Before August 31, 2009, I never went anywhere outside my country Canada. Today, I finally got a big event: My first time to the US! We only went to Buffalo, though. Not very boring, however.

We drove from our home in Markham to our directly southern neighbor, Toronto, and then drove west on the 401, then to the 403 in Mississauga, and then south to the peculiar place where two highways, the 403 and QEW, combine together to form the QEW/403 through Oakville and Burlington only. Soon, the QEW left the 403 and headed south through Hamilton, and then east to St. Catharines and Niagara Falls, and then headed south again to Fort Erie and Buffalo. It was my first time to ever cross a country border. We crossed the Peace Bridge and got onto the Interstate 190 New York State Thruway and got a little mixed up. It was everyone's second time here except me, as this was my first time. We had a pretty fussy map because roads were shown as lines. If you didn't know, those maps are harder to understand. And we didn't buy MapArt's Buffalo (In case you didn't know, MapArt is a company that is clearer than most fussy maps with roads that are shown wider and less likely to mix up. You can tell which is a local road, whats an arterial road, what's a highway, what's an expressway, and what uses tolls).

We hunted around the city for a McDonald's for a long time (My brother wanted to try "American McDonald's", not McDonald Canada!), but looks like everything was closed and there were no McDonald restaurants in sight. We just found rows and rows of run-down buildings, and many churches. A lot more than Toronto. Still no McDonald's. We managed to find a Wendy's, though. BOO MCDONALD'S, YAY WENDY'S.

So we went around looking for some very interesting and historical stuff, and then a washroom. Since this place lacked shopping malls and restaurants with no "Washroom's are for customer's only" signs, we bought some Coke and a caffeine free Sprite at a Subway's just to urinate. I guess Toronto wins.

We got to see Lafayette Square, City Hall (It was boarded up for renovations), and a time capsule. There, we hunted for another washroom. When we arrived at a Tim Horton's restaurant, we got a horrible shock: It was closed. Closed. Shut tight. Locked. No longer open. All the shops around the area were closed.

We left to try and see Niagara Falls on the American side (I only saw the falls on the Canadian side). On the way there on Interstate 190, we found a McDonald's. Too late! WE ALREADY ATE LUNCH (The hamburger from Wendy's was still in my stomach)!

We didn't really find a place to see the falls, and we made a wrong turn. We turned into the Rainbow Bridge for crossing the border back to Canada. BOO! Fortunately, we didn't really know that the falls were only visible on the Canadian side, which is why so many Americans flock over to Canada to view the falls.

We arrived back in Toronto at about 9:10 at night without dinner in our stomachs (the burger was still in my stomach! That's sure long-lasting. Also because we ate lunch at 3:20 pm). We stopped at a small Chinese restaurant for a quick dinner, then went home so tired we could sleep standing up. No really.

Sorry for the really long news post and the fact it'll be a bit longer, but please read this news post if you haven't.

Here are two videos of pictures of Buffalo's history.

Here's the second one.

Well, please comment!

Sorry if my news post is long and you hate reading.

EDIT: Removed a few errors.
EDIT: Fixed another error.
Another edit: Fixed a typing error.
Another edit: Removed the embed codes above the videos. If you want to copy the code, right click on a video and right-click on it. Then click on "Copy Embed HTML".