Day 3
More Exquisite Boredom
Our third day was filled with more of the same boring stuff as our second day, which meant it was pretty wonderful. I slept even more than I did on the previous day.
By now, I had decided to spend as little time as possible in the room, no matter how comfortable it was, and spend all my waking (or otherwise) hours in the dome car instead. I may not have had a chance to suck down any Pina Coladas, but I did get as many diet Sprites as I could afford, and I did get some good scenery of the Canadian plains.
The day started out with what remained of western Ontario, which was more hilly land mostly flooded by beaver dams. Those little critters were really on overtime, and from the looks on their faces, they were quite proud of themselves, too.
Once we got out of that landscape, we got into a very long segment of flat. Real flat. You could calibrate a straight edge against that country side.
There seemed to be about two industries going on there: Growing wheat and cutting lumber. The wheat came in the morning, and the lumber later on in the day. We saw enough lumber going by in the other direction on freight trains, or sitting at stations waiting for a train, that it could easily have been all the wood in New Hampshire. Fortunately, it was traveling in the wrong direction to be from New Hampshire.
The other big industry, growing wheat, probably wasn't too surprising, since that's the only thing I can think of doing with land that flat. What was surprising was that all the food we'd had that was served with gravy, had gravy made with cornstarch instead of flour. Maybe the Canadians just grow that stuff for export, or are just sick and tired of seeing it.
By the middle of the day, the train was making some pretty good headway towards making up for all the time lost on the first day. In fact, we'd just about caught up completely by the time we got to Winnepeg. There was a planned stopover there for an hour or two, so they let us off the train and we took a small walking tour of the immediate vicinity of the station.
This brought us to a sort of shopping mall food court, except that there was no mall attached, and the food court was taking up all the space that the mall would have if it had been there, which it wasn't. Lots of interesting food there, ranging from the standard mall food we all know and detest, to other things like Ukrainian, Greek, Trinidad Curries, you name it. I don't think I've seen variety like this before. I think it's a real testimony to the inventiveness of the human race to be able to develop so many different kinds of junk food.
We also looked around for film for the camera. Again, my efforts were thwarted, this time by a national holiday called "Victoria Day." I never heard of this one before, and whenever we stopped someone to ask them what it was about, we were greeted by stares as if we'd asked what Christmas was. Finally, someone told us that it was a fine old English holiday that they also observed in Canada, and if we'd had any culture at all in our upbringing, we'd have known that.
See? Canada isn't half American after all. It's half British.
I guess the holiday was still to be a mystery, though, because the British couple with whom we'd shared the previous night's dinner were also the recipients to this lecture, and they confessed that they'd never heard of this holiday, either.
Well, the gift shops in the train station were open, and stocked every form of film known to Kodak, which meant no Polaroid film. Even finding this out was difficult as all the help in the store, like all the service personnel nationwide, were all on the phone the whole time we were there.
We didn't eat anything at that fancy food court because we were just overwhelmed by the selection, and managed to get ourselves in a mental gridlock over the whole thing. We settled on having whatever would be served on the train, since there would be so few choices, and since whatever they had would be such inoffensive mommie food that it couldn't possibly disagree with me. We got back onto the train in time for the first seating for lunch, and I had a pretty wonderful plateful of Shepherd's Pie (see, I told you -- mommie food). Not very exciting, but good. Again, that cornstarch gravy, though.
By now, I'd given up on trying to record the trip by longhand. Actually, I'd given up the day before, but by this day, it was final. It also meant that I could handle a scotch bottle again. The new barkeep that came on the train at Winnepeg was also a lot more entertaining than the last one. We had a very nice time (at least as much as I can remember of it).
Dinner: Boring roast pork and cornstarch gravy, but it was wonderful anyway. After dinner: You guessed it. More drinkies up in the dome car.
Towards the end of the day, we were seeing more and more places that weren't forest anymore, as they'd all been cut down, presumably the source of some of those flat cars of lumber we'd seen going the other direction all day. This sort of made me wonder whether there'd be any trees left to look at by the time we got to British Columbia.
While in the lounge, I did get to read a couple of Canadian newspapers. They were a day old, since they don't appear to publish on Victoria Day (whatever that is), but it was still pretty current. From reading them, I got the distinct impression that the country was in the process of falling apart.
I guess there are a couple of factions in the Canadian government. One wants a very loosely coupled federal government (sort of like the one we had 200 years ago, that didn't work), with high degrees of autonomy for the individual provinces. The other faction wants a more centralized government (sort of like the one we have now, that also doesn't work). The Federalist Papers all over again, eh?
Well, that's just the little I could pick up. Evidently, there was some governmental summit a few years ago at a place called "Meech Lake". The agreement from this summit was given the name of the location, so when you hear a Canadian talking about Meech Lake, he's talking about the government falling apart, and not just his last vacation.
Anyway, this Meech Lake agreement thing was intended to get faction #1 to sign off on the constitution (which is still new) by having faction #2 give the farm away to faction #1. When we showed up, a bunch of the members of faction #2 had just decided that they didn't want to give the farm away to anyone, especially faction #1, and would sooner become a territory of the US. All of this seems to have had the effect of making all the newscasters declare that both Meech Lake and the new constitution were dead. This in turn made the value of the Canadian dollar drop like a stone (good for us), and the Canadian stock market fall almost as rapidly.
For those of you without a program, or who haven't guessed yet, faction #1 looks to be Quebec, which really wants to be an independent French speaking country that only trades with the US, and faction #2 is Ontario, which really wishes Quebec would shut up, sign the damn constitution, then very quietly go away (without becoming a separate country). Or, this was as much as I could figure out.
Huh. Barely makes sense to me, but I guess everyone there who knew what was going on thought that Canada, as we know it, would cease to exist on June 23, 1990. Since then, we have come to see that it has simply continued to exist in the same constitutional limbo that it's been in ever since the Hudson Bay Trading Company divested itself of the place.
Well, that really covers a bit more ground than just day 3, and also has little to do with the scenery. Day 3 was cut slightly short for us, because we were going to have to get up on Day 4 in time to get thrown off the train at 6:20 AM in Edmonton. Unfortunately, the train was now running on schedule again, so we weren't going to get any extra hour of sleep just because the train was behind schedule.
Day 4: On the Road to Nowhere
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