Today is Monday August 23, 1999.

Day Ten: We left Banff at 7:40 AM Sunday on a Brewster Bus to take us to Jasper. I sort of thought of this as a bus ride with a stop at the the Columbia Ice Fields for lunch and a tour, but boy was I wrong. From the moment we left the Banff Springs Hotel our driver, Peter Archer, was telling us the lore of the mountain travelers. His commentary was worth the price of the ride all by itself. He has a nice easy style and a pleasant English accent that made us feel comfortable listening to his narrative. We traveled the Canadian Rockies with the Indians, the fur traders, the railroad men and finally with the adventurers. We were mountain travelers too, but in the comfort of our luxury tour bus we need not fret about the wilderness, just sit there and enjoy the ride and the stories. We made lots of stops to take pictures and to check out the views up close and personal. We stopped at Lake Louise to board more passengers and to visit the deli for a light breakfast. Our stop at the Columbia Ice Fields included a nice lunch and a ride up onto the Athabasca glacier itself. We arrived at Jasper in the early evening hours, and after a quick stop in town (at the bus & train station) we arrived at Jasper Park Lodge, our third Canadian Pacific Hotel on our trip. We checked in only to find we gave the wrong voucher to the Snowcoach tour guide, but that was no problem: we were checked in (and, in fact, our room was upgraded as well). We were given a cabin overlooking the lake about 100 yards from the main buildings. This "cabin" (and I use the term lightly) is bigger than Mary's apartment in SF was. Two beds and a sleeper sofa, refrigerator, bar, large closet and a bath down the hall rounded out the room---Oh, I forgot to mention the living room, with a sofa (sleeper) and a table and chairs. The restaurant was nice: good food, and a great view of the lake too. The pool was warm (well, at least  it was heated: "warm" might be a bit of an overstatement) and the hot tub was nice and hot. Tomorrow I'll walk around the lake and check out the views.

Day Eleven: I awoke early even though this was to be a sleep-in day. The sun was just rising and the colour of the lakes was stunning: an emerald green, with the clearest water I've seen in a lake since Lake Tahoe. I explored lake edge while Mary showered and packed up for today's train ride. It seemed like 12:30 came too soon and we had to leave Lac Beauvert and the Jasper Park Lodge behind.  This is a place we will most likely revisit on a future trip to Canada: it is too much to see and absorb in less than a day. We arrived at the VIA rail station at 1 PM for a 2:05 scheduled departure. The place was mobbed, as this was the bus, train and rental car station for the townsite of Jasper. After exchanging our voucher for a train ticket, Mary headed to the CAA office for some local maps. The train was running late and the police were all over the platform (we found out later that a gun had been found on board and the police were there to apprehend the owner). There was a lot of confusion on the platform when our train finally arrived. I looked for our car number and found it...only to be told that the numbers were to be changed here and our car was somewhere else. Then we were told that a few cars were to be removed from the train (they actually added one car). When we tried to board, we were too late as switching had begun and we had to wait until it was over to board. Finally Eric, our car attendant, opened the vestibule and lowered the steps to our car. We boarded and soon we were getting used to our new accommodations. We have room D on a car named Macdonald Manor, one of fifteen sleepers on our train (#2) to Toronto. After a familiarization with our compartment and an introduction to Eric, we met the dining car chief, who offered us the choice of "5:00, 5:00 or 5:00" for dinner in the diner/dome car just one car ahead of us in the train (the 7:00 seating was already filled up by the time he got to us). We took the five o'clock seating. We sat in the dome car, with hors d'oeuvres for about an hour before dinner was served. Dinner was nice; we ate with a couple from New York state.  The food was very well prepared and tasted good.  I had buffalo pot roast and Mary had maple chicken. After dinner I walked down to the 'Park' car at the end of the train. It is a round end dome/lounge car. They had snacks and drinks available and service in the dome, the lounge or downstairs in the smoking section. It was too smoky for me so I just checked it out and left for our car. We watched trains and countryside roll by till about ten PM when we let Eric make up the room for sleeping. This is a fifty? year old car rebuilt several times and it functions quite well. The beds were comfortable, with more headroom than an AMTRAK Superliner. After tucking Mary into her upper bunk I quickly fell asleep myself.

Day Twelve: It was three thirty-five in the morning when the train suddenly went into an emergency brake application, Mary was glad there was a net to keep her from hitting the floor. On the radio I heard the engineer tell the Saskatoon Yard operator that he had made an emergency application to avoid some drunk kids on the bridge over the river who were playing chicken with our train. He was obviously (and rightfully) upset by their actions and asked the operator to call the CN police. They were apparently too busy, since they had already been summoned previously to this location earlier by a passing freight train.  It took almost twenty-five minutes for the air to be pumped up and for us to be on our way. The CN police had not arrived by the time we left the scene. The engineer stated that one of the kids was between the rails and a companion had pulled him away seconds before he was to be hit by the train. Not a pleasant thought. I slept till eight o'clock this morning: when we awoke they were making second call for breakfast, so we dressed and made our way to the dining car for our second VIA meal. The pancakes were good and the bacon was crisp. We spent the next two hours in the lounge car, visiting with other passengers. When we returned to our sleeper, Eric was getting ready to remake the beds and return the room to the "day time" configuration. Mary went down the hall to shower, while I visited with Eric as he worked. He brought us a table for our room, on which I set up the computer to enter this missive. When we arrived in Winnipeg, Eric left and Scott became our new car attendant. (The entire train service crew changes at this point: tomorrow our old crew will return to Vancouver on Train #1.)  Eric told us that if they had left on Friday, they would only have two hours in Winnipeg before returning on train #1 to Vancouver. That does not sound like fun to me. In Winnipeg we added more cars to the train, which caused another delay of thirty minutes. The train was too long to service at one stop so we had to wait some more: in all we were in Winnipeg two hours for a one-hour stop. Now we're on the move again and the next crew has been introduced.  The dining car steward again offered us a choice of "five-thirty, five-thirty or five-thirty" for dinner (she promised us that tomorrow we will have a real choice). Dinner again was very good and the company was fun to talk to and learn about. We have yet to dine with a Canadian or Canadien (as on the freight cars). The scenery has changed again by the time dinner is over: no more prairie, but a lot of small lakes and hills and evergreen and aspen type trees. The sky has a few clouds, just enough to break up the monotony of blue, and we notice it is warm when we travel between the air-conditioned cars. After dinner we spent about an hour or so in the dome car, watching the scenery roll by. As darkness settled in on us, we were traveling past a long string of lakes with very little signs of inhabitants. A lake this picturesque at home would be dotted with cabins or covered with boats. We are really in the wilderness way out here. When we returned to the room, the beds were made up and we were soon asleep for the night.

Day Thirteen: The prairie is long gone and we are traveling in some interesting country, with no people to be seen except railroad workers. We see very few towns along the way: even the whistle stops seem like they are uninhabited. We are in the land of trees and swamps now, lots of dead trees, some forested lands, but lots of brownish waterways. We stopped this morning to change crews and service the train at Hornepayne. First we fueled the engines, then moved to the 'station' to change crews and water the cars. Our train is so long that two stops are required to add water. One interesting feature during this trip has been the ever-present telegraph poles and wires. Sometimes there are lots of wires and some times none. We were told that they are completely unused, but they still connect to some line-side signals, so I wonder. We were also told that it would cost $500 each to remove the poles and wires, so they will stay until they rot and return to mother nature. I've seen a large number of pulpwood cars and their loading facilities, usually just a track 100 meters or so away from the main line. During part of the trip today I noticed a large area with a lot of damaged trees, all blown down in the same direction, must have been quite a wind to do that much damage. Some were all the way over some broken half way up the trunk, both conifers and deciduous trees were damaged. Just during dinner we entered another area of lakes along side the tracks, though these had some population around them, and  few boats tied up along the shorelines. This is all single track territory with a lot of passing sidings. I added all the frequencies that I had, but somehow missed the dispatcher to train crew when I programmed the scanner, so the radio is pretty silent. I hear the engineer once and awhile and sometimes a trackside detector. We haven't met or passed too many trains in the last two days, only about five or six. It seemed like we met more on the CP portion out of Vancouver than here on the CN. [Hours later] Of course now that I've written that we have waited on sidings for about three trains. We are running about three hours late and will probably be in Toronto after midnight, maybe we can delay our departure an hour or two tomorrow so we can get some sleep in the Hotel York. We ate our last dinner (a six- thirty seating at seven o'clock) on a VIA train: first course was a clam chowder, followed by a dinner salad with cranberry vinaigrette then a tasty pork roast, rice with lentils and vegetables.  Of course this was topped off with apple pie and ice cream and coffee. I'm back in the room to end the days writing, I hope to post this to the website before leaving for Montreal. I will take long walks in Montreal, the train was too difficult to navigate safely, and also too smoky as well. Most of our station stops were only planned for fifteen minutes, even though they never took less than thirty, they boarded the train after ten or so so a person couldn't get very far outside.