Vancouver to Toronto on the Canadian train

It took four days to travel across Canada. On Tuesday, after arriving at the Pacific Central station we joined the queue to board. As I mentioned before, Canada is celebrating its 150th anniversary and, for the month of July, offered young people under 25 the opportunity to buy a ticket for $150 that could be used for one month to travel all over Canada's train network. As you can imagine the train was full, especially the economy end. When it was time to board we found seats in the middle of the carriage with no one behind us, and had a place to store our bags. We were supposed to depart at 8.30pm, but had a few technical problems as we left Vancouver and we reversed back along the line for repairs. Two hours later we finally departed.

We also had 'economy' tickets, which meant we were near the front of the train in airline style reclining seats. The 'posh' end was at the rear, they also had a glass viewing car as well as the viewing domes that we had, and a restaurant with fine dining. Our main luggage had been checked in to the baggage waggon so we only had our two day-packs and a small holdall we had bought from a thrift shop, as they call them here, to hold the clothes we would need for the trip. The tickets didn't include food, so we had bought a few snacks to tide us over during the day as we planned on eating our main meal in the buffet car. We had had a busy day as we had arrived in Vancouver earlier in the day and spent a fair amount of time walking around the City and couldn't resist visiting the Monet exhibition whilst we were there. We hoped as we were quite tired that we would be able to sleep, unfortunately it didn't happen as we both fidgeted about all night trying to get comfortable.

When dawn broke we were up eating our breakfast bars watching the sun rise over the mountains, a bit bleary eyed, but very excited and looking forward to seeing the Rockies. However at the moment British Columbia is suffering wild fires and the smoke from these fires has spread down across the country making it difficult to see the mountains in all their glory, we saw areas along the side of the tracks had been blackened by the fires the previous week. The most scenic part of the journey should have been around Jasper Park but this area was shrouded in smoke which was a shame. However the scenery alongside the train was very picturesque with many beautiful lakes. We arrived in Jasper at the end of the first full day and were able to spend an hour there and eat our evening meal as well as buy some rolls for lunch for the following two days. It was very busy with holiday makers enjoying the park in the lovely sunshine Canada is experiencing at the moment.

Back on board we settled down to a routine of eating, snoozing, reading and watching the world go by. Whilst we were looking out of the window, jokingly Chris said let's see if we can find a bear, jokingly he said there's one and I looked, then we both realised there was one! It was climbing a tree, a really big black bear, how amazing was that. Cue elk or moose next please?

Occasionally we would have updates from the train manager, who always made us laugh, he would start his announcement by singing the notes, do dooo do, just like the chimes at a station, then he would say, Hello train land! He had such a happy voice, it kept everyone on the train in a happy mood. There were no complaints about the delay and the young people especially were all very cheerful and enjoying the trip making new friends and spending most of the night chatting in the lounge area and sleeping until late morning. Surprisingly the washrooms remained very clean considering there were over 300 people using them. There was one at the end of each carriage, although no showers, we had lots of hot water. We also had free hot water to make tea, coffee or soup and at the end of each carriage was a cooled water dispenser.

The next two days followed the same pattern, although after Jasper the land flattened out and we rolled through Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manatoba, before finally arriving in Ontario, where the train weaved its way through the thousands of lakes to Toronto. By this time, Saturday, we were nine hours late, having to stop numerous times to let freight trains past, sometimes we were stationery for up to an hour. We were scheduled to arrive at 9.30 in the morning, however it was after 7pm before we left the station having to queue a long time for our luggage. We then took the underground and a short taxi ride to our hotel, which has wonderful giant beds where we slept like the dead. Four nights cat-napping had taken its toll!