Making stops along the way*: Saskatoon to Toronto

“Why are we here, again?” T. asked as we stood in the Saskatoon VIA Rail station. Our train was late, but not as late as we really needed to be if we were going to check into our Airbnb. The station is several kilometres out of town and, improbably, undergoing renovations, so it looked completely desolate. Improbably, because the only passenger train that passes through is the Canadian, eastbound and westbound, two or three times a week.

We were here for two reasons. I wanted to at least stop off and see something of every province I hadn’t yet visited, and Saskatoon is where the train stops in Saskatchewan. I was pleasantly surprised. Saskatoon is a place I knew next to nothing about before, and it is really nice! 

Our hostess said the train station was the worst possible introduction, but her neighborhood quickly set things right. Picture, if you will, leafy, tranquil streets like those in Oak Park, Illinois. Saskatoon was founded in 1883 by a temperance society, but you wouldn’t know it now. A mere few blocks away in Nutana there’s live blues every night, a local pub with daily specials and friendly people, a record store, two bakeries, a fair trade/organic outdoors shop, and at least two independent bookstores, one of which is the largest in Canada. Plus, there’s the South Saskatchewan River, which winds through town lined by a walking trail and crossed by a number of historic bridges.

What I like about Saskatoon is that it must be the only city named after a berry. Saskatoons grow everywhere along the banks of the Saskatchewan River, and they make a delicious fruit pie. Isn’t that great?

And in 1962 Saskatchewan was the first place in the world to introduce a universal health-care plan. Medicare, which soon went nationwide, is still administered by provinces and territories today.

So why don’t more people seem to know about this place? I began to get an inkling why more people don’t live here from reading a novel by Sharon Butala, which I found in the basement. Butala is a Saskatchewan writer whose characters refer to Saskatoon simply as “the city.” They are ranch folks, and there are scenes in November in which the temperature out on the prairie drops to -30 degrees C. Not counting the chill from the wind that whips across from the Arctic.

But while we were there in September, it was lovely fall weather, and we enjoyed walking the riverbank along the Meewasin Trail. Meewasin is Cree for "beautiful." And I'm sure some Canadians said "Good day" to me as I walked in Gabriel Dumont Park. It must be a Saskatchewan thing.

At Turning the Tide bookstore, also within walking distance, I had trouble choosing from among books about the U.S. right, what white people need to learn about racism, or LGBTQ issues. When I finally settled on a book light enough to carry with me, the bookseller offered me another copy for 40% off, purely because it had been on window display and the cover was faded. He didn't have to do that!

We could have done so much more in Saskatoon, but only had a few days. Another day I walked across the Broadway Bridge.
It features in the song "Cherokee Louise" by Joni Mitchell. Joni was born in Alberta, but Saskatoon is very proud of the start she got there. In the notes to her first record, Joni Mitchell credited an English teacher for inspiring her to write.

To the south of the Broadway Bridge I could see the Victoria Bridge (1907) and to the north, the Canadian Pacific Railroad Bridge, one year older.

Victoria Bridge

Historic posters like these also hang in the Jasper train station.

I stopped at the Ukrainian Museum of Canada. Eastern Europeans, especially Ukrainians, played a huge role in the development of the prairies once they became agricultural. Ukrainians were oppressed in their own country, ruled by Austria-Hungary, Poland, and Russia and conscripted into armies to which they felt no allegiance. They came through the Winnipeg train station and settled in this harsh environment, and made it work. They fought for bilingual education and other issues that affected all Canadians.

An exhibit I found particularly touching was a series of photographs of Orthodox churches that once stood all around these provinces. Most of the buildings no longer function as churches, if they remain at all.

Kuroki (Farm) Ukrainian Orthodox Church

At the Vinyl Exchange on Broadway, I was sorely tempted by the record collection. I surely would have bought something had I any way of carrying it until I got back to a record player. A poster on the wall advertised a great album by Saskatchewan's native daughter.

The Charlie Jacobson Band was playing at Blues on Broadway. There's something on there every night, even Monday. I really enjoyed it. There was even a farmers' market in Saskatoon and, while it was modest and mostly indoors, the yellow corn on the cob was the sweetest I'd ever had. One benefit of a northern climate!

Well, you may recall that our train into Saskatoon was several hours late, and I was fine with that. The station was bleak enough at 9:00 AM; we wouldn't have wanted to be there at 4:40, particularly with nowhere to go. But when I called VIA Rail the night before our departure to check on the progress of the Canadian, it was still scheduled to be on time the next morning. So, we showed up at 4:00 in the morning like we were supposed to.

It was just as well VIA Rail hadn't been able to reach me overnight (my phone number was in their system, but it can't cope with a foreign number, or so I was told). If they had, they'd have told me the Canadian was canceled because of a freight train derailment. As it was, we arrived at Saskatoon station having missed all that excitement, and were told that the train was coming after all, but had not long left Edmonton! So we settled down to wait. At least we hadn't been on the train all night, stuck and wondering if or how we were ever going to get on the move.

There is only one woman who works at the Saskatoon train station. She kept us updated (we were "the British passengers," indeed the only passengers there for some hours). She even offered to squeeze us into her car and take us to a Tim Hortons, which I thought was a nice Canadian touch. We decided to stay rather than have to get a taxi back at some point.

The remains of a phone

It's hard to describe how dead this station is. I had thought the Edmonton station was desolate and far out of town! In the women's room was an old Modess machine that charged 10 cents. Of course, it was "EM-TY."

The VIA Rail woman was deep into her book, but occasionally up for a chat. "It never fails," she said, "when trains have been on time I schedule an appointment for four hours after my shift, and sure enough the train is late!"

"So it's you," I said.

When the Canadian finally arrived (with free coffee, juice, and cookies set out for the inconvenienced passengers), we saw the woman again on the platform, whizzing our bags (the only checked baggage) on her little cart up to the baggage car. "'Bye ladies, enjoy the rest of your adventure!" she said. Well, why wouldn't she be cheerful? Imagine all the overtime she gets.

Saskatchewan is the world's largest producer of potash.

I couldn't look at the landscape of the prairies without trying to imagine it as it once was, covered with tall grass. Nowadays this food of the buffalo is rare, but for millennia the prairies in warm weather were wave upon wave of colorful wildflowers. There were millions of buffalo, and people who depended on them, and a way of life that had lasted for so long was almost wiped out in less than two decades of the nineteenth century. On the trains that built the West, the Winchester corporation used to hand out rifles to passengers, who would just lean out the windows and blow buffalo away. In all the annals of human waste, this is the story that way back in junior high school made me think that the word "savages" was used about the wrong people.

We did not shoot anything except photographs out the train window. For one thing, this is Canada.

Grain elevator

After the buffalo the Plains peoples were forced onto what Canada calls reserves. While the all-out massacres were not characteristic north of the 49th parallel, the people's way of life was still gone, and agriculture had arrived. During the next era of prairie life, colorful wooden grain elevators came to dot the prairie. The railway was lined with them, part of the "breadbasket of the world" industry, and each one represented its little community. Most that you will see today are concrete and generic. This era, like the one that preceded it, is vanishing.

We had two more days on the train, rolling into Winnipeg after midnight. We were not stopping over in Manitoba as we had later plans for that province, but did get off and check out Union Station, a grand central railway station that really should get more use. In its heyday Winnipeg's Union Station welcomed immigrants from Europe and, during the World Wars, shipped troops back.

Most of the stations we stopped at, though, were tiny. You can tell when a little old station is original because the station name is in all capital letters.

The historic Melville, Saskatchewan station (1898) is being restored.

It was darn cold in Winnipeg, so we were glad to get back on board. There were flurries outside the dome car, the kind a British passenger called "polystyrene snow." In the morning I saw big birds of prey swooping overhead, talons out.

We were in a third landscape by now, the boreal forest of northern Ontario. Lake after lake, the odd kayak, and leaves finally starting to shade to orange and red. St. Joseph Catholic Church like a tiny barn in the middle of nowhere.
And then we came to Longlac.

There was one older man who was always wandering around the train, repeating the same stories to everybody. He was probably just lonely but I lost track of whether former prime minister Jean Chrétien was responsible for CN being cruel to VIA Rail, or whether it was Bill Gates. Was just-in-time delivery the bad guy, or climate change? It was a welcome change when two railroad workers joined me and the men in the dome car. One was a very young man but the other had been working on the railroad since the age of 18. He was very enthusiastic about what T. and I are doing. "Come to Hornpayne!" he urged.

We did eventually stop in Hornpayne, Ontario to let them off, but first we had to offload the fishermen, or whatever they were. They had a lot of stuff like coolers to take off the train--hopefully not containing moose. 

Earlier in the train trip we'd had onboard entertainers who sang "Ring Of Fire" and "We'll Meet Again" in the bar car. The last night we had a Métis storyteller. The Métis, especially in western Canada, are a distinct people of mixed indigenous and European ancestry. They weren't placed on reserves, but like their First Nations brethren they suffered discrimination, the forbidding of their languages, etc. Only in the last generation or two has this finally changed.

The storyteller was armed with juggling balls and lots of stories about the fur trade. Unlike some other contacts with Europeans, the fur trade was more cooperative and led to a lot of French traders having families with First Nations women. Hence the Métis.

This man also, usefully, put to rest some myths. For example, although every part of the buffalo could be used for something, that doesn't mean that every part of every buffalo was used--there are only so many flyswatters that you need. And overtrapping and thus, the decline of some of the fur species was practiced by Cree as well as Europeans. Clearly, in the case of the buffalo indigenous people formed a relationship that was sustainable over an extremely long time. But we don't have to idealize them in some kind of "noble savage" way.  

The train was really rocketing while I slept that last night. By morning we were in Sudbury Junction, which means we'd clearly made up some time. My first job in Canada I worked for a woman from Sudbury, and she regarded Torontonians as wimps because Toronto's winter was so mild. Tennesseans regard Floridians as wimps for the same reason. I guess everyone in the northern hemisphere has some southerner to make fun of.

And so to the Canadian Shield. I'd seen deer bounding across the snow-kissed fields in Saskatchewan and two full days of the province of Ontario, but only now was it starting to look familiar.

I saw corn. I saw a black squirrel, that mysterious inhabitant of Canada that I have somehow never seen south of the U.S. border (how does it know?) I saw a GO train, a sure sign of the Toronto suburbs. Almost home.

*Gord Downie of The Tragically Hip, "Looking For A Place To Happen"

Coming home to a place she’d never been before*: Jasper and Banff National Parks

“Hey, petrol is cheap,” T. said when we pulled up at our first gas station in Canada. We were renting a car for our week in Alberta. Gently, I reminded her that although the price looked cheap for a gallon of gasoline, it’s sold in litres up here. Ouch!

You never know what you’re going to get with T. Sometimes she’s all “I’m a pensioner, where’s my discount?” Next thing, she’s ziplining or getting me to bike across the Golden Gate Bridge. And so it was that, at the Columbia Icefield between Jasper and Banff, she talked me into a guided “ice walk” on the Athabasca Glacier. 

I wasn’t sure I wanted to walk on the glacier. I pictured teetering along on solid ice, and as anyone who’s seen me try to skate would know, I don’t do ice. We were provided with mini-spikes to put on our boots—not crampons, but a rubber attachment with a mini version of metal spikes, for when we walked on the glacier. Apparently people who run and hike all winter use these. I was hooked.

The glacier from its "toe"

It was really walking on snow rather than ice. And although icewalks.com offers all sorts of layers you may not have brought with you, from rain pants to extra gloves, I found that once we were walking I quickly warmed up. The temperature was only around freezing and the snow was falling steadily, though lightly. Our guide, Forrest, said it was “a special day on the ice.”

It certainly was. Sometimes I couldn’t see anything but to follow the people in front of me in the path. We got to walk all around the glacier, safely avoiding crevasses, some fifty meters deep! (Or did he say 500?)

The features of the glacier are awesome, but like most glaciers it is receding, and may not be around in fifty years. Signs leading up to the lip of the glacier show where the ice reached to in recent decades. Our guide asked if anyone in the group had been born since 1982,

or since 2000. Stop it, Forrest, I thought from the back of the line. Some of us were born in the parking lot.

The ice walk was amazing, one of the highlights of my travels. C$100 for three hours turned out to be money very well spent (you obviously cannot walk the glacier without a guide, for safety reasons). On a sunny day it would be a very different experience, as you could look up and see the icefall. There were times when all we could see was white! Winter had come early, Albertans assured us. We knew this the morning we arrived in Jasper, when snow flurries greeted our arrival. 

There was some time between picking up our rental car and checking into our motel in Hinton, about an hour north of Jasper. So we took a leisurely drive part way down the Icefields Parkway, one of the highest and most scenic drives in the world. Unlike the Going-to-the-Sun Road, however, the Icefields Parkway (Alberta Highway 93 between Jasper and Banff) doesn’t wind around cliffs, but is pretty straightforward driving. It’s an extraordinarily good road, maintained, as we learned, by constant construction (in one spot or another) during the short summer.

On our first leg of the train journey we’d had a group of fourteen in our coach. I think they were from China (it’s a good guess wherever you travel these days), but couldn’t be certain what language they were speaking. In any case, it was amusing to find them following us wherever we went. Not just out of the train when we stopped at Kamloops, and they couldn't wait to stand by the tracks and smoke cigarettes (why else get out for “fresh air”?!) We saw them at the place we found breakfast, we saw them at stops along the parkway.

We even saw them at supper, when, through the unseasonable cold and snow, we went to get a steak and some Antler Ale. This was back in Hinton, where we were staying at the Pines Motel. I was pleasantly surprised by how nice the rooms were there: nice touches like a bathtub and underfloor heating! Sometimes a motel with a couch and microwave feels like one of life’s greatest pleasures—at least after hours of snowy walking on the glacier.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. It wasn’t snowing the day we hiked Maligne Canyon. This is a lovely walk across as many bridges as you care to cross (handily numbered First to Sixth) and along a ridge above the Maligne River.

The next day, we drove south from Hinton again to Maligne Lake, and hiked the first part of the Skyline Trail.

If you hike the whole trail, it takes you above the treeline (hence the name) and two or three days. We contented ourselves with an out-and-back to Lorraine and Mona Lakes. 

If you don’t see wild mammals between Hinton and Jasper, you are unfortunate indeed. Every time we rounded a bend there were elk or bighorn sheep grazing, or sometimes licking right in the middle of the road. It is their habitat and people defer to them.

Bighorn sheep

Young moose

The day we hiked from Maligne Lake, we saw a different type of animal crossing sign: caribou. Based on this warning, we are pretty sure that is what we saw a bit further down the road.

The caribou appears on the back of the quarter.

Caribou is another name for reindeer (in Alaska, typically, they’re eager to sell you sausage made out of this). I hadn’t know before that unlike other deer, both male and female caribou grow antlers. So all this time, Santa Claus’s team may have been coed. Just like a dogsled team.

We had several days in Jasper National Park, but we also wanted to visit its adjacent neighbour, Banff. Banff was the third national park in the world, and seems to provide slightly less for its visitors than Jasper. Maybe I was spoiled by facilities at every stop and trailhead in the northern park. At Lake Louise, one of the most visited national park sites in Canada, we struggled even to find a public washroom. They sure don’t want you to use the one in the Chateau Lake Louise. 

Mirror Lake

The lake itself, though, is postcard perfect. And Lake Louise is just the first of a series you can hike to—provided you are happy to walk relentlessly uphill. But it was a beautiful sunny day and the trail was only slippery in a few places. Armed with our hiking sticks, we reached alpine Mirror Lake and then our goal, Lake Agnes Teahouse.

Lake Agnes was not a letdown, but the teahouse sure was. To be fair, it was very busy, but there was nowhere to order; the signs instruct people to sit down and wait for someone to take their order. No one ever came. I mean no one ever even came out and acknowledged our presence, never mind took an order. And if you’re not going to hire more staff, teahouse folks, at least shovel the snow off the hundred steps to your washroom at the top of a steep hill. It was the only really slippery place on the whole trail. Don’t staff have to use it?

If you pack your own snacks, though, you’ll enjoy just sitting and having a look at Lake Agnes.

We were glad to get back down to Lake Louise. I think people canoeing on this picture-perfect lake may be the iconic Canadian image.

Back in the day, there were two rail companies that crossed Canada to the west. One, CN, we have already established built tracks on the northern route, via Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and Edmonton, Alberta. The original (whose equipment, funnily enough, VIA Rail uses today on the CN route) was Canadian Pacific. That railroad used the southern route via Regina and Calgary. In the old days travelers piled into Banff and its Springs Hotel from Royal Canadian Pacific trains. 

Nowadays, the only train that uses the Banff and Lake Louise stations is the Rocky Mountaineer, a pricy tourist train. Lake Louise station does house a restaurant though, and we had a look round. It’s one of Canada’s only remaining log railway stations. Even the bench out front seemed classically comfortable.

Dining car, old CP railroad

Between Lake Louise and Banff there are two highways. The Bow Valley Parkway is slower, but much more scenic. We took it a couple of times but did not see any wildlife. For that, you should drive north of Jasper, where we saw herds of something literally every time.

We stayed a couple of nights in Banff, in another HI hostel. This one was nice too, with a $7 lasagna special in the bar (and $3 shots). We were in a dorm for six, though, and this turned out to be a bit much. I am fairly certain we had a variety of religions represented in the room, which was not a problem, except whatever two young women's religion was they got up at the crack of arse to light candles. T. said they were putting plastic bags on top! I didn't know any of this; I just smelled something perfumey and wondered why anyone had plugged in an air freshener at 4:00 in the morning.

Not a bad view, though

Something else I've noticed the few times I've stayed in hostels is the packing habits of certain hosteling young women: Everything in their suitcases is wrapped in plastic. Not regular plastic bags, like we're destroying the oceans with, but the kind hard candy is wrapped in. Packing and unpacking, for these gals, involves hours of crumpling and uncrumpling--slowly, torturously, so as not to disturb others, I guess. Boy were we glad to get back to the Pines Motel, where the proprietor welcomed us back like old friends!

Now I know I've gotten a bit obsessive about this, but I was so happy to be wearing my fleece as a mid layer while we were hiking. It was cold and there was snow on the ground, but the sun was out and we worked up a sweat hiking uphill. Unlike cotton, the fleece kept me warm when we stopped, and dried out instead of giving me a chill. Wish I'd gotten this right on Kili summit night!

Speaking of layers, there was a lovely layer of snow on the ground when we woke up on our last day in Hinton. The snow was swirling outside, as it had been on our ice walk, but driving didn't seem dangerous. We found that we really liked Hinton and were most disappointed to find that the Canadian Steakout, our supper place of choice, isn't a chain and we couldn't find it anywhere else.

The Steakout was so good we went there twice (they don't serve only steak). I got a kick out of their menu, which flagged tiger shrimp pasta as "vegetarian." I guess in Alberta, if it isn't beef, it's veggie! The place was so popular we had to sit at the bar in front of three TVs. One was showing Canadian football, one a preseason Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game, and the third, for some reason, a religious channel. I found it a little distracting to lift my eyes from the bar and see teachings about leprosy or marriage guidance popping up next to Johnny Manziel. But the best thing about the Steakout was the wall decorations.

This is a jersey signed by the entire Canadian women's hockey
team that won gold at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. Between that and Randy Bachman's guitar (of bands The Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive), it was like the whole country was telling me "Welcome home."

Who knew we'd end up enjoying Hinton so much? We just thought it was a more affordable place to stay than Jasper. But the Canadian was coming through town again, so we had to return our car and catch the train. We got going early that morning because we'd seen forecast of snow accumulation.

It wasn't cold enough to make scraping the windshield difficult--good thing T. still had her key card from the ship to use. On the way to Jasper the road was rather dicey. We were following a minivan when we saw it slowly slide off the road in front of us. Fortunately, no one was driving fast and the van came to no harm in a snow bank, but the women inside were shaken up. I think they were Canadian, but they had no boots on, no winter coats, nothing. We and another driver stayed with them until we were sure their heat was working and a tow truck was on its way.

Our last glimpse of Hinton was from the train which, delayed by an hour or so, rolled back northeast to where we had just come from. By now the mountains just looked beautifully frosted and we were glad not to be on the road. I even spotted an elk from the window--there are so many in Jasper National Park I was spoiled for choice as to pictures.

Here's one I saw earlier.

*John Denver, "Rocky Mountain High"

Type 2 travel: across Canada by train

Somewhere on the second leg of our rail journey from Vancouver to Toronto, a young American woman came up to me in the observation car, where I was (perhaps unforgivably) looking at a book. I knew she was American because she asked “Traveling somewhere?” and went on to tell me a large part of the story of her life, which she was on the road to figure out. Before the rail part of her journey, she had literally been on the road, biking much of the Pacific Northwest coast. She explained to me that there is “type 1 fun,” when you have fun at the time and also have fun remembering the fun later. Type 2 fun, like her bicycle journey, is more about doing it at the time, knowing that the fun will come later, in remembering. I think her train trip, in which she was on the second of three days, was turning into type 2 fun for her.

There are also two types of travel. One is when you have to get to a wedding, a meeting, or are just eager to see your family again. That kind of travel is primarily about getting where you want to go. You don’t particularly care how you get there, but you do want the trip to be over as quickly as possible. This is how I feel about airplanes. They may be the fastest type of travel, but they’re not pleasant, and if I experience delays with a flight then the whole point of it is gone.

The other type of travel is primarily what we have been doing: road trips, slow boats, and now a cross-Canada rail journey. Let me be the first to emphasize that trains in Canada are not fast, and this one in particular is notorious for not running on time, for reasons I’ll mention. If you expect a high-speed train like in Europe, you will be disappointed. And if you want to get from, say, Jasper to Edmonton, Alberta in the least amount of time, you are better off driving even compared with the on-time schedule of the train.

The Canadian, as this classic train is known, is not about getting somewhere fast or on time. It is definitely type 2 travel, where the journey is at least as important as the destination. Enjoying the Canadian depends on your expectations. If, like me, you are eager to feast your eyes on the changing landscape of Canada out a train window, without worrying about when you’ll reach the next station, then you’ll enjoy the journey.

The Canadian appears on the back of the $10 bill.

VIA Rail, the passenger service of Canada, alerts passengers on its home page to the likelihood of delays. The reason is that VIA does not own the tracks; they are owned by Canadian National, which today is a freight company. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from neoliberal economics, it’s that free movement of goods is important, whereas free movement of people is to be restricted. That is what happens on CN’s tracks. A lot of times (though, as we discovered, not always), when a miles-long freight train is passing through, the passenger train just has to wait on a siding. 

Every blog post, article, and TV show extolling the Canadian will also tell you to expect significant delays. And that there is no WiFi and, given the remote country the train is passing through, often no phone signal either. If you don’t know this in advance, you may feel miserably stuck on the train. If, on the other hand, you want a 1950s experience in classic ’50s train cars, you’re like me and will be happy to put your phone away.

Restaurant car

I have been wanting to cross Canada by train since I immigrated here in the year 2000. Back then, a sleeping compartment or berth on the Canadian cost between four and five hundred dollars, which was too much. As a result, I never did it. Today an economy class ticket (i.e., a reclining seat) costs that much. Guess how we’re traveling?

All those posts, articles, and shows I mentioned are also from the perspective of sleeper class. They make it sound like a cruise on rails: gourmet dinners, an attendant making up your berth, no doubt with a bilingual chocolate on the pillow. And maybe in sleeper class it is like that. But our cruise is over, and no one ever seems to blog about their trip on the Canadian in a seat, though that is how most people must travel (the sleeper tickets were sold out months in advance). So here I am, back online, to tell you what it’s like to cross five provinces and 4,467 km eastbound on VIA Rail #2. Here are my top tips:

1. As VIA Rail states, do not book onward travel or anything time-dependent on the day of arrival. Build an extra day into your schedule so you don’t stress. If you don’t have that kind of time or just want to get there, this is not the trip for you.
2. Get up in the dome car and enjoy the all-around views. Almost the whole route is scenic, and there’s no better way to appreciate the vastness and variety of the Canadian landscape.

   

   Fraser Valley, BC

3. Before you go, pack or download plenty of tunes if you like to listen to those, or books so you’ll have something to read. I didn’t end up reading much, but I did listen to my new Buffy Sainte-Marie albums and a lot of The Tragically Hip. k.d. lang kept popping up on the iPod, too.
4. The food on the Canadian, even in economy where it’s not included, is really good. I don’t know how s/he does it in a tiny galley, but there is a chef who cooks meals fresh to order. There is also a surprising selection of beer and wine, all domestic bien sûr.

Nonetheless, we packed plenty of snacks and took sandwiches, etc., especially for our third and longest leg between Saskatchewan and Ontario. The food is good value for money, but you will not want to depend on buying it all the time, and some of the stations have basically nothing to offer no matter what time you pass through them.

5. Let the WiFi go. Do you know the attention my guidebook attracted, with its paper maps and things I could look up, or had planned in advance? A frustrated guy who was getting to Edmonton later than expected took a picture of my map (with his useless phone, naturally). Other passengers spent short breaks in train stations trying frantically to get WiFi, which was often not good. They reminded me of one of my teammates on Kilimanjaro who seemed to spend the whole trek trying to get a phone signal. He even photobombed another hiker’s summit picture, holding his phone up to the sky. I know he missed his family, but did he not tell his wife he was going to climb a mountain?

Rear view from the dome car

I did actually turn my phone on at one point during each leg of our journey: to show my ticket. We hadn’t gotten around to finding a printer, so I had the e-mails on my old BlackBerry, the phone I barely use but which is not cool enough for anybody to steal. Remember how cell phones originally started out as huge bricks, then became smaller and smaller, and are now giant again? “I miss those little BlackBerrys,” the conductor said—but note, she could scan my ticket fine on the small screen. Here’s tip #6 for free: Don’t update or upgrade anything as long as the old thing works. Saves SO much money.

Oh, and #7. Take a comfortable change of clothes on the overnight train. An alternate pair of sandals or shoes you can slip on and off is great (you can’t walk around the train without shoes for safety reasons). Also, layers! Have a sweatshirt or something to slip on for extra warmth, because the temperature varies from car to car. Have another fleece or something to use as a pillow. Basically, carry on whatever you need to be comfortable on the train, as well as if you get off the train at stops (Canada can be cold).

Front view from dome car

Does this sound like hard work? Why have I been dreaming about this journey longer than any other adventure we’ve been on in the past two (or for me, 18) years? I love Canada. Falling in love is not rational and, unlike what I believed growing up, loving a country does not mean believing it’s objectively superior to all other countries. It is just the way that I feel. Loving a country other than the one I was born in is not like bigamy; it is more, as Chaim Potok put it, like loving both a mother and a father. I became a landed immigrant and threw myself into my new country, and it was a success. I love snow, classic Canadian rock, even hockey. I love the way people talk and the fact that they don’t, always. Even some of the annoying things are endearing to me. That is love.

So I didn’t just want to see the west of Canada, which I'd never gotten around to before. I wanted to stop along the way and explore it. One, because it would have been a shame to ride through, for example, the Canadian Rockies without taking time to go out and see them. And two, because the train is scheduled to take five days between Vancouver and Toronto. Although we were prepared to spend four nights on a train, we did not want to spend four in a row!

Rocky Mountains, BC/Alberta border

I’ve spent nights on trains several times before. It used to be possible to get a sleeper train from Toronto to Montréal, and T. and I also traveled to Montréal aboard the Ocean, VIA Rail’s overnight train that rolls from Halifax, Nova Scotia through New Brunswick and Québec. From those journeys and our berths on a Thai train, I did not remember sleeping on a train being significantly more comfortable lying down than in a reclining seat. I kept waking up anyway, and the seats on trains are far more comfortable and roomy than on a bus (which, in turn, is much better than a plane). So I was happy to book seats in economy, again, with the expectation that we could be hours late getting into our first stop, Jasper.

We stopped off for a week in Jasper and that deserves a post of its own. We spread the five-day train journey over two weeks. Just to say here, it was a good way to do the trip. There were people on each train who were going all the way through but I think it would have had diminishing returns, at least in economy class.

Oil derrick, Alberta

I do recommend economy, though, if you want to see a different side of Canada. There’s a whole other Canada beyond the cities, obviously, and you not only see it from the train windows, but you can meet it, too. I had supposed the Canadian was largely a tourist train but that’s probably only true of sleeper class. Canadians joined our train along the way, from a university kid who regularly takes the train to Winnipeg, to a hunting party and a couple of railroad workers who took over the dome car in Ontario for a while. Talking to them was interesting. They’re from Ontario, yet a thousand kilometers from anywhere I’d been. Toronto, for them, was an overnight trip.

So take the Canadian, but take it slowly and in stages. It crosses five provinces and four time zones, with four distinct landscapes. Eastbound, from following the Fraser River in British Columbia to the mountainous border with Alberta, the tracks wind through the prairies by the second day. On the third morning you’ll reach the boreal forest of northwest Ontario, and by the last day you’ll wake up on the Canadian Shield, a billion-year-old expanse of exposed bedrock that covers much of North America, from the Great Lakes to Hudson Bay.

Train distances still use miles, from the original mileposts.

We planned a week in Jasper, getting off the train one Saturday and leaving the next. Wouldn’t you know, we were early! The train from Vancouver didn’t seem to experience any freight-related delays at all. I woke up on Saturday morning, looked out the window (it wasn’t very light yet), and saw that were arriving in a town. I don’t know what there was to see just west of Jasper, because we were already there.

And that’s my 8th tip, for the train journey if not for life. Sometimes, surprises are pleasant ones. Sometimes you’re all prepared to take your time and be comfortable, and you wake up already in the Rockies. So be prepared for your expectations to be exceeded too. Alberta certainly exceeded mine.

Spoiler alert: After all the adventures on this and the two subsequent legs of our train journey, let it be known that the Canadian arrived into Toronto only 42 minutes behind schedule. "Not too bad," as they say around here.