Thanksgiving is the last long weekend before the region goes quiet, and it is the one we would tell you to take.
The colour is usually somewhere near its best. The wineries have finished the hard part of harvest and gone back to being pleasant places to spend an afternoon. And there is a version of the weekend where you eat extremely well three days running without ever cooking anything.
Thanksgiving Monday is the 12th. Here is how we would spend the four days around it.
Book the table first
Book the table before you book anything else. This is not us being dramatic about restaurants. There are a finite number of seats with a view in this region and they go weeks out for this particular weekend.
Table Rock House runs a three-course Thanksgiving menu from the 7th to the 9th, $60 before tax and service, with the Horseshoe filling the window. It is the one to pick if you want the falls to be the whole point.
Queenston Heights does Thanksgiving brunch on Sunday the 11th, two seatings at 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., $65 for adults and $32.50 for children twelve and under. A $25 deposit per guest holds it, credited against the bill on the day. You are above the river with the escarpment behind you, which is the best seat in the region for the second week of October.
Legends on the Niagara runs the same brunch at the same price on the same Sunday, one seating at 11:30 a.m. If Queenston Heights has gone, this is where to look next.
Table Rock House · Queenston Heights · Legends
The weekend everyone looks forward to
Ball’s Falls Conservation Area in Lincoln runs its Thanksgiving Festival across the whole long weekend, Friday the 9th to Monday the 12th, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day.
More than 150 craft and artisan vendors, local farmers, craft drinks, live music, historical demonstrations and guided nature hikes, in a conservation area with two waterfalls and a nineteenth-century mill in it. It is the closest thing the region has to a proper autumn fair.
One practical warning from their own page: on-site parking is limited and not guaranteed. Go in the morning, or decide how you are getting there before you leave.
Ball’s Falls Thanksgiving Festival →
Where to be when the light is good
Between the meals, the question is where to be when the light is good.
Nobody can tell you when the colour peaks. It moves with the weather every year, it works down the escarpment from the top, and anyone quoting you a date is guessing. What does not move is where to stand.
The Niagara Parkway between Queenston and Niagara-on-the-Lake is the drive, river on one side and vineyards on the other, and it is fifteen minutes from the Queenston Heights table. The Niagara Glen puts you down inside the gorge among mature forest on trails that are properly steep. And if you would rather see the whole thing at once, the gorge, the whirlpool and the escarpment turning together, that is a nine-minute helicopter flight.
The falls, after dark
The falls are lit every night of the year, and October is the month that starts to work in your favour: 6:15 p.m. to 2 a.m. up to the 15th, then 6 p.m. for the rest of the month.
Earlier darkness is the small gift of this time of year. You can have dinner and still see the illumination properly, rather than choosing between them.
If you only have the Monday
Start at Queenston. Have brunch above the river. Drive north on the Parkway with no particular schedule. Stop wherever looks good, which in the second week of October is most places.
Be somewhere with a window by dark.
Building the whole weekend? Plan it in the trip planner →
Or see what else is on this month →
