Excellent Exciting Excursion Exploration Expedition and Escape on Six Trains

Feb. 20 through March 3rd

"The earthquake was 5.4 on the Richter Scale and there are reports of cracks in roads so the bridge may be damaged", said our Canada Via Rail activities director.  This pulled the rug right out from under my magical mystery tour.  We had just left Vancouver after riding Amtrak up from Seattle, spending the night in a hotel, and visiting the wonders of the Vancouver Art Gallery https://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/.  

                                               Vancouver Art Gallery: Firelei Baez

Steve and I took advantage of the tour package tickets to ride the elevator up to the Vancouver Lookout https://vancouverlookout.com/.  Things thus far were living up to my escape plans which were to cut the elastic on my ties to all that may seem stressful or humdrum in my life, and experience something excellent and exciting.  Hope springs eternal.  I left behind the work to make bookings for our music, meal preparations, housekeeping, phone messages, and more.  Now the man continued, "We may need to wait a while before we can leave".  As we sat for two and a half hours with nothing to think about but news of an earthquake, the elastic pulled me back psychologically to a wee bit of stress.  Finally we lumbered ahead onto the trestle over the great and mighty Frazer River.  At mid-span Steve said, "Here's where the bridge might collapse under us!"  Maybe he was channeling his great-grandfather's train wreck recorded in his song, "Great Grandfather": https://steveandkristinebel.bandcamp.com/track/great-grandfather.  Someone else from another seat piped in, "They've done some work on it recently so maybe it will hold up".  The redheaded burly young man next to him said, " I'm an engineer.  It will be fine!"  I say with over-confidence, "I believe  you!"  The he sheepishly admitted, "I really don't know that".  By now we've made it over the river safely.  

The trip to Vancouver disgruntled me as we had reserved seats facing eastward toward the industrial effluvia of the cities of the Puget Sound, as opposed to the beauty of the sound itself.  So after taking about as much as I could of it, I wandered to another car full of empty seats and we relocated.  By then we were taking in the waterfront glories of Everett, Bellingham Bay, and Vancouver.  I'm not letting trivialities like reserved seat assignments keep me from enjoying the matchless beauty of our Washington coast, even on a cloudy day.  The next morning we awoke hungry, and the three of us made our way to breakfast in a Turkish bakery down the street from our hotel.  I ate a sublime cake-like pastry with feta cheese and luscious spices leaving me happily sated.  Few things delight me more than tasting a wonderful discovery I may never learn how to cook or find again.

                                                      Selfie on the Vancouver Tower 

                                                       Vancouver from the tower

Then off we went on Via Rail Canada to the next leg of the package.  The first order of business was the attempt to make ourselves at home in the sleeping berth.  We each got a bed and three hot meals every day on the trains, as part of our package.  Ideally perhaps I'd have worn one set of clothing throughout the twelve days of travel and laundered them nightly but then who knows where I'd hang up the undies.  As it was I took three full sets of clothing to alternate and couldn't fit my roller bag  under my seat, meaning it had nowhere to go but on my armrest and then at the end of my bed at  night.  Hence the mess you see in the picture.  As well we were assigned a small bench seat that folded into a bed at night, and somehow wound up in two upper bunks, meaning the lower bunks and opposing seats were assigned to two other people.  

You're looking below at Steve on his bench with his guitar near the ukulele of his bunk-mate, Aaron.  Don't ask me how Amtrak Vacations found two bunkmates for us who were a married couple of folk musicians, about our age with similar political ideas, but it worked out unbelievably well.  We didn't ask for that; it was pure serendipity.  The second photo is what my bunk looked like.  I thought it somewhat too cozy until I moved to the American version of the same thing on Amtrak and then cozy went to quite cramped.  At least here I could sit up to squirm around while dressing in the morning.  

Steve and I bought guitars especially for the purpose of playing on this trip.  They're both very small.  Mine is a bass-uke, with a fret board so tiny I have to stare at it lest my muscle memory takes my fingertips to the wrong places. 

                                                             Me and my UBASS

 Aaron started strumming on his ukulele, inviting us to join in.  One thing led to another until he and his wife Barb invited us to perform just for them.  Soon the very narrow corridor was plugged up with nine listeners as we continued for about a half-hour, pulling together all the train songs we knew plus a couple more.  We had decided not to bring the guitars out to perform in one of the two community spaces in the cars, unless we were invited by the management.  This it turns out was wise.  We let everyone in our listening audience know that we wouldn't be asking for permission ourselves.  But several of our fans did so.  Then the activities director gave us a cheerful but adamant talk all about how and why we can't under any circumstances, play in "public".  Canada Via Rail has an application procedure for their hired musicians and, you see, how can they otherwise know how bad we might be?  Even after we explained this to people, one of our fans continued to harangue the poor guy.  We take no responsibility for that, but it was kind of flattering.  Steve and I are no strangers to the difficulties of performing in Canada as Americans.  Still, people kept presenting us with Canada Via Rail's web page for musicians to apply, which we know would do us no good because we're not Canadians.  That was the only performance we did on the trip.  Barb with her lovely voice sang duets with Aaron on a couple of folk songs familiar to me from Bill Staines.  Our connections with our bunk-mates seemed to transport me back to my memories of college dormitory conversations between bunk roomies.

                                             Typical dome car view on Canada Via Rail

Meals are a particular pleasure on Via Rail Canada, and undeniably a social experience.  The food is hand-prepared by a chef each day, with fresh-cut vegetables and fruits.  All meals were great, with desserts especially spectacular.  I totally threw caution to the wind and gained three pounds.  The waiters usher passengers into a small table for four and almost instantly usher a couple of strangers to sit across from each other.  In such circumstances introductions and conversation ultimately follow.  By the end of the trip I was on first-name basis with about a dozen riders.  

One of them had listened to our music in the corridor and found her way to our dinner table to pepper us intensely with questions.  She cut a striking figure, a thin and willowy Canadian with a shock of gray hair pulled back from her inquisitive bright blue eyes.  She had heard one of Steve's songs that seemed to launch a difficult dialogue within herself regarding the limits of capitalism, and Steve and I were quite willing to take on one side.  The song is "Dark Days", and she loves it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmSz0dIPFFk.  She reluctantly answered a few of our questions revealing that she's and actress preparing for a lead role in a movie soon to be shot in Edmonton.    We got out for a short stroll in Winnipeg and while clutching my arm as we navigated the icy road, she explained that movie producers take out insurance policies on the health and lives of their leading actors, making them promise to avoid specific risky behaviors.  So we quickly found a safe spot to walk, and as we passed a parking lot I couldn't help noticing Canadian flags on car antennae, no doubt making their stand against American trade tariffs and other such nonsensical intrusive hubris.  Anyway she was a bright spot in our memories on Canada Via Rail.

  

Train song lyrics hound and haunt me.  "And the sons of pullman porters and the sons of engineers ride their fathers' magic carpets made of steel" [Steve Goodman, City of New Orleans].  That's Steve, the great grandson of the engineer who among others took Lincoln's remains across the country for the public to view after his assassination.  "Mothers with their babes asleep are rocking to the gentle beat and the rhythms of the wheels are all they feel".  I woke up one morning when that rhythm stopped as we waited in Cleveland.  It should have been perfect for sleep; no sound and no movement, utterly still.  I guess something deep inside connected that rocking, rolling and gentle jarring to the comforts of the womb.  I wanted it to begin again, partly because in my position lying on my belly, I felt so directly connected to the earth below me.  "From the great Atlantic Ocean to the wide Pacific Shore...as she glides over the woodlands on the hills and by the shore" [Box Car Willie, Wabash Cannonball].  

Via Rail Canada has no internet access, probably in part due to cars that remain well-preserved and just as they were when built in  1955.  The experience throws one into interior ponderings, or if you will, trains of thought.  With many hours to pass, the alternatives are reading books, playing board games, wine tastings, lectures by the activities director, or just being alone with ones' thoughts.  It feels like a throwback to culture before obsessions and addictions to digital electronic devices.

We made it, after our first night on board, to the peak of the Rockies past Jasper.  The activities director warned us that Jasper's housing had half burned down last summer and that the town was in grief, with many residents having left town for good.  We see signs out the window of the thousands of black tree corpses still standing yet burnt, right up next to the train tracks.  The remaining green ones at this latitude and altitude in many cases appear to me kind of scrawny and underfed, though that's just the natural appearance of alpine firs.  Still I'm grateful for their greenery after the dismal vast expanses of mountains with nothing left on them but what appears from a distance to be thinning black hair on these giant mountainous heads.  So far we're only two hours late due to the earthquake which makes no difference to us since we have two days to kill in Toronto before catching our next train.  The rivers and streams are frozen and the snowy peaks towering over us right and left reminded me of why I was making this trip.  

It included several stops for embarkments as well as dis-embarkments.  The first stretch to Winnipeg seemed to have an international array of passengers from England, Germany, New Zealand, America, and Canada.  The last stretch to Montreal seemed to usher in a younger demographic of Canadians using the train for utilitarian rather than entertainment purposes.

                                                        Rolling through the Rockies

                                                                   Burnt Rockies

                                 Valemount Hotel where we played music a while back

In Toronto we had two nights to spend in a comfortable suite downtown, and tickets to take another trip up to an iconic landmark designed by the same architect who created the one we went up in Vancouver.   It's called the CN Tower. Taking the taxi across town we drank in the beauty of the city's buildings.  

                                                                   The Mall

We went looking for a nice sit-down dining experience, following signs through a mall that seemed to be enormously tall and long; witness the ceiling on the above photo.  Just the search was a big adventure.  It took us so long that by the time we found a place that sunlight pictured above was gone. We finally settled on an elegant-looking Italian place, not the one we wanted which was closed for renovation.  Steve ordered what he thought might be an interesting meal but due to translation difficulties turned out to be plain old macaroni and cheese.  Oh, well, seize the day!  It was our last day in Canada before catching another train to New York.

                                                              Toronto CN Tower

We arrived in the big apple at around 10 pm with just enough time to make our way to our hotel and turn in.  Our schedule was a bit packed.  The connection left us barely enough time to take in the sights of the city.  We had tickets as part of our package, to the "Hop-on, Hop-off" bus, which we mistakenly assumed would pick us up at Penn Station.  Instead it required us to walk a mile.  After sitting on a train for six days no doubt it was just what the doctor ordered to regulate our systems, but made me plenty nervous, as I didn't really know where we were going nor whether we'd have time to do this and make our connection for the train.  It turned out to be at the M & M Store.  Yes, you read that right; a three-story big store devoted to nothing but M & M candies and swag.  Fortunately it had a bathroom too because after spending three hours of walking and touring we were about to wet our pants.  The tour was fine, though a might chilly on the roof of a bus in the winter, and as one might predict, pretty slow-moving through downtown Manhattan traffic.  Then we quickly walked back another mile.  That stress took some enjoyment from the experience though the sun came out and the tour was otherwise reasonably worthwhile.

                                 Knish for breakfast in Penn Station 

                                  The chilly top of the bus tour of NYC

                                We love the message, "Stop Wars" vs "Star Wars".

On the Amtrak American side now, we glided through what looked like Bible-drenched other-side-of-the-tracks humble abodes.  It's Hoosier Country and we were due to be in Chicago in an hour and a half, waiting for the Empire Builder to carry us home.  

                                      Note the Amtrak red stripe now we've left Canada         

                                         Sunset on Amtrak

 

                                              Hoosier Country

                                        Slightly different look to Amtrak "Roomette"

                      In Canada it's called "Dome Car" and on Amtrak "Observation Car"

The train stopped in Spokane in the wee hours of the morning to take on riders and release the back half of cars for a separate train going to Salt Lake City.  Knowing I'd missed the beauty of Glacier Park in the dark, I was eager for one last glimpse of mountain scenery before arriving home.  So I forced myself out of bed to head for the observation car to watch the Cascades roll by.  It was then that I felt the shock of amputation as it had left us.  It was a rude awakening.  But in the dawn's dim early light the great and mighty Columbia River began to show herself out our roomette window, and then the Wenatchee Valley wherein there are no bad views in any direction, even from my north-facing dining car window.

                                    Dawn's early light over the Wenatchee Valley

For the last few hours we glided past many lovely views of the Skykomish River raging and cutting through the steep banks of the North Cascades.

Then we're back home again!