Day 9
Back in the Saddle Again
This day started by getting up at some ungodly hour to catch the train. Normally, I'd feel sort of put out at the notion of getting up so early in the morning, but by now, I was pretty malled out, and the urge to get the hell out of Edmonton was taking on a sort of survival instinct status that ranks right up there with eating and squishing carpenter ants. Besides, I was anxious to get back on the train (well, dome car), all on its own merits.
Still, I hadn't got much sleep the night before. Same trip: Naps all day, Contac wears off at night, and I get to spend the evening worrying that I was going to oversleep our departure. The result was that I woke up about every half hour to check the time.
Sleep deprivation aside, our plans for getting to the train station went off like clockwork, which just goes to show that I can even screw up having a disaster. We just checked out of the hotel, the cab showed up right when we told them to, and we got to the train station at exactly the time predicted by Robert when he worked the whole thing out the night before.
I ought to have Robert make the travel arrangements more often. The baggage check and boarding process even went like they were supposed to.
Even though I hadn't got much sleep, I was still pretty excited about being on the train. Unlike the first leg of our journey, our sleeper car was pretty far away from the rear lounge car, so rather than shuttling back and forth between the room and the dome lounge, we just planted ourselves in the dome car for almost the whole day.
In fact, we got to the dome car even before the train left the station. The train's departure was noteworthy, too, and it turned out that if we weren't in the dome car at this time, we would probably have never found the reason for what happened next.
See, the train pulled out of the station, nice and smoothly, just like usual. In reverse. OK, so we figure we're just backing up to one of those switch things so we can get on the right track, as it were. It's just that after a half an hour of backing up, we were running out of patience, as well as Edmonton.
Short note here: On the way in (and evidently out) of the station,
on the east end of town, there is some of the most amazing graffiti on some of
the walls visible from the train. (The most feeble example is pictured at left -
- unfortunately, I was slow with my camera.) Just goes to show what someone will
do when they're tired of shopping and it ain't hockey season.
Well, we weren't the only ones confused about all the backing up, because one of the couples, sitting behind us, exclaimed in one of those wonderful central Canadian accents "Next stop, Saskatoon, eh?" (Geographical note: Saskatoon is east of Edmonton.)
One of the porters heard this and explained to us that CN was real short for cash ever since Mulroney decided to shut the trains down. They discovered that the tracks leading out of town on the west side were sitting on some terribly valuable real estate, and all they had to do to cash in on this was to tear the tracks up and sell the land underneath. Of course, this has a subtle effect on those of us headed for Vancouver. They had to back the train up (in an easterly direction) until we were clear of Edmonton, and find a track that bypassed town entirely.
This next leg of the train route, from Edmonton to Vancouver, was by far the most scenic of the whole line, which made it an even better time to park myself up in the dome car. I'd expected to spend most of my time up there being asleep, but as it turned out, I didn't nod off, even once. Maybe because it was too warm up there to sleep, because the air conditioner wasn't really up to the trip. It was the first really sunny day we'd had on the train, and I got my first chance to discover just how important that air conditioner could be.
As it was, I split my time between ogling the sights as we went up into the Rockies, taking pictures of the sights (ok, taking picture of the sights: having a Polaroid with its "press here to blow a buck" button made me extremely stingy with my film), and reading a really great Len Deighton spy novel.
Around noon, when we went down to the dining car for lunch, we got some of the worst service we'd had the whole time we'd been in Canada. I don't know what it was, but I kept getting the distinct impression that we'd done something to really piss off the staff in the dining car, but the service started out so bad, we must have pissed them off just by walking into the car.
All of this business made it even more odd when shortly after lunch, we decided to get off the train in Jasper to walk around town a bit. To do so, we stopped by the room to drop off all the books and stuff we'd had with us in the dome car, and doing that took us through the dining car. As we walked through, some of the dining car stuff seemed honestly concerned that we might be getting off the train in Jasper as our final destination. Maybe they had more abuse that they hadn't got a chance to use during lunch.
Jasper is a very scenic town. I even got a few good
pictures of it, too (ok, a picture; see above). It's up in the Rockies,
pretty much to the east side of the continental divide. I should mention that I
realize that the Canadian Rockies are the part of the trip that everyone wants
to hear about the most, but to tell the truth, I don't really know what to say
to do justice to them.
What I can say is that I used up 30 shots of Polaroid film (purchased at extra inflated Canadian prices) taking pictures, and I still don't think I did them justice.
Well, let's give it a shot anyway: We first knew we were getting close to the Rockies when the mind numbing flatness ended and we started through some rolling foothills, with all sorts of Aspens and Birch all around. The first views of the mountains were pretty spectacular, many of the peaks still having substantial snow caps. Once up in the mountains, I was very much reminded of the Colorado Rockies, except that the Canadian Rockies look to be just a bit more plush (probably more water around there). To balance that, they also weren't quite as high as the Colorado Rockies, coming up a couple thousand feet short.
There's that metric system again: They quoted the altitudes to us in feet instead of meters. Maybe the bigger numbers (feet vs. meters) just sound more impressive.
The train stayed in Jasper for quite a long time. While there, we picked up a bunch of people from "Brewster Tours." This tour company seems to supply half the population of Jasper, because the most prominent feature of the town itself (excluding the neat-o looking mountains all around) was the number of Brewster Tour busses. There were also lots of people pouring out of those busses and into our train. Enough of them that they had to add a few more passenger cars and one more dome car to the train.
Well, it was a pretty stop. The train station, unlike the stations in all the bigger cities we went through did have a rental car agency, right there in the station. Gee, I wish they could have done that in the big towns. It figures that the only town in all of Canada that has the good sense to put a rental car place right inside the train station is also the one town where we weren't going to need a rental car. Even if we did stay there for a couple of days, we probably wouldn't have needed it, because everything in town could be reached on foot. While there, we also picked up a copy of the "Scenic Rail Guide to Western Canada".
The latter was written by an ex-CN conductor, and has mile by mile descriptions of the various train routes through western Canada. It cost something like $8.00, and had a white sticker on the front over the part that says "Compliments of VIA Rail Canada." The edition we had was revised in 1989, and proved to be an authoritative reference to all the routes that had been shut down, either right before we got there, or while we were there. There appeared to be quite a few of both. Reading through this book gave me a good sense of just how much VIA has been cut back in the last year. This was confusing, since they obviously didn't seem to have too much trouble keeping our train full. Maybe VIA, like Amtrak, is a government supported operation that loses even more money every time someone buys a ticket.
Evidently, THE route to take used to be the "Canadian," which ran from Toronto, around the north coast of the Great Lakes, through Thunder Bay, Winnepeg, Calgary, Banff, ending up in Vancouver. All that seemed to remain of this line anymore is a run from Toronto to White River, and another part from Calgary to Vancouver, which are no doubt the prettiest parts of the route. Naturally, both of those segments evaporated while we were there.
The route that our train took seems to be a concatenation of the "Continental" and the "Super Continental," which is a more northerly route, overlapping the Canadian only at Winnepeg, and the source and destination. What makes this confusing for the ever dwindling set of modern passengers is that this remaining route is called the "Canadian" in the official VIA schedule. Worse still, the book didn't document the part of the trip between Toronto and Winnepeg, since it assumed that leg would be the route of the original Canadian. And, as a last non-feature, the Calgary-Banff-Vancouver route is supposed to be twice as neat as what we took. Naturally, this prettier route is no longer part of the VIA system.
Unfortunately, our schedule wouldn't permit us to take the remains of that old line through Banff, because the people who do run that train now don't run it very often.
Poop.
Well, we got back onto our new, augmented train, and spent the afternoon up in the dome car again, drinking a lot of Cokes to fight off the heat.
Oh yeah: Coca Cola.
Have I mentioned this already? If we all remember the great "New Coke" vs. "Old Coke" fiasco, we all remember when Coke apparently backed down and resurrected Old Coke in the name of "Coke Classic." What wasn't very heavily publicized was that Coke Classic amended the original Coke recipe to allow the use of corn syrup instead of real sugar. The results, as any good cola junkie knows, isn't quite as satisfying as the original.
Well, the Canadian sugar growers must not be as subsidized as their US counterparts, or at least not as screwed up, because Canadian Coke still uses real sugar. It's wonderful. It's even better than wonderful. In fact, I'm still carrying the remains of a few dozen too many that I drank on this trip.
Well, anyway, the scenery was spectacular, the book was
good, and the cola was great (and cheaper than it was in the stores and hotels
in Edmonton, so I made sure to buy as much as I could drink).
Later, in the dining car, we were again reminded how important air conditioning on a train can be, because there wasn't any. Aside from collecting pools of our sweat, the food was a very pleasant experience. The service was also substantially improved since lunch, with the same staff seeming to go out of their way to bend over backwards for us, perhaps to make up for our earlier meal.
Since there were only two of us, and since the train was full, and more since the tables in the dining car seated four, we never ate alone. On this particular occasion, we were sharing our table with an elderly lady, apparently from one of the French speaking provinces, and a rather large gentleman, with an obviously US Midwestern accent.
Having a Canadian at our table, and a French speaking one at that, gave us our first opportunity to try to get one of the locals to explain what this Meech Lake business was all about. Well, she didn't tell us anything that we hadn't already figured out from the TV news and papers, except to let us know that quite a few French speaking people didn't necessarily toe what many perceive to be the official French speaking people's party line.
The gentleman from the Midwest, who had told us that he spent most of his vacations in Canada, didn't seem to have any patience for all this talk of Canadian politics, or at least didn't seem to think that it was possible to take Canadian politics at all seriously. It seemed that the Canadian issues that were far more important to him were that the $1 coin is completely worthless, in both concept and value, that his life would be infinitely better if he could still use old paper Canadian $1 notes, which was still part of a pointless monetary system, not to be taken seriously because it came in too many bright, happy colors, and it was all completely pointless because everything just cost too much anyway.
I kind of wondered why he spent so much time in Canada on his vacations.
We just smiled at him and sweat some more.
After dinner, we of course returned to the dome car,
and caught the remainder of the Rocky Mountain scenery before the sun went down.
I'd planned to have a few drinks, too, but never quite got around to it.
You know, here's one thing about crossing a time zone line headed west that really bugged me: We set the clocks back an hour. "Good!" you say? Gives you an extra hour in the day? Well, that just means I have to wait another hour before I feel that it's proper to start drinking. Harrumph. I guess this will work more to my advantage on my trip back.
We stayed up in the dome car until the sun had set, then finally returned to our sleeping car. This was the first time all day that we spent any appreciable length of time in that room, and we discovered that for some reason, it was a bit larger than the two we'd been in before (the one with the wet floor, and its replacement). I'm not sure if that's due to just being in a different car, or due to that room being the last one in the car (or the first one, depending on how you want to look at it). It was room "F" in a row from "A" through "F." Being on the end of the row of bedrooms may have been what got us the extra couple of feet.
Whatever it was, it sure made moving around in that room a lot easier while the beds were down than in the previous room we had. We needed that space, unfortunately, to pack up again, since we had to get off the train the next morning when we were to reach the end of the line in Vancouver. This was unfortunate because I really wanted to stay on the train a whole bunch longer.
I sat up for a long time that night, finishing off that spy book. After I used that excuse up, I sat up a whole lot longer, just to watch the scenery go by.
I think I could get hooked on this train travel business.
On to Day 10: Sleep Deprivation
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