Blessing In Disquise

 

Back in the planning stages of this road trip when I was looking for stops to break up the driving, Niagara Falls crossed my mind, We had stopped the four years earlier for the first time and though enjoyed it, really didn't think I would ever return. But I thought my brother-in-law and his family would and so I worked it into our schedule. As you can see from the picture above, we did make it and my brother-in-law and family, mother-in-law and sister, and my two kids all got to ride the boat from the U.S side this time (prior time had been from the Canadian side) into the horseshoe of the falls. I probably would have ridden again but my wife had no interest in repeating the boat ride and as it turned out, I had business to attend too.

Initially we had planned to see some relatives from my wife's side of the family and so had gotten a VRBO rental for two nights in nearby Buffalo. It was fully paid for a booked but I hadn't heard anything from the owner and while in Toledo, sent out a message just making sure everything was okay since we would be checking into it in less than 20 hours at that point. I got a response right back saying that it had been cancelled a long time ago and my money had been refunded. This was contradictory to the VRBO check-in email I had just received earlier that day saying that everything was a go and I double checked and indeed had NOT been refunded a dime. 

I made a call to VRBO who immediately called the owner of the rental who was now unresponsive two minutes after sending me that text. VRBO was very helpful and offered to find us an equivalent rental but couldn't really do much but force the cancellation of the rental and make sure we got full refunds. We got our refund but declined the offer to find another VRBO to house us on short notice. I made sure to give an appropriate review on the still active rental on the VRBO site and the unresponsive owner who cancelled on us without letting us know, immediately gave me a bad customer review. I'm guessing I could clear that with VRBO since I was never his customer but since this was my first VRBO experience and probably the last for a long time, I haven't yet at this point. 

We ended up renting a couple motel rooms for the night. The relatives of my wife couldn't make the crossing over from Canada where they live because their passports were expired and my brother-in-law and family were here on U.S. Visas and didn't have Canadian ones so we really didn't need the extra day anymore in Buffalo. Also, we got hard to get tickets to another site along the coast that were going to require us to leave at around 1 in the morning had our VRBO rental not been cancelled. With no VRBO to worry about, we were free to head out a day early and have plenty of time to use those tickets the following day. But more about that later.

One more story before I stop. 

On our way to Niagara Falls, the confusing road signs, heavy traffic and a confusing GPS direction led me to make a wrong turn, heading directly to the Canadian border. Had I not panicked, I might have seen a narrow turn off right before we passed by the U.S. border inspections where I could have corrected this mistake but I didn't. Instead, I had to do a u-turn and then end up in a long line of traffic waiting to cross through the U.S. border patrol inspections. Three of us didn't have passports since we hadn't planned on going to Canada and the rest didn't have a Visa for Canada. I wasn't quite sure what was in store for us. Finally about an hour later, we pulled up to the U.S. border patrol agent and pled our case. He took it in stride so it must happen often. He verified the passports of all those with them and was able to look up their U.S. Visas on his computer. Since the other three of us without passports, had passports back home, he was able to look those up with our ID's and twenty minutes later, we were released back to U.S. soil. We eventually made it to the Falls after several more wrong turns, but this time, not leaving the country illegally.