Just back yesterday evening from 72 hours in Buffalo. Roughly. Not quite 72 hours over Memorial Day weekend and not quite all in Buffalo, though we were in the Buffalo-Niagara Falls MSA the whole time.

Three days isn’t enough to drive to Buffalo from northern Illinois and spend a worthwhile amount of time. Like Pittsburgh, that would be a four-day venture. So we flew. First time since early 2020. Except for mandatory masking at the airports and on the planes, everything was about the same as it used to be, including holiday-weekend crowds. One of our flights was on a Boeing 737 MAX-8, and clearly we lived to tell the tale.

We, as in Yuriko and I, arrived late Friday night and made our way to Amherst, New York, a Buffalo suburb, where we stayed. We were up early the next morning to spend most of the day at Niagara Falls State Park. I was fulfilling a promise I made in 1996, when we arrived at the falls in March to find the American Falls still frozen. I told her we’d come someday when the liquid was moving again, and so we did.

That wasn’t the whole first day. I discovered that nowhere is very far away from anywhere else in this corner of New York state by driving north along the Niagara Gorge, stopping at Lewiston and Fort Niagara, and then returning to Amherst.

On Sunday, we weren’t up quite as early, but we made it to downtown Buffalo in the morning for a walkabout. As promised by various sources, the city has some first-rate architecture, most especially Buffalo City Hall. Late in the morning, after a brief stop at Tim Horton’s — they’re everywhere in metro Buffalo — we toured the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site, formerly the Ansley and Mary Wilcox home.

Lunch that day was on Main Street at the Anchor Bar, which specializes in Buffalo wings and claims their invention, but in any case the joint didn’t disappoint. Afterward, Yuriko napped in the car while I spent time looking around Main Street, which includes Buffalo’s theater district and Saint Louis Roman Catholic Church.

Also, this mural.
Created by local t-shirt designer David Horesh and painter Ian de Veer, it’s highly visible when you’re traveling southbound on Main.

Could it be that current Buffalonians might not want millennials, or more importantly, tech-industry millennials with high incomes, to show up in droves to drive up prices for everyone else? Maybe. Not sure Buffalo has the tech ecosystem, as they say in the biz, to support such an influx. Then again, in the vicinity of the mural are places probably supported by people with at least some disposable income, such as Just Vino, the House of Masters Grooming Lounge, Hair to Go Natural, and Fattey Beer Co. Buffalo.

I had a mind to visit Delaware Park afterwards, since a Frederick Law Omstead park is always worth seeing, but we ended up sampling it merely by driving around it. Looks like a nice place to while away a warm afternoon.

By that time, Sunday afternoon, it was fairly warm in greater Buffalo. Rain had clearly fallen the day before we arrived, and cool air arrived afterward, taking temps down into the low 50s early Saturday, when we got to Niagara Falls. Did that matter? No. It wasn’t cold enough to freeze anything.

On Monday I got up early and visited the splendid Forest Lawn Cemetery, permanent home of President Fillmore and Rick James, among many others. Later, we drove to Lockport, New York and spent some time along the Erie Canal. As long ago as elementary school, I heard about the Erie Canal, but had never seen it. We also took a tour of one of the manmade caves near the canal, where rapid water flows formerly powered local industry.

Back in Buffalo for a satisfying lunch at Lake Effect Diner, housed in a chrome-and-neon diner car dating to 1952. Then we drove south via surface streets to Lackawanna, where you can see the Basilica of Our Lady of Victory, our last destination for the trip.

Why Buffalo? There was that promise to visit the falls, of course. But I also wanted to see Buffalo. My single previous experience there had been a quick drive-through in 1991 after I saw Niagara Falls for the first time, from the Canadian side. Every city of any size has something interesting. A lot of smaller places do as well. So we shuffled off to Buffalo.