Days 9 & 10

Day 9

Our train trip soon became a rigidly-kept schedule. We preferred the late-sitting for meals, having lunch at 1pm and dinner at 7:30pm. It seemed later and later as we passed through time zones. Saturday (Day 9) saw us in Winnipeg for a few hours, as our crew switched over. But since we got there at 8:30am, and nothing really opens on a Saturday until 10am, we found the stop a bit tedious. Winnipeg, of all the cities we’ve been in, reminded me most of Toronto. Eerily quiet on a non-weekday, with wide four lane streets and hints of history in some of the stone buildings. Our adventures kept us warm enough (there was a brisk, cold wind) to walk over to a mall. Like Toronto, Winnipeg has an interesting and intricate system of pathways – this time over as opposed to under. Skywalks connect mall to mall, and small shops and kiosks fill the causeways. Other than picking up another book (I eat literature for breakfast), we didn’t see much to buy in Winnipeg, despite my wish to try and find another pair of moccasins. Either the stores weren’t open, or they were the exact same stores we saw at home: The Bay, Staples, Shoppers... etc. We headed back to the station to allow about 20 min. of internet time before we flew off again; we both checked our mail, I updated this blog, etc. etc.

Lunch came and passed. We read, we played with the computer, we wrote thank you cards, we stared out at the new scenery: prairies. Wide, open expanses of farmland that Roger was disappointed to find weren’t as flat as he’d imagined. It was a bright sunny day out, and the fields shone golden with old stalks of corn, or dark rich brown from recently-cut and tilled hay crops. Cows and horses popped up every so often, but usually it was fields and hedges of trees. The trees were gnarlier than before, tougher and curled up. Someone mentioned they were probably Manitoba maple. The evergreens had all but disappeared. Dinner came. Manitoba left. Entering Saskatchewan, the scenery remained unchanged. We read, hung out in the dome car, etc. End of a day with little substance, other than gustatory or pastorally aesthetic.



Day 10

Our next day started with an early morning stop in Edmonton – so early, we saw nothing but lights outside our curtained berth. As the day progressed, we saw that the sun had left us in Saskatchewan, and the ground now undulated in soft hills. More trees, less farmland. Due to our scheduled stop in Jasper around 1pm, the train was offering brunch instead of breakfast and lunch. We ate around 9:30, and were placed at the table with a couple of people who drew us jovially into conversation. The older man was Father Gerard, a priest of an Old Catholic church in Vancouver. He grew up in Gaspe, and identified himself as both Acadien and Metis. His travelling friend was Jim, an Asian man with a deceptively young face. He didn’t look much older than 35, though he told us he had a son that was 27. We enjoyed our meal and our conversation, then headed to the dome car to see the approach of the Rockies. Soon, the gentle hills deepened into valleys. The soft slopes took on steeper inclines. As they were all wrapped in a thick mist, I immediately thought of Scotland and the highlands – Glencoe, Rannoch Moor, etc. We saw a couple groups of elk and an unfazed team of Bighorn sheep watching the train pass by. The landscape shifted from rockfaces and trees trees and more trees (I noticed that they were once again mostly coniferous, pines and firs), with an outbreak of valley view and snaking river. All the staring out the windows made me feel a little like a nature voyeur – no interaction with it at all, but drinking in the picture it made, endlessly.

Suddenly, Jasper was upon us. Because we were running late, we only had 30 or so minutes at the station. Roger and I made it as far as the lounge, where we capitalized on the few minutes of internet we could gain. Sooner than we would have liked, we returned to our birth and continued staring out the windows transfixed. A couple hours of staring later, we realized that all those mountains we’d seen before had just been teasing. The snow-capped peaks of the Rockies suddenly appeared, wrapped all around in mist, but as highly-defined and clear as anyone could imagine it. The trees by now had become titans – soaring tens of feet high. My favourite scenery was watching the train pass by dips where the trees rooted themselves feet below the level of the train, yet stretched far above. I felt almost as if a brontosaurus head or some other Mesozoic creature would peek up from out of these ancient-seeming woods.

After dinner that night, the time changes all caught up with me, and what was supposedly 8:30pm local time (PST) felt like bedtime. I tucked myself into the lower birth with my iPod and just stared out the window at the full moon, playing hide-and-seek with the clouds and bending train, and let the silhouetted giant trees lull me into a relaxed state of mind.