A father-son duo’s New York to Niagara Falls road trip with the Chevrolet Tahoe

My father and I have never needed a reason for a road trip. Give us a free day, a car, and roughly any direction, and the conversation tends to end with someone saying “why not” before either of us has thought it through properly. This one started somewhere over the Atlantic. Dad had work in New York, and since we both already had our visas sorted, he asked if I wanted to tag along. I said yes before I’d fully processed the fact that neither of us had much left to see in the city itself. We had both done New York before. The restaurants, the skyline, the walk down to the Village, all of it filed away from previous trips. So somewhere over the ocean, two seats apart from anyone who could talk us out of it, we started looking for something we hadn’t done. Neither of us had been to Niagara Falls. We landed late in the evening, checked into the hotel, and by the time we had dropped our bags I was already looking up car rental rates on my phone, more out of habit than intent. An SUV, it turned out, was not the extravagance I