Day 18
Back to the Heartland
Well, what can I say?
The day started way too early, or at least threatened to do so when Robert got up at some ungodly hour of the morning. Around 5:00 AM, to be precise. I was so excited about being on the train again the night before, that I left the shade open on the window and sat up and watched scenery for half the night. Since we were up so far north, sunrise came around 5:00 AM, and it woke Robert up, all bright and early.
Between Robert being up and chipper at that hour, which to me is a wholly hypothetical prospect, and my sudden realization that he hadn't spent a half an hour triple checking the motel room for things we left behind when we checked out on the previous day, I was starting to wonder if maybe I should check under the bed for pods.
Fortunately, I did the sensible thing and fell back to sleep, and didn't wake up again until around 8:30, which was still too damned early, but a whole lot more realistic than 5:00. Not enough sleep, really, because I was up so late, but enough sleep so that I could function without wanting to spend the rest of the day spewing my guts out.
This was almost too late to get a good seat in the dome car. Since
we were on the Canadian Rockies return leg, the dome car was already nearly full
with people who'd arrived even earlier to stake their claim for the day. Shoot,
some of them were even people who I'd advised the day before that they should
stake an early claim, so I had no one to blame but myself. We did manage to
vulch a pair of seats being vacated by a couple on their way down to the dining
car for breakfast.
This wasn't such good fortune as we'd originally thought, though, as this left us seated in front of a pair of kids who were trying to rip-off the cast of Saturday Night Live's "Wayne's World" skit, except that they were a whole lot less funny. A half an hour of this might have been funny, but after it'd dragged on for a whole morning, or day, or week, it started to get just a bit thin.
Most of their discussion seemed to center around what a great injustice to mankind it was that the bar didn't start serving liquor until 11:00 AM. All I could do was hope against hope that we'd cross the time line before then, and set them back another hour.
Trying our best to ignore them, we got a good view of the Canadian Rockies. It was much like the first time, except played in reverse and a bit more cloudy. We didn't get to see so many snowy peaks this time, because they were in the clouds, although I generally saw more of the scenery than last time. Maybe this was because Robert got hold of the new Len Deighton book before I did. Without Len Deighton to distract me, and without feeling obliged to be constantly on the lookout for good photo opportunities, I was able to concentrate on the scenery proper.
It's pretty nice looking up there. A lot like the
Colorado Rockies, except a whole lot more plush, with a whole lot more water
laying around, and with a whole lot more "Canada" and "CN"
logos all over everything. I guess I said that already.
I clobbered the crap out of my head getting up and racing down to the dining car at the first lunch call, and still almost got there too late to be seated right away. Lunch was as good as it'd been on the first train out, except that it now seemed to be the peak season, which meant peak season prices, which meant that it was a lot more expensive than before. Too bad.
When we returned to the dome car, the only seats we could find were a pair of rearward facing seats, across from a Kiwi I'd met in the train station the day before. She was one of the ones who'd staked an early claim on my advice. We sat there and listened to her as she told us some fairly fascinating stories about her year long journeys through India, Thailand, and other exotic places. One of the more useful things she told us was that there was something even more uncomfortable than flying coach on a major US airline, and that was riding in a bus in Nepal in the middle of the summer, with half the rest of the population sitting next to you.
She was pretty interesting to talk to, and kept our mouths and ears going clean until the stop in Jasper. We had a 1:15 layover there, and she was just getting off for good, planning to return to Vancouver on the newly privatized route through Banff and Calgary.
We really didn't do too much in Jasper. Too bad, too,
because those in the know knew to get off the train in a dead sprint so they
could queue up at the place that rented shower stalls to train passengers. Well,
we didn't know about that. Robert had already taken a lap of that town on foot
the first time we were there. The scenery was nice, but not great, again due to
the cloud cover, and I wasn't in any sort of mood to retrace Robert's previous
circumnavigation of town.
What we did do was stop by a cafe and pick up a couple of Nanaimo bars to go, and stop by the drug store and pick up a package of candy. Afterwards, we sat on the bench at the train platform and watched them uncouple a few passenger cars and one of the dome cars from the front of the train. What with all the Brewster people getting off in Jasper, they could shorten the train a bit. We also tried not to watch the Wayne's World crew trying to bounce bean bags off their ankles to the strained strains of some stupid heavy metal group playing on their boom box, while they were shit-faced drunk. Somehow, I got the impression that they wouldn't do much better sober, but it was also pretty clear that they were trying to make a public demonstration of how totally cool they were.
I guess I'm just too old to appreciate that anymore.
It would seem that we weren't going to get away from these two. Even when we were talking to the nice Kiwi, we'd moved up a couple of rows in the dome car, they did also, this time bringing their girlfriends, who were not at all objectionable to us, except for the company they kept.
Now, no matter where we ran, where we turned, or where we hid, they'd be there acting obnoxious at us. We just kept trying to tell ourselves that we'd been teenagers ourselves, a long time ago.
After Jasper, we went back up to the Dome car and took the pair of seats previously occupied by the Kiwi. Wayne's world settled in behind us. Robert read some more of the Len Deighton book, and I tried to follow the train's route in the Rail book we'd purchased the last time we were in Jasper.
Actually, that last bit was me falling asleep for about an hour. I awoke to the sound of Wayne sitting there across the aisle, whining for his girlfriend, who was in the smoking lounge below, to come back upstairs and finish fixing his hair. While he wasn't whining loud enough for anyone outside the upstairs lounge to hear him, it was still plenty loud enough for those of us up there to catch every plaintive whimper in full dynamic range surround sound. Amazing. He had all that energy to sit there whining for her for a half an hour, but he couldn't lift a finger to actually go find her. I felt kind of stupid for not having bought some kind of unflavored laxative to spike his beer with when I had the chance back in Jasper.
Even still, I picked a fairly scenic spot to wake up, and one that I didn't remember from the first time. This was on the east end of the mountain range. It came off as a sort of Utahesque landscape, but somehow with more vegetation and wetlands. I probably should have taken pictures, but I didn't. So, what else is new?
For dinner, we had some very nice poached salmon, and sat at a table with an elderly couple from Vermont (around Bennington, if it matters), with whom we swapped stories about our difficulties with obtaining tickets for the train. Evidently, they'd gone through almost as much hassle as we did, so I guess I don't feel so singled out anymore. Even worse, their hassles were spread out over a period of about five months. Shoot, we got all that in just a couple of terror packed weeks.
As good as our dinners were, we couldn't help but feel sorry for this couple, who were the recipients of a pair of salmon steaks, each with about three fishes worth of bones inside. Their dinners were completely unparsable, which was even more the shame, because it was otherwise very tasty salmon.
We returned to the dome car, and this time managed to put some distance between us and Wayne's World. By now, the dome car seating was a lot less in demand, probably because most of the passengers had got off the train in Jasper.
We sat in the rear of the lounge, among a fairly interesting set of people. First, there was a woman from South Carolina who managed to wrangle a ride up in the engine (whatever that thing in the front's called) for her 16 year old son, and was being kept updated on his progress by one of the VIA guys who was also in the lounge, complete with his walkie talkie. She asked the VIA guy what the deal was with the old Vancouver-Banff-Calgary-Winnepeg-Thunder Bay-Toronto route -- the one formerly called "The Canadian", and probably the more scenic of the two routes -- and she was told that the route was discontinued, but that major parts of if may have recently been purchased by Amtrak.
I guess Canada's way of privatizing their heavily nationalized transportation systems is to sell them to the heavily nationalized US transportation systems. Still, it sort of makes you wonder what's going on if Amtrak thinks they can make more money off the route than VIA can.
Anyway, there was also a couple from England, a gentleman from Switzerland, a couple from Holland, and a young guy from Australia, who were all sitting around trading travel stories. The Aussie was the most interesting of the bunch, having recently been to even more places than that Kiwi who'd been on the road (rail?) for the last year.
This was all just a way of making me feel that our big three week adventure in Canada was just kid's stuff next to real travel.
Still, while we had that VIA guy up there, we took the opportunity to have him explain to us what the deal was on Meech Lake and their flag debates. His cut on the Meech deal was that it wasn't really the French speaking people who were dragging the country down, but rather the big bureaucrats in Ontario who were soaking up all the tax dollars from the less wealthy provinces, and trying to push all the problems of the country off onto Quebec, and at the same time trying to alienate Quebec from the rest of the country. This sounded like it sort of made the two halves of Canada one culture separated by a common enemy.
And, it turns out that their flag thing was just some people getting upset that some other really riled up folk in Ontario used the Quebec flag as a doormat. I suppose that it's some measure of the country that they didn't react to this by attempting to make a constitutional amendment forbidding anyone from using a flag as a doormat. Then again, half their problem was that they didn't have a constitution in the first place.
He also said that the reason that the Ontario folks were so hacked off was that some town in Quebec made it illegal (under punishment of being expelled) for anyone to speak any English within 50 feet of a public school.
He then reassured us that the Meech Lake thing had been blown all out of proportion by the press, and that at the 11th hour, the big guys from Quebec and Ontario would work out some sort of arrangement in a bar somewhere, and tell the rest of the country what they decided -- just like they did three years before.
I guess we've all seen how well that came out.
Well, after this, the discussion degenerated into a big debate over comparative government: US vs. Canada vs. UK vs. Australia. This went on until about midnight.
The VIA guy also figured that based on the interference on his radio, we were going to see some northern lights that night, but unfortunately, it was still too cloudy to see anything.
All in all, though, it wasn't a bad day, even if I don't know what to say about the scenery.
Well, I guess I should say something: By the time the sun went down, we were back into the Canadian Plains. Lots of fields of whatever they were fields of. Many of them were still under a few inches of water from the big spring runoff, so I can only hope that they were trying to grow rice there. Probably not. Lots of wetland that probably isn't supposed to be wetland.
And, where there was exposed dirt, it was again that really dark black stuff that got all the farmers so excited on our way out west. I guess they must have a lot of farmers in Canada.
As for the passing freight trains: It was a little more encouraging. On the way west, all we saw on the eastbound trains was what looked like lumber made of all the trees in B.C. On the way back, all the westward freight trains seemed to be carrying new cars and grain (or at least cars that could carry grain).
Oh yeah, I also figured out another neat thing about trains: They're a whole lot better than cars because you're subjected to a whole lot fewer billboards along the way.
While we were discussing politics with all the other people in the dome car, Robert and I also polished off a couple of airline sized bottles of Chivas and Ouzo. This ensured that we went to bed happy that night. Ok, so I'm a cheap drunk.
Back in the bedroom car, just before I started typing up the day's exploits, I got a bad case of the one thing about riding on the train that really bothered me, and that was the lack of any sort of shower facilities.
My desperation drove me to attempting to give myself a sponge bath over the little sink in the room. It was a pretty fruitless pursuit, too, but I did notice that I was spilling an awful lot of water on the floor, which finally uncovered the mystery of our first day on the train. Now, I knew why the floor was so wet.
Realizing that the trains sat in the station in Toronto for two days before going out again, and considering how slowly the carpet must dry for it to have still been so wet when we boarded that first night, I took pity on whoever would be climbing aboard in another few days and threw a towel on the floor to catch what I was spilling.
No, I wasn't looking forward to getting off the train at all. Of course, if I did have to get off the train, first I'd take a shower, and only afterwards would I get depressed about being off the train. After all, I do have my priorities.
On to Day 19 and More Train Time
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