The big vacation! (aka Ashley eats a lot of salad but has a great time along the way)

I want to start off by saying thank you to everyone for your super sweet comments on my video!! I will definitely start to do more in the future!

We had such a nice time in Niagara Falls this week! Armed with lots of snacks:

(cereal, almond milk, apples, banana, larabars, almonds, hummus & Mary's Crackers) we took the bus on Wednesday afternoon. Upon our arrival we were greeted with sunny skies and amazing service at our hotel. Does anyone else use Hotwire? We booked The Radisson a few weeks ago for $61 USD/night! The room and location were great and the staff was really friendly!

We started off with some lunch at a Firkin. As the title suggests, I ate a lot of salad on my trip. This was the first:

It was topped with COLD grilled veggies. Friends, what is the point of grilling the veggies if you are just going to refrigerate them? Chilled veggies aside, it was a decent salad.

As I mentioned in my video, I wanted to go to the Coach outlet and Joey was a really good sport about it. It was super busy and I wasn't particularly impressed when we arrived!! I was looking for some sort of swing pack (for going out mostly) but I wasn't really feeling them once I saw them. We wandered around the other stores in the outlet and I picked up a few goodies at Body Shop and that was it! Joey was impressed with my willpower. We then headed back to the hotel for some rest before heading out for a night on the town.

Before we went to NF, I did a little research on restaurants in the area. I knew it was going to be a little bit challenging, but I don't know if I had really wrapped my head around the whole thing. Even though it is on the Canadian side of the border, there is a huge American influence! There is so much meat and cheese and bread, it is kind of unbelievable. And because it's a tourist town, things can be a bit pricey, so that also became a factor. We were going to go to a place near the hotel called Copacabana for dinner.

They had a great live band on the patio and we had had a lot of fun at a Toronto Brazilian steakhouse back in December, but after surveying the buffet we realized that there weren't going to be a lot of Ashley-friendly options and it was going to be too expensive for not enough (good) food. So we ended up going to Ruby Tuesday's because I knew they had an all-you-can-eat salad bar. I started off with a plate of salad bar items:

Greens & spinach with cucumbers, cranberries and sunflower seeds with some baby carrots & edamame on the side. Not a bad start! For my main I chose the tortilla chips with guacamole, salsa and pico de gallo. The tortilla chips were super yummy and I probably ate a 1/4 of what they gave me. The guac could have used a bit of lime & cilantro but overall I enjoyed it.

Joey really wanted to go to Nightmares so I obliged (He had been such a good sport about the Coach outlet so how could I say no, really??) I was not too happy about it and rather scared.

I am not a fan of scary movies or haunted houses but I made it through without chickening out or crying so that was positive! There were a lot of scary sounds and groping and scary sights in that place and I pretty relived when it was over. We chilled out with a ride on the Skywheel.

I took some pictures of the view but they didn't turn out very well. The falls looked pretty spectacular. Clifton Hill is a really neat place to be at night. There is so much going on with tonnes of lights and so many different attractions.

It was a an action packed first day so we headed back to the hotel to get some rest for the excitement of day two! Check back tomorrow for my recap of Thursday & Friday (with more salad and an exciting gluten free vegan meal!)