We left Saskatchewan and entered into Manitoba. It's so dramatic, from flat fields to somewhat of a rolling landscape. Again, it’s amazing how diverse our country really is from east to west.

I knew that we left it too late. We should have showered a little earlier. With the extreme temperatures coming across the prairies, it seems that some of the showers (1 per sleeping car) have frozen up and are not working. It has also affected the flushing mechanism in the sleeper car bedrooms, so even after the steward had reset the system, they still didn’t flush consistently.

Given that we were scheduled to arrive into Sioux Lookout at 05:00 a.m. on Friday morning, I wanted to be awake if for nothing more than to walk the platform and take a few pictures for my mom. So at 4:30 a.m. today, I went on a search for a workable shower and luckily found one a couple of cars down.

Overall, I’ve had much worse showers that this one, so things went reasonable well, even more interior room than on some of the cruise ships we’ve been on. Once I got back to our cabin, Deb raced out the door headed for the same shower.

Still moist from the shower, we pulled into Sioux. For all you Sioux Lookoutians the station has been saved in a Heritage drive. It just had it’s grand reopening last weekend and it looks amazing. It’s completely renovated both inside and outside, it even has an elevator to take it to second floor shops and offices. It seems that VIA did not renew its contract for a lot of services in Sioux, so the total time stopped there has been reduced dramatically. One of the hotels on Front St, has event been converted into a brand new Cultural Center. According to some conversations that I had with a few of the locals, Sioux is now about 70% native so they’ve done whatever they can to accommodate here. Still it brought back so many memories of years gone by. It’s probably the last time in my life that I’ll make it back beyond our return trip next week. I think I should carve my initials in the washroom or something.

Back on the train. We’ve been traveling now for some 82 hours at the time I write this and we’re still about 10 or so hours away from Union Station. We are currently running about 2 to 3 hours behind schedule because of the freight trains. Freight trains are CN’s moneymaker and since the creation of VIA to handle the passenger traffic, VIA is just basically renting the rails and must give way to these massive freight trains. While it did happen when I rode the trains as a kid, this has gotten way out of control. It seems that we stop almost hourly waiting for the meet. The signal shows Yellow/Red – we move over to the spur and wait for the freight train to arrive. Some of these "meets" as the workers call them work very well, and then there’s ones that we end up waiting in excess of ½ hour for the train to arrive. One rumor here from one of the staff says that if a VIA train causes a delay to a FREIGHT train, there can be as much as $10,000 per minute penalty. So you know who must be the moneymaker.

As far as wildlife on this trip, it’s been somewhat limited – we’ve seen one deer, three Australians, two Americans, a couple from Quebec and that rare illusive couple from Beamsville. Most people are nice; they have their stories as do we and we compare notes over breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Today both lunch (Angus Burger) and dinner (Leg of Pork) were very nice and we even picked up a new address for Australia should we ever get there in the future.

We continue to head south towards Toronto with a planned arrival for 10:00ish. Looking forward to the four days in and around Toronto and then back on the westbound Canadian for the return trip home.

Tonight’s feature movie in our cabin was Eagle Eye with Shia LeBeouf – so it lights out and looking forward to seeing my little granddaughter Hannah shortly