Taking a guided tour is a great way to experience a new place, whether you’re in a foreign country or just down the road from where you grew up. From titillating historical details to fascinating and hard-to-imaging facts, a tour can acquaint you with a place’s uniqueness and specificity in a way that can better help you orient your time there.
There are plenty of tour companies in the Niagara region that provide exactly such an experience, whether you’re looking for an insider’s view of wine and beer or history and geography. Depending on what you enjoy and want to know more about, you should be able to find something that’s right up your alley. Even if wandering off on your own is your favorite way to discover a place, a good tour can add meaning and direction to your wandering, allowing for more fruitful exploration.
Don’t just go it alone when you head to Niagara. Here are a handful of great tours that will add breadth and depth to your Niagara vacation.
Public Niagara Wine Tours
A tour offered by Niagara Fun Tours, the Public Niagara Wine Tours are available all year round every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The tours take about six to seven hours to complete, and they hit a number of well-known and popular wineries — five in total. You’ll have ample time to explore, taste, and purchase wine at each one, and tastings are free. Multiple pick-up locations are offered throughout Niagara, starting at 10 a.m., so you don’t even have to forego your vacation goal of sleeping in.
Taste the Town Tours
A walking tour of food and culture, this Niagara-on-the-Lake tour is suitable for people of all fitness levels and ages. Walk through what’s been called “the prettiest town in Canada,” while learning about its history, sampling its top-notch cuisine, drinking its excellent local beers and wines, and discovering more about it and the Niagara region than you thought possible in a two and a half hour stint.
Microbrewery and Cider Tour
A five-hour guided tour also offered by Niagara Fun Tours, this beer and hard cider tour takes place every Saturday and Sunday from 1 p.m. until 5 p.m. starting the middle of September and going through the end of December. Free tastings are par for the course, and you’ll be able to sample everything from local IPAs and ales to seasonal lagers and stouts. Pack a lunch or grab a bite at any of the breweries’ restaurants. For the lover of beer and/or hard cider, it’s a perfect introduction to everything you’ll want to drink during your time in Niagara.
A Niagara Falls Day Tour
For the visitor who wants to get a good overview of the place before embarking on any specifics, a Niagara Falls day tour is perfect. Whether you focus your time on Niagara Falls proper, or you head out into wine country to get a feel for the fertile and stunning farmland that grows so many excellent grape varieties, a day tour can help orient you to the place in a way that a book or website won’t. Fall for Niagara has a number of tours available.
Take a guided tour of Niagara, and discover more quickly some of what makes the place so magical.