 1920s and 1950s. Though the tour now just goes to the foot of Bridal Veil, they kept the name out of sentimentality.

Instead of a blue garbage bag, visitors are given bright yellow garbage bags to shield themselves. My yellow-bagged brethren and I take a short elevator ride through the rock behind the falls. We then head out to a multilevel red wood boardwalk that spans the raging water.

Our guide leads us up and down steps, across the boardwalk and to the foot of a pair of falls where we can position ourselves wonderfully close to the violent splashing so strong that it generates hurricane-force winds. Soggy visitors walk into the windy blast and scream like they’re on roller coasters.

In the chaos, tourists often drop things into the rocks below. When someone loses prescription glasses, staffers go through a box of found spectacles and have the visitor try on pair after pair to find something good enough to get them home.

3:56 p.m. I’m running out of things to do. I don’t want to have to visit that casino.

4:23 p.m. I walk a bit until coming to a relatively unheralded and remote part of the park: Three Sisters Islands. It’s the least touristy part of the park, and the most familiar--it could have been Wisconsin, Colorado or Washington. The islands are simply three thick wooded patches stretching into the Niagara River, above the falls, connected by a bridge. Many park employees consider it the park’s most beautiful corner.

There’s no crush of tourists, no competition for a view, no cameras trying to capture every moment. It’s a rare sight.

5 p.m. I’m in my last hour at the park and I try something new. I stop trying to do things. I listen. Listen to the loudness that has been around all day but I hadn’t stopped to hear. If you position yourself just right you can hear water in all its forms--a trickle, a lapping, a rush and a roar all at once. It helps to close your eyes.

And I listen to the people. I hear French and German, Spanish and Polish. Hebrew and Arabic, Bahasa (which is Indonesian) and Malayalam (which is south Indian; there are a ton of Indians here).

When I quit trying, Niagara Falls is most rewarding.

6:10 p.m. The buses that will pick us up outside the Hard Rock Cafe haven’t arrived yet, so I walk into the restaurant for a beer: a Molson, out of respect to our Canadian neighbors. I sip that beer wearily, knees aching from 3 or 4 miles of walking. I’m glad I’ve seen one of the world’s great wonders and not at all unhappy that I’ll be home soon.

6:43 p.m. Back at the airport, I catch up with the world-traveling Gary duo, who were bored by midafternoon. They did Maid of the Mist. The line was too long for Cave of the Winds. They tried walking around the town of Niagara Falls, but it was dead. “There needs to be more to do,” Richard says.

But in the security line Diana Williams was aglow. Her day was sad, but perfect. She rode the Maid of the Mist, strolled into Canada and shed a few tears.

“There was enough water going around so that no one noticed,” Williams says. “It’s not just about Gina and her death but living, too, and me going on.”

And Sue Ryan was disappointed. She and her parents needed more time. There was more walking than they expected. Cave of the Winds required too much stair climbing, so they didn’t even try, and by the time they were ready for Maid of the Mist, her knees were ready to give out. If she returned, she would give herself a couple of days.

Which means the Garys needed less time, Ryan needed more time and Williams had exactly enough time. A three-bears kind of thing.

8:11 p.m. (Central) Back in Rockford. With no luggage to pick up, we all head straight to the parking lot and drive off.

9:54 p.m. Home. A mere 17 hours and 22 minutes after this adventure began. I wouldn’t do it again, but I’m glad I did it. A day at Niagara Falls was fine. But I’m not sure I’d try it in, say, Chicago.

jbnoel@tribune.com