What I did this summer

Did someone move Niagara Falls? Because it's not where I thought it was, which has screwed up my planned summer week of travelling with my younger nephew. I had already given him, for Christmas, a ticket to Titus Andronicus at Stratford. Later, my nephew mentioned that T.S. Eliot said this about Titus Andronicus: "It is one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written” (he (my nephew) got that from Wikipedia). Admittedly, it does sound a bit like the Elizabethan version of Saw II. Who am I to argue with the combined forces of T.S. Eliot, my nephew and Wikipedia? So I bought my nephew, for his birthday, another ticket to a play at Stratford, for Richard III. It is on the top-10 Shakespeare list. Not at the very top, of course, as that position belongs indisputably to Hamlet, although I think even that play has its flaws. For example, I don't think Will did a good job of making clear what actually happened to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. For another, I didn't particularly like Hamlet as a person, especially the way he treated his mom and Ophelia. And the story was a bit too tame. In Titus Andronicus, in contrast, two men rape a woman then cut out her tongue and chop off her hands then two more people each get a hand cut off then two people are decapitated then a midwife is killed then a baby is kidnapped then two people have their throats slit and are baked in a pie then someone has her neck broken then someone else is killed who is then killed by someone else who is then subsequently killed by someone else then finally someone is buried alive. And Richard III is even more violent. So basically Stratford is going to be a cultural bloodbath.

My nephew has never been to Niagara Falls. So I thought after the high-brow violence of Stratford -- even though Titus is at the lower end of the high-brow scale, still, it is Shakespeare (although that is disputed, partly because of the jejune dialogue) -- we could head to Niagara Falls and do the low-brow haunted houses and Maid of the Mist tour. Then I was planning to take him up to Tobemory and give him a four-hour scuba dive that he can do without being certified, which will at least give him the chance to figure out if he's interested enough to want to take lessons. (I gave him scuba diving lessons a number of years ago for Christmas, which never materialized, although not through any fault of mine.)

The problem with this plan is that because the government of Ontario seems to have relocated Niagara Falls, we'll have to go West to Stratford then South and East to Niagara Falls then West and North to Tobermory. In other words, going to Niagara Falls in the middle of the trip doesn't really work. Going at the beginning and the end doesn't either, because of the timing of the plays at Stratford. It's not a tragedy, of course (although I'm sure Shakespeare could have made it into one by throwing in some poignant soliloquies and at least five revenge killings), but I may have to rethink the itinerary a bit. I have a book called Top 100 Unusual Things to See in Ontario, which includes sights like Trenton's Big Boulder, Smiths Falls' High-Rise Privy, and The Swamp That Feeds the World. I'll see what my nephew says. Perhaps we should aim to make it one of the stupidest and most uninspired trips ever taken.