Day 17
Getting Out of Town
Back in the saddle, again (again). This was to be our last day in Vancouver, with the train leaving late in the evening (well, 9:30 PM). This really confuses me: Every departure or arrival on that route involving any sort of major city seemed to happen at times which precluded sleep. Either they left late in the evening, or arrived somewhere terribly early in the morning. The major exception to this was Winnepeg, but that was a town situated right in the middle of some major flatness.
VIA's excuse was that their departure times were worked out to give us all the best scenery while we were still awake. My comment is that this schedule fine tuning had us sleeping through the western mountains as we were coming in to Vancouver.
Well anyway, in the week that we'd stayed in Vancouver, I'd never quite got the hang of getting a good night's sleep on that motel room's bed. For one thing, it was too hard. I was always having to wake up to rearrange all my numbed limbs like so many slabs of meat on a grill. For another, the grill analogy might not have been too far off, since even though the weather there was cool and rainy for the most part, the room was always too warm, and no amount of coaxing could get the air conditioner's compressor to start working before 6:00 AM. Of course, the noise from the AC kicking in that early in the morning was the final reason for my lack of sleep.
No, that still wasn't all of it. I was too worried about having to go back home and face work, and I was too excited about all the travel plans we'd be able to screw up this day before we got onto the train. This is all to say that I didn't do much in the way of sleeping the night before, unless you considered the combination of my head and that "Gypsum-Maid" brand pillow making my arms go to sleep to count as rest.
Despite all of this, I did manage to sleep in (or grump in) fairly late on this morning. By the time we got up, we had two hours to get human before check-out time. We just barely managed this, too. The check-out went ok, also, except for the $3.00 of charges for three locals calls we'd made -- all to destinations within a mile of the hotel.
That just gave us about nine hours to kill off before the train was due to leave. A good start on killing this time off was to go to the Beijing for Dim Sum, as we'd tried to do on Saturday. This time we were successful, and ... It was great. No big surprise.
Afterwards, we went in search of a Cirrus related money machine for the day's spending wad, and spent a little time after that walking up and down Robson St., which is supposed to be the "Rodeo Drive of Vancouver". Hah. Lots of expensive shops, and nothing anyone with more sense than dollars would want to buy. We did find a Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, which we probably spent more money than reasonable in. Same chain as those by the same name in Colorado. Nice to see Colorado companies doing business in Canada, rather than vice versa, for a change.
We walked back to the hotel, got properly relieved to find the rental car still there and with our luggage still in the trunk. We drove out to the Science Center and found, much to our delight, that the clouds had cleared up enough to make the town warm enough to allow us to get our final $5 worth out of the air conditioner for the day without having to unpack our coats.
The main attraction for the Science Center, as far as we were concerned, was the OmniMax theater. Vancouver has both an IMAX and OmniMax theater, although they're not both in the same place. Of course, like everything else in the country, both said "CN" all over them.
We got to the museum just in time to miss the 1:30 showing of whatever it was that they were showing, so we had a bit of a look around the museum. You know, for one of these little bitty science museums, this one wasn't half bad, containing exhibits interesting enough to keep people over the age of 8 interested for at least five minutes. They also had the world's largest Rubik's cube collection, which kept me interested for another couple of minutes.
Particularly interesting was the music machines display, which contained all sorts of widgets that allowed you to make all sorts of noises, which would have driven your parents crazy.
The movie was great. I don't remember what it was about, beyond all sorts of amazing footage from real high up in the air, but who cares what it's about when it's one of those huge screen IMAX things, anyway. They're always great. We got what I consider to be the best seats in the house, too, which were right in the middle of the theater, in the first row above the main projector. This is the one place in an OmniMax theater where the optics seem to work out ok. Just two problems with the movie:
First, people getting phone calls in the middle of the movie. Here's one of those downsides to the notion of everyone having portable cellular phones.
Second, the fire alarm going off for five minutes, and killing the middle of the movie.
With lots more time on our hands, we went across the bridge to North Vancouver, and checked out the shopping mall on the expensive side of town. It was just like any other shopping mall except that instead of having millions of stores selling cheap looking clothes to teeny boppers, they had millions of stores selling gaudy jewelry.
Shoot. All those jewelry stores, but no place to buy a Nanaimo bar or a pair of panty hose.
Well, we got gas for the car and took it back to the car rental place. The guy who drove us over to the train station in the courtesy van was the same guy who picked us up on our first day in town. He was a real nice guy, and even helped us carry our baggage into the station, and tried to help us figure out where the heck we were supposed to check the stuff.
This still left us a couple of hours before we, being first class passengers on the train, had to do our advance check-in. Oh yeah, this is really great: If you're traveling first class on VIA, you get to stand in an extra line for them to take your tickets. If you're traveling coach, you just get on the train and they'll come by your seat and get your ticket later.
Anyway, we were about three blocks from the surly Sikh curry house we'd gone to a few nights before, so it sounded like a nice enough place to get dinner again. I don't know if it was our faces or breath or B.O., but the minute we walked in the door, the put-out Punjabi help made it very clear to us that they wished we weren't there.
Well, the grumpy service I could take, up to a point, but they didn't get the order right. I guess it was just a misunderstanding, as "chickpeas" might sound like "cheese&peas", but it did make a big difference to us. When the dishes came out, carried by a different waitron as the one who took our order clearly had as much of us as he could take, we detected the mistake. The waitron who delivered the dishes seemed pretty unreceptive to the idea of correcting the problem. We fetched the original waitron who took the order, and he came running over screaming at us how we were wrong, and he'd written down precisely what we'd asked for, and how they weren't going to correct anything because there wasn't a mistake in the first place, and they weren't about to throw out perfectly good food just to keep us happy.
Well, I guess he told us, huh?
After this, he made a nice show of being real friendly and cheerful with the other customers. This put me in a sort of cruddy mood. Shoot, I'm still in a lousy mood, just writing about it.
We skulked back to the train station, where quite a crowd was collecting for the evening train. There was a group of five women, all wearing "Minnie Pearl" hats, singing protest songs about the imminent demise of the VIA system. Indeed, I picked up a copy of the new schedule, which had gone into effect a day before we'd arrived in Vancouver, and the whole Vancouver to Calgary (via Banff) run was gone. Closer scrutiny revealed that the route had been taken over by a private company. The trains on this line didn't seem to have any sleeper cars (they just put you up in hotels overnight (at least they have showers)), and they didn't seem to have dome cars.
If you ask me, not having a dome car wrecks the whole thing. So there.
It seemed like the whole darn Canadian passenger rail system was going to disappear entirely by the time we got back to Toronto.
There was also a big group of Japanese tourists, being herded around like so many cattle wearing expensive cameras. Between the time they arrived and the time they were allowed to board the train before everyone else, there wasn't a single safe retina in the house, what with all those camera flashes going off. This seemed curious, because now in the 90s, they all carried video cameras instead of still cameras, and camcorders don't normally take flash attachments. Maybe they were just setting standalone flash attachments off out of feelings of nostalgia, or because they thought we expected them to.
So, I stood in that very special line, reserved for the first class passengers, and looked longingly at the coach passengers who only had to point and giggle at us. Then, we waited around on the benches while most of the people stood in a big mob in front of the doors to the train, even though they knew they were going to have to stand there for another half an hour. To their credit, they didn't riot when the Japanese were let on the train five minutes before the rest of us.
I walked over to the information desk and asked the Information Guy what the deal was with the "Diet Pepsi" train sitting there on the tracks for the last week. I didn't ask why it was Diet Pepsi when they normally serve Coke on the train, because I was afraid of the answer. He told me that it was a special train that they were putting together for a bunch of (unknown to me, but that doesn't mean anything) rock stars. They were going to film a trans-continental rockumentary, complete with the band members getting drunk and drugged, abusing groupies, puking on roadies, and rolling those specially prepared Diet Pepsi Isuzu Troopers they had on the flat car.
Just before they boarded us, they opened the gift shop. As far as I could tell, the only reason they weren't boarding us at this point was out of deference to the gift shop, by way of throwing them a bit of business.
The occidentals were allowed on the train at precisely the scheduled time, which was only about five minutes after the Japanese were let on. The people with the "Brewster Tours" packages were clearly upset that they didn't get this treatment, but they didn't get too ugly about it.
Not only did the train board on time, but it only got out of the station about eight minutes late. If that sounds like an achievement to you, then you've probably been riding aircraft too long to know that this was the only passenger train departure in two days, and that the train itself had been sitting there at the station for two and a half days, getting prepped. If they couldn't get this thing out on schedule, it would be a good explanation as to why Mulroney wants to shut the thing down. Actually, Robert's theory is that all the Asians (Indian, Pakistani) who are porters on the sleeper cars must all be getting better paid jobs at the airports. All right, you had to be there.
Not wanting to sound racist here, but it really did seem like the Asians were running all the transportation in the county. I hope that's not an indication that the pay is lousy.
Well, that's almost the day. We checked into room "C" on car 220. (I mention this for no reason other than to give me an opportunity to observe the infinitesimal effect typing it has on the size of the scroll bar in the word processor.) We told the porter that our travel arrangements said we'd have to move to room "E" when we got to Jasper, due to conflicting reservations. He just looked at us funny. I checked the floors to make sure they were dry, and headed for the dome car.
Unfortunately, our room was in a car that was so far forward that we were stuck with the middle dome car, rather than the rear one. Don't ask me why, but I just liked the rear one better. I found a good reason later on.
No matter. We were just settling in up there in the lounge, I was typing away at the portable, and the porter came up and told us that there wasn't really anyone in room "E", and that we should just move our stuff right then instead of waiting until the next day.
Shoot. And after I'd already checked "C" for dry floors.
Well, there I sat up there in the dome car. Robert moved all the stuff, and I just stayed up there sucking down booze and pop from the bar below. I didn't help Robert with the move, but he helped me with the booze when he returned. My typing must have bothered some of the other people, because the lights in the lounge got turned off.
Well, maybe it was really because that way, we could almost see the nighttime scenery better. This was probably to compensate for the meticulous scheduling done by VIA to insure that one of the best parts of the trip would always be shrouded in darkness.
Whatever. The view was great, and even the shitty tasting Diet Coke I got tasted great. Everything tastes better on a train.
I was so excited about being back on the train that even though I was in a near state of exhaustion, I still stayed up until all hours of the night, watching the scenery go by our window.
On to Day 18: Back to the Heartland
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