Day 20
Almost the End of the Line
This was our last full day on the train. You know what I'm probably going to remember the most from the train, I mean besides the lack of shower facilities and the corresponding abundance of gamey smelling fellow passengers?
Please do not flush while
train is in station.
Ne pas actionner la chasse
quand le train est en gare
Little bitty bathroom, that was. Actually, it wasn't really a bathroom at all, but rather a very small room with a toilet in it. A real toilet, mind you, and not one of those things with the blue stuff in it. The trouble was that the enclosure was so small that we had to assume our intended attitude even before entering, because there wasn't going to be enough room to turn around once in there.
Ok, so I put on more than just a little weight.
The other trouble with the toilet room was that it was equipped with some kind of personnel sensing equipment, or something, because every time one of us went in there, the train pulled into the station, and therefore, we weren't allowed to flush.
That by itself was only a minor annoyance. The fact that being in such cramped quarters only helped reflect my BO back to me was another (we really needed to shower). Once the beds were down, though, the whole room was that cramped.
With the beds down, we had about three feet of space between the edge of the beds and the edge of the sink. If we had anything hanging off the toilet room door or on the hooks next to the entry to the room, then we had even less space to deal with. The general protocol, once the beds were lowered, was for one person to sit on one of the bunks while the other conducted his or her business.
On the way out, we lucked into a bedroom number "F" (ok, that's not a number, but what else am I going to call it?) on the leg from Edmonton to Vancouver. If you ever take one of these VIA trains, if they still exist by the time I'm done typing this, see if you can get reservations for a bedroom number "F," because it has a few extra feet of space between the beds and sink. Believe me, it makes all the difference in the world.
I got up at some ungodly hour in the morning again; something like 7:30 AM. I got dressed as soon as I could move around without hurling the previous night's dinner, and headed up from the dome car. Up in the dome car, I found a good deal of our cast to Wayne's World camped out with sleeping bags, presumably from the evening before. Maybe it was a good thing that I got to bed as early as I did.
I decided that part of the problem we'd been having was our proximity to coach. I know this is a terribly snobby thing to say, but on the way out, we just didn't have any of these problems in the rearward dome car. Here with the front dome car, we found that the lounge we were in was actually the boundary between US and THEM.
Normally, I wouldn't give this too much notice, except that it seemed like the coach section had an awful lot more hard core drinkers than the first class sections, and they didn't just sit there being quietly looped like the few from first class, either.
Then there was Wayne's World. There was always Wayne's World. I thought I was going to scream.
The Wayne's World crew started the trip in Vancouver, complaining that the bar didn't sell alcohol before 11:00 AM, then went on to spend every stopover searching for the local liquor stores, invariably meeting with more success than I'd wish them. I'm pretty sure that none of them spent any time at sea level during the entire trip.
Even the kids aside, the bar in that car was a continual mob scene. I got the distinct impression that the bartender that took over at Winnepeg was intimidated by the mob (and who wouldn't be), because he managed to keep the bar closed more often and longer than any of his predecessors. Even then, he still sold about three times the booze we'd seen before, and in the mean time, had to deal with only half drunken mobs ready to kill him because he wasn't selling them more.
And if he was scared, it was for good reason, because a lot of them got quite ugly: Either at having to wait for the bar to reopen, having to wait in line so long once it was open, because the booze cost so much, or because of all the people trying to get through the narrow hallway that served double duty as the line for the bar and the hallway to the other cars.
And that was just what the bartender from the first couple of days had to deal with. This new one had an extra problem.
The terrain that we got into on this day was the same rolling hills with lots of trees and wetlands as we'd seen on the second day of our vacation. This time, I was a lot more awake, and therefore was able to follow the scenery better. I noticed that quite a few of the really small towns we stopped at had no roads, no airports, and were serviced only by the rail system, or perhaps by boats from the other side of a lake. At first, I couldn't figure out what it was that made those houses look so funny, but later on, I was able to put my finger on it. What it was was that they didn't have any driveways, garages, or even cars parked in front. They didn't even have roads.
They did have bugs, though, and lots of them.
Anyway, we heard from one local political activist that would hang out in the dome cars, waiting to pounce on anyone who looked too conservative, that the reason VIA was still running the northern train route, having kept it in favor of the much more scenic southerly route, was that the northern route had more small communities which absolutely depended on the rail system as their sole means on access to the rest of the world.
It turns out that a lot of these towns were summer
vacation communities, where people either had summer cottages, or ran fishing
resorts. We found out about the fishing resorts because we spent a lot of time
stopping to pick people up at the end of their fishing trips.
Now, take a bar and dome lounge that's already a bit loud, rowdy and pickled, containing people who haven't bathed or sobered up in two or three days, and add to it about 1.5 dozen guys who'd spent the last two or three days sitting in a boat, in the middle of a lake, under the Canadian summer sun, swilling beer and eating greasy pan fried fish, and you have a real lively scene on your hands. Maybe even a bit too lively for my tastes (or olfaction).
Fortunately, they were serving trout for dinner that night, so at least most of the new passengers didn't follow us into the dining car. This meant that we had a quiet dinner.
Well, we'd had subs in the lounge for lunch but that was before we'd picked up the Canadian Sportsmen. Over the course of the day, we spent more and more time talking with the mother and her son from South Carolina. The kid had somehow survived the Plum Pit Incident, and even more importantly, he even survived his mother's reaction to it.
By the time dinner was rolling around, and by the time the lounge had filled with new passengers who were even smellier than the old ones, we decided to retreat to the dining car as a foursome, so we'd at least have some safe dinner company. To tell the truth, at this point, I wasn't in any mood for sharing my dinner with strangers.
Like I said before, these VIA trains were pretty old equipment. Evidently, one of the first things to stop working was the air conditioning. Ok, I know I've already said this, but I'm going to keep going on about air conditioning, because it's a very important thing to me. Yes, the AC on the dining car was working, but not well enough to keep up with the heat being generated in the kitchen. The end result was that it was enough of a losing battle to make it mildly uncomfortable in there, but it was still doing a good enough job to condense the water out of the air, and keep a steady drip hitting my right hand all through dinner.
And, the trout was overdone.
Oh yeah: Eating in the dining car was a prime example of what an industry that's really serious about its unionization can do for you:
We'd go to the dining car. One person would tell us to wait to be seated.
Another person would come seat us.
Another person would put our menu cards on the table.
Another person would come take our orders, and mark up our cards.
Another person would come take our drink orders.
Another person would come take our liquor orders.
Another person would come, read the cards and sign them.
Another person would come, rip the bottom segment off the cards.
Another person would deliver our meals.
Surprisingly, the same person would remove our empty plates.
The cards signer would come back, rip more pieces off the menu cards, and total the expenses.
The liquor person would come take our money.
Someone who only materialized for the event would bring our change and collect the tip.
I don't want to leave the impression that I had a bad time, because the scenery was still very nice, and the company we had was very friendly. It just wasn't our best day on the train, unless of course, you count the last half hour of our very first day when I stuck my bare feet into a bunch of wet carpet.
The heat during dinner didn't really get to me too badly until we'd finished eating. Good ol' survival instincts: Eat, then worry about the environment. The four of us decided that it might just be a good idea to check out the rear dome car, and get away from Wayne's World and the Sportsmen.
Yes, there was a nicer group back there, what there was of them. The air conditioning in that car didn't work at all, and it was an absolute oven back there. The high point of the whole trip back there was to get a peek at one of the "drawing rooms", which was the only accommodation on the train that was even larger than a room "F".
The day was a mess. We stopped back by the room and fetched what was left of our private booze reserve -- a 10 year old single malt and 50cc of Bailey's Irish Cream -- headed back up to the middle dome car, and met back up with our dinner companions. It was a real zoo up there by then. We gulped down our Coke and the two mini-bottles of booze, sharing the single malt with the S. Carolina lady, and beat a hasty retreat back to the room for the evening.
One of the more notable features of the day was that it was the first day in about two weeks that I'd touched my portable CD player. I wonder if that meant anything cosmic. I also read the Len Deighton book that we'd picked up in Vancouver, and that Robert had finally finished.
I suppose when I look back on the days we spent on the train, this one will contain the least fond memories, excepting the sign in the toilet room, and the Jethro Tull disc I listened to that night at ear splitting volume.
All in all, there were a lot of features of the day to get me down. Aside from the ones already mentioned, I'd managed to put on enough weight over the course of the vacation that I just didn't have any clothes that fit anymore. It was also the last full day of the last train leg of our vacation, and a lot of that was spent trying to avoid Wayne's World or find a working air conditioner. All that was left was to pack, and contemplate on how our vacation was rapidly drawing to a close. Just two or three days in Toronto, then back to Merrimack and WORK.
Back to Merrimack, where I wouldn't have any idea how much I'd just spent, or how I was going to pay off all the bills, where I'd have to start dieting, and where I wouldn't have any idea as to how I could deal with my job any better than when I'd left, or how poorly I had to face up to the prospect that there just wasn't anyone in the company that seemed to want to give me a job and get me out of the dead end I was stuck in.
Ok, since then I've dealt with that in a mostly successful fashion, even if it took me another three years to get out of that dead end. The point was that I got kind of depressed that evening. Aside from being out of money, we'd used up 60% of our accrued vacation time, meaning that we probably weren't going anywhere else for at least another year, assuming that we'd ever have that much money again, which given the new car payments, we probably wouldn't.
Ah well, so much for the day. At least I'd be able to get a shower on the following day.
On to Day 21: Train-Be-Gone
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