Day 19

More Train Time

Well, we stayed up pretty late the night before, sitting up there in the dome car, waiting for the northern lights. First, that meant waiting for it to get dark outside, which was pretty darn late to begin with, and then it meant waiting for the clouds to clear up. Of course, they didn't until we went back to our room. Then, all the stars came out. Didn't help much, because the room was south facing.

So, I sat up until all hours of the night typing stuff. I was still pretty excited about the train, so even after I was done typing, I still didn't get to sleep until fairly late.

Robert, on the other hand, was out like a light as soon as his head touched the pillow, and didn't move an inch until around 9:30. Must have had something to do with getting up so early the day before.

While Robert was still sleeping in, I got up kind of early and went on up to the dome car. I figured Robert would stumble on up there in his own good time, and in his own good time, that's just what he did. Once we were all collected up there, Robert, the Aussie, some other Kiwi and I played a game of Trivial Pursuit. The Aussie, bless his heart, was so far behind the times that he didn't realize how unbearably yuppie that was, but we didn't tell him, and at least he didn't ask to play "pictionary."

Anyway, it was the Australian edition of the game, meaning that most of the questions concerned Aussie cricket match scores. Well, not all of the questions were about cricket, but certainly the ones in "Arts and Entertainment", "History", "Literature" and "Sports and Leisure" were. Even still, Robert and I won the first round.

As for the train trip: Each major stop brought with it the hope that Wayne's World would get off the train and stay off, perhaps getting lost on their way to the town liquor store, but these hopes were always dashed when they'd come back aboard at the last minute with a fresh batch of batteries for their boom boxes. The only people we did lose were the ones that we'd have liked to see more of, including that Kiwi lady from the first day, and a fairly cool Swiss guy.

One of the reasons that I has having such a hard time with the kids was that on this trip, unlike the trip out, we spent our time in the forward dome car, which was what separated first class from coach. The other times, we used the rear dome car, which was what separated first class from walking.

Well, not wanting to get into gratuitous class distinction things, it was still true that coach just contained a different class of people. Like Wayne's World, and to be fair to them, they were a lot more pleasant than some of the others.

On the other hand, riding with so many coach passengers did teach us a couple of fiddles, one of which was to buy sandwiches in the bar instead of blowing $8.00 (plus tax and tip) on lunch at the now inflated prices in the dining car. Getting sandwiches from the bar was a lot faster, too, and could be done at our own convenience and didn't involve nearly as much frustration with the waitrons in the dining car. Oh yeah, and the air conditioning in the dome car worked a lot better than the one in the dining car. Too bad the food in the dining car was so much better.

This also gave the Aussie an opportunity to get a re-match game out of me before we got to Winnepeg. This time, it was one on one, and without Robert-the-human-encyclopaedia (had to spell it that way out of respect for Robert's copy of Britannica), I lost, although it was a close game. By close game, I mean that I got most of the questions that weren't about cricket, and the Aussie got most of the ones that were. Of course, four out of the six categories did concern themselves mostly with cricket, so maybe the score itself wasn't THAT close, but I like to remember that it was anyway. After all, this is MY trip report.

Before we got to Winnepeg, which was where the Aussie got off, we did get to have lots of fun conversations with him. We talked about politics, wherein he told me that in the previous hour, I'd managed to slander every nationality represented in the train, and most of the rest besides. (Nice to know that I haven't lost my touch.) I guess I was making the ears prick up on some of the British and Dutch passengers on the train.

We also got to explain the wheat thing to the Aussie, although I'm still pretty sure that the explanations just didn't take. Here we were, back in the middle of the mind numbing flatness of central Canada. The Aussie guy hadn't seen anything that flat in his life, and he really couldn't understand why the Canadians put up with it. We tried to explain to him that flatness in North America was synonymous with wheat, and that wheat was a major part of the economy of North America, and how happy all the nearly starving people in the third world are because they get to buy cheap Canadian and American wheat from the Russians.

Oops. There goes another nationality.

It didn't work. He though eating was ok, but still not a sufficient excuse for all that flatness. I suppose he had a point there, but there sure as heck wasn't any point outside the train. It really was flat.

Sadly, we lost the Aussie when we got to Winnepeg. I mean he got off the train, and stayed off, although he was mumbling something about Winnepeg being smack in the middle of the most criminally boring piece of real estate he'd ever seen. I'd have been interested to find out just how long he did stay there. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that he was on the first bus out of town, even before our train left.

Anyway, we got to Winnepeg in the middle of dinner hour, and we were going to be there for three hours. This was just a little hint from the dining car staff that they were sick of dealing with surly passengers in a hot, steamy car with inadequate air conditioning. Or, maybe I'm just making that up. Just the same, we were still stuck with three hours to kill off in Winnepeg.

You know, there isn't much you can do with three hours in a strange town. Maybe dinner, if you had any idea of where to go. Other than that, you can't go to a movie, and you can't go see the sights. What do you do?

We opted for a bus tour that'd been heavily recommended by our porter all through the previous day. I think he got kickbacks. This was a two and a half hour ride around town on the top floor of a double decker bus, with a guy on the microphone giving us a running commentary and some canned bad jokes. I won't get into the jokes, but the commentary went sort of like:

"There's the Air Canada Building. You can't see it from here, but when viewed from above, it looks like a big Maple Leaf shaped building, which symbolizes our country."

"This is the legislature building. On top of it, you can see a statue of a child, holding some stalks of wheat in one hand and a torch in the other. The torch symbolizes the march of progress, and the wheat is to show that Manitoba is an agricultural province, and that it is a major portion of our economy, and that we feed the nation."

"This is the Hudson's Bay Store. You can see it's connected by covered elevated walkways with every other building in town. Why, you can walk from one end of downtown to the other without ever having to step outside!" (See? I told you so.)

"Here's where a French speaking person led a bunch of Indians and slaughtered a bunch of English speaking people."

"This is our city commerce center. On the second floor, you can see that the outside wall texture is decorated with a pattern that looks sort of like wheat. This is to symbolize that our province is an agricultural one."

"This is our giant underground shopping mall. Well, actually, you can't see it from the top floor of this bus, but it's really down there, and it's really big. There are so many passages down there that you can go virtually anywhere in town. Why, if you try to cross the street here, above ground, you're liable to get a ticket." (Really)

"Here's Eaton Center, an old mail order warehouse that's been converted to a giant downtown shopping mall. It's connected by covered walkways to everything else, but they're done up so fancy that even the walkways have stores in them, so you'll never have to know that you're not going outside."

"Here's where the British army showed up and slaughtered that French speaking guy and all his Indian buddies."

"Here's the real expensive section of town, where they've gone to great lengths to keep people from driving through their neighborhood, just to look at the expensive houses. As you can see, all their efforts have failed miserably."

"Here we are back downtown. Now, you probably can't tell this from the ground, but when viewed from above, the downtown area of Winnepeg looks sort of like a stalk of wheat, which symbolizes..."

All right, maybe I made that last one up, but I was getting so sick of hearing about wheat, that I was thinking of never eating pasta again. Maybe that's why everyone there eats cornstarch gravy.

We got off the bus, carrying our souvenir stalks of wheat, with about 40 minutes to kill off before the train was supposed to leave. Not really enough time to go anywhere, except maybe a local fast food vendor.

We walked across the street to "VeeJay's Burger Bar," which was a fairly normal looking burger place, serving all the normal American forms of greasy fast food, except that they put curry sauce on everything. Robert got a burger with curry sauce, and I got a hot dog with curry sauce. Really.

We took our food back to the train station and ate it at a table next to the station's snack bar. Several of our fellow passengers, all possessing a newfound green pallor, stopped by to mention how a curried hotdog was an obviously better choice than the train station's snack bar, except that it wasn't so obvious before they tried the snack bar.

The hot dog was quite good. Really. Honest.

Just about the time we were to re-board the train, I decided to try to call Charlie to see if the house was still intact, and to check up with the answering machine, which had only accumulated one whole message during our whole vacation thus far.

This was great. I went to all the trouble of spooning out a C-note for an answering machine that came with every bell and whistle possible, including the remote control butt scratcher, and no one calls it to leave a damn message.

First, I tried calling Charlie. Randy had watched our house for the first two weeks, but Charlie took over after that, even though, or maybe because, he hadn't read the first day of my trip report yet. He wasn't home.

Ok, so I'll wonder about the house. Just a quick check on the answering machine, and wait a minute... There's a message! It was from Charlie. We have two telephone lines, and he'd called the one with the answering machine from the other just to leave a message on my machine, assuming that I'd be thrilled to get a message for once. Aside from that, he also mentioned that the house was still there intact.

Bless his little heart. It was a nice thought.

On the way back from the phones, I was accosted by a woman who told me that judging by the way I was conservatively dressed, I had to be a "Christian Woman."

Actually, she just walked up to me, and said: "Excuse me, but are you a Christian woman?"

I suppressed my natural instinct to shoot back a reply that I sure as heck hoped that at least half the answer was obvious, and instead played it safe: "Uh, yeah, but what's it mean?"

She told me that I just had to be one, and launched into a harangue about how all the other heathen women in the station were only half dressed, and therefore had fallen prey to all the dark forces.

Gee, I never thought I looked like the Church Lady before, but maybe this requires further review. In the mean time, I made nice excuses to get out of her path.

Ok, that was weird, but it was a whole lot better than earlier, when we were standing in front of the station waiting for the bus, and some bum snuck up behind me and pawed my hair. Yuk!

We got back on the train, which had a whole new set of staffing in all the cars. We just went straight back to the dome car, but sneaking a pair of airline bottles of hooch we'd picked up in Vancouver. (Glenmorangie and Amaretto, in case you were wondering. No, we didn't mix the two.)

We caught back up with the lady from South Carolina and her 16 year old son (the one who got to ride in that thing up in the front of the train the day before), and we had a good old time talking to her. At one point, the kid swallowed a plum pit and spent a fair amount of time choking on it.

Watching the kid choke on a plum put, to be quite honest, wasn't very funny. Watching his mother, on the other hand, was. She was simultaneously:

I'd plum forgotten about that very special relationship that grows between a mother and her son. It was touching.

Well, that was all fun, but the train was still 40 minutes late leaving the station. We'd almost finished our hooch by the time it pulled out. It did get underway eventually, and we sat and talked for a while about this, that and the other with her and a few others up there. Sooner or later, most of them retired to their rooms, or at least most of those with rooms retired to them. Not Wayne's World.

Too bad most of the people left, though, because they missed some of the best scenery of the day. Aside from the bit about the Aussie, you might have noticed that I haven't mentioned much about the scenery from this day. Well, I may have said it before, but if you've been to Kansas, there isn't much more I could say about it, except that it's less humid and has less bugs and billboards than Kansas, but that's about it.

Yeah, the terrain was flat. In a way, though, it wasn't bad at all. The farm land was very lush, having a lot of that deep black soil we'd seen so much of on the trip out. There were also lots of ponds with ducks and loons in them, and little clumps of low trees dotting the landscape. Of course, the land was so flat, the only way you could tell where the ponds stopped and the land started was that the you could see air underneath the bodies of the ducks.

Most of the people couldn't stand it. They were pretty surprised when I took a picture, but I explained to them that I wanted photographic proof that it was so flat.

It went on like that for most of the day. Right up until just before sunset, as a matter of fact, which again, was fairly late in the day (11:00-11:30 PM). The trouble with sunset was that the sun set so shallowly, and so far in the north, that it really wasn't clear to me exactly when to quit calling it day, and call dusk it dusk instead, or when sunset gave out to nighttime.

Now, you'd think that after sunset, trying to watch the scenery from the dome car would be a losing experience. Well, perhaps it would be most of the time. This time, though, there was a very bright full moon in the southern sky, and the northern sky never did get too dark for as long as we were there. If the sun had set behind it, it had only barely done so, and for as long as we were there, the northern horizon had that post-sunset red glow to it.

With all that illumination in the night sky, we could see quite a bit of scenery, and the not quite darkness with the glow of the perpetual sunset and full moon all over gave everything a sort of cozy look. And, the reflection of the moon off the wetlands and ponds (I think the wetlands were where the ducks had to stand up, and the ponds were where they could float) was also quote beautiful.

In case you hadn't guessed, one of our motivations for staying up there so late was to take a second crack at the northern lights. This particular evening seemed to be a good bet, because the sky was so clear. As luck would have it, we did get a small show, much higher in the sky than I would have expected. Nothing spectacular, but a good demonstration of the concept.

All the "oohing" and "ahhing" we were making attracted the attention of one woman in the lounge, who came over to see the lights with us. She was only mildly impressed, and then only because she didn't think they were visible from so far south.

We got to talking to her, and found that she worked in the mining industry up in the Yukon, and only got this far south every once in a while "to visit my family, eh?"

We jabbered with her for a while about what it was like to live up there, but things were starting to get to me. For one thing, the air conditioning in that car just wasn't hacking it anymore. Air conditioning must still be a new concept to Canadians, but if I think about it hard enough, I guess that shouldn't surprise me. For another thing, all that weight I'd been putting on during the trip made my clothes distinctly uncomfortable. After a while, I just had to get back to the room and to bed.

On to Day 20: Almost the End of the Line


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