Pacific Central Station in Vancouver, British Columbia
Pacific Central Station in Vancouver, British Columbia
Twenty-one years ago my brother Steve and I took a road trip across Canada. Our ultimate destination was Vancouver, which was hosting a world’s fair called Expo 86 that year. We had a great time at the fair and saw a lot of fascinating sites all over western Canada. However, while we spent a lot of time there, we saw almost nothing of Vancouver itself. It seemed like a pleasant city, though, and I’ve always wanted to go back and check the place out in more detail. This year I decided to take the train out west during the week between Christmas and New Year’s and pay a longer visit to Canada’s western metropolis.
The city I visited this year was quite a bit different than the one that held the world’s fair two decades ago. The city fathers wanted Expo to be Vancouver’s debut as a truly global city, and it seems to have had that effect. 21st Century Vancouver looks and feels more like New York or Tokyo than Seattle or Portland. It’s a city of soaring towers and a fast-paced, edgy lifestyle. I don’t know that Vancouver is a place I’d particularly care to live, but it was a fascinating place to visit and made for a nice getaway.
Friday the 21st was a very foggy day, so almost the second school dismissed at 2:15 I dashed out to my car and headed out on my way. It’s a fair hike from Algona to my sister Margaret’s house near Decorah, and I wanted to do as much of that trip as I could in daylight. I made it as far as New Hampton before it started getting dark. It was also right at freezing at that point, and from there on the roads were just a bit on the slippery side. I managed to make it all right, though, arriving well before Margaret had expected me.
Margaret’s big news this fall is a sunroom she has built onto the front of her home. She has completely re-built (and downsized) the old deck, which was rapidly falling down on its own, and the new sunroom extends out from what was built as (but never actually served as) the main door to her living room. It’s a small room, but being mostly glass it comes across as remarkably spacious. She had a tree set up in there for the holidays, and it was really quite lovely.
* * * * *
I’d see a lot of Margaret’s house over the next few days, definitely more than I’d intended. We essentially got snowed in as northeast Iowa was buried in sixteen inches of snow, with sheet ice covering the roads south of there. It was a pretty snow, like the kind they make with painted corn flakes on a TV Christmas special. It was especially pretty (and felt kind of strange) when we sat in the sunroom and could see the snow falling below us.
* * * * *
When we heard travel was not recommended anywhere in eastern Iowa (and many roads were literally closed) we decided to wait another day before attempting to go down to John and Janet’s, where we’d have our family Christmas. We filled a lot of the extra time by making cookies and candy, both from old stand-by recipes and ones no one in the family had ever tried before. In the latter category were some bars with a shortbread base, topped with pecans and soaked in a honey-based caramel sauce. They were simply out of this world. Somewhat less successful was our attempt to duplicate the “snow candy” that Laura Ingalls Wilder made in the Little House in the Big Woods. The idea of making hard candy by boiling molasses into a syrup and pouring it over snow seemed straight-forward enough. Unfortunately the melting snow added additional water, and that kept the candy from setting up right. The flavor was okay, but the consistency was somewhere between taffy and slime.
I also spent a lot of the time at Margaret’s reading. I read through a variety of holiday books she had (like the Christmas book from the Little Golden Books series that our Grandma Fishel had given Margaret back in the early ‘50s). I also read through a lot of planning materials for the trip I was about to take. I’d printed out reams of material (literally) from various websites, but I hadn’t had time to sift through any of it. One advantage of the snow was that it gave me a chance to look through things.
On Monday the two of us went down to John’s together in Margaret’s car, which is four-wheel drive. We probably could have made it driving separately, but after seeing literally dozens of cars in the ditches along highway 20, I was just as glad I wasn’t driving my own vehicle. Margaret and I arrived at John’s at exactly the same time as my brother Paul and his family. Janet had made delicious soups for dinner, and we spent the afternoon talking and getting re-acquainted with one another.
John and Janet live across the street from Maquoketa’s Methodist church, and it seemed as convenient to go there as anywhere for Christmas Eve services. In retrospect, I think all of us would have rather gone almost anywhere else. My niece Rachel said they needed to decide whether they wanted to do a modern service or a traditional service, and she’s certainly right. There were elements of both, but neither was done well. The service was simply dreadful. This is one of those churches where they don’t use hymnals, but instead project the words (but not the music) to the hymns on a screen via a PowerPoint presentation. They also projected many (but not all) of the other elements of the service, and everything in the church was oriented so it faced the screen, rather than the altar. Our family took to joking about “the sacred screen”, and indeed it did seem more important to the congregants than anything else in the church.
We even saw part of a movie on the sacred screen. Part of the sermon involved an anecdote from the A Christmas Story, the movie where an annoying little kid wants a BB gun for Christmas. After telling us pretty much the entire plot of the movie, the minister showed a portion that he had downloaded on the computer (which almost certainly violated copyright, but no one seemed to care). Since we’d pretty much been watching the screen the whole time, there really wasn’t much difference when it switched to a movie.
What bothered me most about this service was that it really didn’t strike me as “worship”. Indeed, there was almost nothing in the entire service you could even pretend to call a prayer. They read from the Bible, sang some hymns, and had an endless children’s message, but we never got around to praying. Nor did the minister ever imply that Christmas should mean anything special to us or that we should change our lives in any way because of Christ. I’d expect at least a little bit of the peace and goodwill message at the holidays, but there was none of that. Unfortunately, that’s a problem I see with far too much of modern religion. People want their religion to make them feel good, but they don’t seem to want to have to behave in a Christian manner.
Christmas Day was quite a bit more enjoyable than Christmas Eve. We opened presents, had a delicious dinner, and spent most of the day just sitting around visiting. ... One of our most interesting diversions on Christmas was “musical crackers”. For quite a few years our family has enjoyed pulling British crackers at the holidays, and we had three different sets of them this year. This year Margaret had gotten a set of crackers whose “prizes” were little whistles tuned to the notes of an octave. The whistles were numbered, and they had “music” for Christmas carols that consisted of series of numbers for the whistles playing in sequence. We had great fun with the toys, and a couple of the songs didn’t even sound all that bad.
The group of us teachers spent the morning of the 26th sitting around John’s family room “talking shop”. Late in the morning we made our way up to Dubuque, where we joined Janet for lunch at a nice little place called Annie’s Lil’ Bites. The place is apparently owned by a Mormon family, and while the food was good, it was strange to see a mostly historic décor complemented by advertising for Mitt Romney. (Inside my coat I had a Barack Obama button, but I restrained myself from putting it on in the place.)
Margaret and I stopped at Hy-Vee in Dubuque to buy gas. We then made our way out of town and back up to her place. That’s when my trip really began.
I quickly transferred my stuff from Margaret’s Tracker to my Metro. I almost had a false start leaving Margaret’s, though. There had been a bit more snow since we’d left, which had not been cleared from the drive. The base of the driveway was solid ice, and I slid badly on it as I attempted to back out and turn around. Margaret’s old car was parked at the edge of the drive, and I nearly hit it as I pulled out.
I did manage to make it to the road, but that was just the beginning. Margaret lives at the bottom of a very steep gravel road, one that had not been plowed since the most recent snowfall. It’s not easy to get up that road in good weather, and winters on that road are the reason Margaret has a four-wheel drive vehicle. I shifted into first, gunned the engine, and managed to get a good start. Unfortunately I had to stop again partway up the hill. There was a pick-up stuck there, blocking the road. The truck belonged to the pastor of Glenville Church, a Lutheran parish just a couple miles away on the main road. The minister had been visiting one of Margaret’s neighbors, and he got stuck on the way out. He asked me to get into the truck, shift it into low, and gun the engine while he pushed. It was a struggle, but we managed to get the truck up to the top of the hill. I said a little prayer and got my car up there, too. The rest of the gravel is mostly downhill, and while it was slippery, going slowly in low gear I made it through all right.
Once I got to pavement (Old Stage Road), I made fairly good time, though there were still some slick spots in places where trees blocked the road from wind. I made my way over to Waukon, where I stopped for a car wash and to use the restroom. From Waukon I followed highway 9 east to Lansing, where I turned and went up highway 86 to New Albin. I’m not sure when the last time I was in New Albin was. The only time I distinctly remember was twenty-five years ago, when [two college friends of mine] were married. [The two] have been divorced longer than they were married, and it’s been years since I even thought about that wedding. I’m not sure I’d recognize either of my old friends today. ...
The roads got a bit more slippery as I entered Minnesota—still nothing dangerous, but “greasy” with fresh ice that I needed to be careful on the curves. I made my way up to Winona, where I stopped to buy gas at Dino Mart, a Sinclair convenience store that had gasohol for $2.899. I still had quite a bit of time to kill, so I had dinner at a Perkins in Winona. Perkins is a 24-hour breakfast place, and it was actually the breakfast menu I ordered from. The service was slow, but the ham and eggs with rye toast were really quite good. The meal was supposed to come with hash browns, not that I really needed them. They forgot to bring them, though, and when I complained I got a substantial discount on my meal. Since I wasn’t exactly rolling in money for this trip, that was definitely a good way to start things.
I stopped at a Walgreen’s store to buy some snacks (specifically Swedish ginger cookies and garlic and herb flavored “Pretzel Flatz”) that I’d eat on the train. I also picked up some scissors and a comb. I’d just bought another pocket comb, but it got lost somewhere in my car. Fortunately at 49¢ another would hardly break me.
I thought I remembered exactly how to get to the Winona station. However I made a couple of wrong turns and ended up right back at the Walgreen’s I’d just left. I spent about fifteen minutes wandering around Winona, never once finding a sign that said “Amtrak”. Eventually I did find the station, though, and I still had plenty of time before the train would arrive.
Winona is where they switch train crews for the Empire Builder, so the station is full of crewmen. There’s only one person who deals with customers, though, and he was extremely overworked this evening. The man managed to check me in, and he also sold me a ticket for a future trip I’ll be making in the spring. (That one will be a much shorter trip, from Winona to Milwaukee.) The man noted that the computer said the train was due in on time. However, since it hadn’t yet checked in at the Wisconsin Dells, he said that was likely not actually the case.
I called Margaret and then settled into one of the old fashioned wooden benches in the station. I started reading through Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and watched the attendant check in numerous other people. Most notable was an elderly woman in a wheelchair. Amtrak trains are not really handicap accessible, but they did their best to accommodate her. The man explained that they’d take the woman out to the platform in an electric cart and then he and the car attendant would lift her into the sleeping car she’d be riding in to her destination. That destination happened to be Minot, North Dakota. I’m not sure why, but a lot of people seem to travel between Winona and Minot; for two irrelevant cities they carry a surprising amount of traffic.
Since Winona is where the new train crew originates, the new conductor was in the station. Around 7:30 he took tickets and passed out seat tags to all the passengers. We learned the train was in LaCrosse at that point, and that it should be arriving in Winona at 8:09—twenty minutes late. Around 8:00 the station attendant pushed the handicapped woman out to his cart, and at 8:05 the conductor marched the rest of us out to the platform. The train did arrive precisely when announced, and the conductor directed us to two different coaches, both of them in the front section of the train (the part bound for Seattle, as opposed to Portland).
This was a full train. There were no more than a handful of empty seats in the car I was directed to, all of them singletons next to occupied seats. I’m pretty sure those of us assigned to this car filled up literally every seat available, both upstairs and down. I found a seat on the aisle near the middle of the car, just in front of the steps that lead down to track level. My seatmate was a woman who lived in the Chicago suburbs but was originally from North Dakota. She was headed to Minot, so we’d be spending the night side by side. While the woman was not unpleasant, she and I said almost nothing to each other the entire trip.
We left Winona at 8:20, one of numerous needlessly lengthy stops the train would make on its way westward. I spent much of the first leg of the trip reading the local newspaper. The big news in southeast Minnesota was about drinking problems at Winona State University. Apparently WSU is one of the top ten schools nationwide for binge drinking. I was intrigued that the article mentioned a concept Margaret and I had seen on a TV news report during the snowstorm. The term was “pre-partying”. Apparently it’s a fairly common practice among college students to get “a nice buzz going” before they head out for a night of drinking with their friends. Needless to say, when they get drunk before they even “officially” start their evening, they end up consuming more and run into more alcohol-related problems. Students apparently also call this “pre-game”, to distinguish it from the “main event” of an evening of drinking. It’s not like it’s really anything new; I remember people doing precisely that when I was in school—with similar results and consequences. I gather it may be more common now than it used to be, though.
We arrived in Red Wing at 9:15. A family of four that was seated in two rows across the aisle exited there. The car attendant warned, though, that no one should change seats, as every single seat would be needed for passengers boarding at Minneapolis. When possible Amtrak tries to reserve pairs of seats for couples traveling together, which certainly makes sense.
They pad the Amtrak schedule at various points, and that padding allowed us to get into Minneapolis (the station is actually just off University Avenue in St. Paul) essentially on time. The previously empty seats were filled by a group of twenty-something black people who were extremely loud and somewhat vulgar. They kept talking and laughing until well after midnight, which made it more than a bit of a challenge to sleep.
It’s not exactly easy to sleep on a train in any event—particularly when you’re on the aisle and you have a seatmate you don’t know and are trying to avoid disturbing. I found the most comfortable position was with the seat upright and my head down on my knees. When the seat attendant passed out pillows, she thought I was in that position because I wasn’t feeling well. She got overly concerned about me and really seemed quite upset that I hadn’t reclined the seat fully. I can’t say my position was terribly comfortable, but it wouldn’t have been particularly different with the seat back, and in that position I’d have been constantly worried about bumping into my seatmate. This way she and I were on separate levels, where we were less likely to disturb one another. I tossed and turned all night, awakening whenever there was a stop and often when there wasn’t. I did manage to get at least a bit of rest, though.
We got back behind schedule overnight and were quite a bit behind by the time we got to Grand Forks. Just past there, around 7am I declared it morning. It was still very dark, but I decided it was pointless to attempt to sleep any more. The sun didn’t really start coming up until 8:15, when we were near Rugby, North Dakota, and it was not truly light until 9:00. Being both at the western end of the time zone and further north, day really does come very late here.
I had intended to listen to audiobooks while I was traveling. I had packed enough books on tape to occupy hours on the train, and I had purchased a Walkman personal tape player with headphones so I could listen without disturbing others. It may seem odd, but I’ve never owned such a thing. When they first came out (roughly when I was in college), they struck me as horribly overpriced. I’ve also never much cared for headphones. They’re uncomfortable, and they seem to isolate listeners from what’s around them. Price is no longer an issue now that tape players have all but been replaced by I-pods and the like. Even the Sony name brand was well under $20. So I figured I’d give it a try, as listening to books had to be a reasonable way to pass the time.
Unfortunately, while I had the audiobooks and the Walkman with me, I’d forgotten to pack the headphones. So I’d have to entertain myself with more traditional diversions. Mostly I read. I finished A Christmas Carol and then read the book Dove. Dove is an autobiographical account by Robin Lee Graham. If you’re my age or older you may remember reading about Graham in the National Geographic. Back in the ‘60s he became the youngest person ever to sail around the world alone. It would probably be illegal for him to attempt such a trip today, and his parents would probably be arrested for letting him try it. In the ‘60s it was a great adventure, though, and his account of it made an interesting read. (I found out later the book is manly recommended to middle school boys. Its vocabulary is certainly less challenging than Dickens, but I’m not too embarrassed to say it interested someone several times the age of its recommended audience.)
I had packed eighteen bottles of fruit juice (some orange, some apple, and some “mixed fruit” that was all juice but tasted like Hi-C fruit punch. I’d periodically drink some of that and nibble on the cookies and pretzel snacks I’d bought at Walgreen’s. The snacks were much cheaper than food would have been in either the diner or the lounge. The lounge had orange and cranberry juice available. The bottles were slightly larger than the one’s I’d brought along, but they should have been at $2.75 each. I’d gotten packs of six for just $3.29 at K-Mart. Pretty much everything else in the lounge was similarly overpriced. The only thing I actually bought there on the way out was coffee. At $1.75 it was no bargain either, but being a long-time caffeine addict, it was more or less a necessity.
The coffee Amtrak served was supposedly from Green Mountain Roasters and boasted that it was certified organic (one of the more meaningless terms in the food industry) and “one of the world’s best coffees”. It wasn’t terrible, but they made it too weak. I actually preferred some coffee I picked up from a vending machine in the station in Minot. For 90¢ I got more coffee, and it was strong enough to have flavor. I also bought a couple of newspapers in Minot, and reading them from cover to cover also helped to pass the time.
I traded seatmates at Minot. The woman from Chicago left, and I moved over to the window seat. The aisle seat was soon taken by a mother whose two girls were on the other side of the aisle. They were just taking a short trip over to Williston. They’d apparently been to Minot on a shopping trip, spending gift cards the girls had gotten for Christmas. Apparently they hadn’t gotten everything they wanted, though. When the woman called her husband to let them know when they’d be getting in at the station, she told him they wanted to stop at J.C. Penney in Williston on the way home.
I did something I’d never done before on the way from Minot to Williston—I sent a text message on my cell phone. While the kids I teach seem to forever be “texting” each other, I’ve never before seen much of a point to it. On this trip, though, I was able to text Margaret (with the messages sent to her e-mail account) to let her know where I was as the trip progressed. Each text message used only one-third of a minute on my cell phone, and the messages could be “queued” so that if the train was out of reception range (which is often true in places like North Dakota and Montana) it would send them as soon as it recognized a signal. I texted Margaret mostly because she had an easy to remember e-mail address. Before another trip, I may add other people’s e-mails to the list in the phone.
Minot is more or less where the Midwest ends and the West begins. It got noticeably drier west of there, and the landscape got significantly rougher. There had been general snow cover all the way through Minot, but it got lighter and somewhat patchy west of there.
We got into Williston at 12:30 Central Time. Williston is almost on the Montana border, and the Mountain Time Zone begins just west of there. We turned over several passengers at Williston, and I got a new seatmate. He was a young man named Derek who played basketball at a college in Bismarck, about three hours southeast of Williston. His destination was Shelby, Montana, which is in the foothills of the mountains clear across the state. His girlfriend would be picking him up there, and they’d be driving to her home near Helena, about 150 miles south of there. He’d be spending pretty much the whole day getting there. I had a nice chat with the guy as he waited for the conductor to come around to take tickets. Once he had the seat check, he went back to the lounge and spent pretty much the whole afternoon working on his computer. (There are no electric plug-ins in most Amtrak coaches, which were designed in the ‘70s—well before anyone cared about such things—so the lounge is the only practical place to use a laptop.)
Having the basketball player go back to the lounge essentially gave me a single seat for most of the day. I alternated between reading, people watching, and staring out the window. My brother Steve may disagree with me, but frankly eastern Montana strikes me as one of the ugliest places I’ve ever been. It’s incredibly dry, with just patches of snow dotting brown grazing land. Every fifteen minutes or so we’d come to a ratty little town with gravel streets. The one thing all the towns had in common was casinos. I’d have thought I was in Nevada from all the little cement block gambling halls.
Almost all the way westward the old Great Northern Railroad (now the BNSF or Burlington Northern Santa Fe) parallels U.S. highway #2. Through most of Montana this highway is absolutely empty. I saw fewer than a dozen vehicles—exclusively pickup trucks—all afternoon. It’s a two-lane shoulderless road, with a speed limit of 70mph. Even the fastest traffic went about the same speed as the train, though.
Across the aisle from me through most of Montana was a couple that consisted of a college baseball player and his anorexic girlfriend. They probably should have booked a sleeper for all the making out they did on the trip. There was nothing they did that was really inappropriate in public (I’d be seeing that later on, once I got to Vancouver). They kept at it literally for hours, though, and they were definitely the people all the people-watchers in the car were watching.
In the middle of the afternoon many of the sleeping car passengers made their way to the diner for a complementary wine and cheese tasting. They didn’t have that feature when Margaret and I went out to Portland a few years back, and it would be a nice addition. There just isn’t a lot of interest on the day-trip through Montana, and an event like that would break things up.
The afternoon service stop in Montana is a Havre, a surprisingly important little city that is literally in the middle of nowhere just south of the border between Saskatchewan and Alberta. We were 1½ hours behind schedule getting into Havre, but we still stayed in the station over half an hour while they emptied the toilets and restocked the diner. I picked up the local papers and was amused that they still had the Bear Paw Bulletin and TidBits, both of which are basically shoppers whose “news” is limited to strange factoids and pieces of trivia. I entertained myself on the way to Portland by reading through those publications, and I did so again this afternoon.
The “real” local newspaper, the Havre Daily News, filled nearly a page with an AP article speculating the outcome of the Iowa caucuses. (Their prediction that Hillary Clinton would win in a squeaker turned out to be dead wrong.) The big statewide story was that a Bozeman man had recently climbed Mt. Everest. The top local story was about a Hispanic man who had rescued an elderly deaf man from a burning building.
There was another local story that would also be of at least minimal interest back home. The Havre Regional Airport (one of those places that makes Mason City seem important) was switching carriers. The new operator (which will provide two flights a day to Denver) is Great Lakes Aviation. Great Lakes, which normally does business as United Express, was founded in Spencer, Iowa. The lakes they refer to aren’t Superior and Erie, but the same bodies of water (like Okoboji) that the community college I work at is named after. Spencer no longer has passenger air service, but Great Lakes still services its planes there. A fair number of the students I teach at ILCC end up working for them.
I was also reminded of my ILCC job when I walked to the restroom and noticed the person immediately behind me. He was a college boy. He was apparently a high school student enrolled in a college credit math course, and he was doing his homework on the train. (Why he had homework over the holidays I don’t know, but he had tons of it.) Judging by the workout he was giving his graphing calculator and the sketches he had made on graph paper, I’d bet it was a calculus class, though it could have been a course in numerical analysis or college algebra. He certainly worked hard at it, which made me wonder whether he was bright and really liked the material or whether he was really struggling to understand it.
We had spent the entire day crossing one of the flattest, driest parts of America, and just as it got to be sunset there were finally mountains in sight. While we only got a glimpse of the Rockies, it really was a spectacular sunset. All the bright reds and oranges made me wonder if there had been forest fires somewhere that were polluting the air.
At 6pm we got into Shelby, only forty minutes behind schedule. The basketball player left the train, and I could see him on the platform greeting his girlfriend with one of those pick-her-up hugs you’d expect to see in the movies. The baseball player and his girlfriend also left at Shelby, as did several other passengers. The only noteworthy new passengers were a mother and her two sons. The mother wore a fur stole, which is not the sort of thing you normally expect to see in the coach section of a train. She smoked like a chimney, racing to the platform at every stop that promised to be longer than a minute or two—whether or not it was designated as a smoke break. Her sons were extremely well behaved, but they had a rather melancholy look to them and they spoke in quavering, hollow voices. Indeed the younger son’s voice was almost identical to one I remember hearing years ago on the TV show Emergency. That was right when child abuse was just beginning to be recognized, and the boy on the TV show supposedly suffered from “battered child syndrome”. I have no reason to believe these children had been abused, but there certainly was something not quite right about them.
The younger boy was seated next to a college-aged girl who was traveling out to Seattle to visit friends. He asked the girl to guess how old his mother was. That would be a hard question, since she had peroxide hair and wore far too much make-up, but she also had the prematurely old face of someone who has smoked her whole life. The girl politely guessed the mother to be not much older than she herself was, and both the mother and the boy beamed. “She’s forty-two,” said the boy, “but she looks so young and pretty.” He went on and on about how attractive his mother was, a beauty I must confess I really didn’t see. It was a very strange conversation to overhear.
Before long we entered Glacier National Park. It was pitch black out, so I couldn’t see the mountains at all, but I could feel the curves and grades, so I could definitely tell we were in more rugged country. Out of boredom as much as anything, I went back to the lounge, where I bought a can of Pepsi ($2), mostly because it was a design I didn’t have in my collection. Unfortunately, while I got the can home safely, when I took it out to school, a gust of wind caught a hold of it while I was getting out of my car, and it became litter rather than a collectible.
We reached the tiny town of Essex at 8:40pm. Essex is home to the Izaak Walton Inn, which has an Amtrak stop right outside its back door. Technically this is just a flag stop, but the train has stopped there every time I’ve been past Essex. It’s apparently traditional for guests at the inn to line out outside and wave at the train when it goes by. It was snowing fairly heavily when we got to Essex tonight, but they were still there waving at us. I felt properly welcomed and waved back at them.
Besides the terminals and Minneapolis, the most important stop on the entire Empire Builder route is Whitefish, Montana. Whitefish is a ski resort just west of Glacier Park, and it’s also the nearest stop to Kalispell, Missoula, and Butte. Especially in winter, the station serves literally hundreds of passengers each day. We made a long stop at Whitefish, as they unloaded tons of ski equipment for people who would be weekending at the resorts. I made my way past the smokers on the platform and on into the half-timbered station. They had a used book library in the station. Passengers could leave or take a variety of paperbacks, but they were asked to leave a suggested donation of $1 for the service. I left a buck and picked up a small volume on baseball history. It turned out to be duller than I had imagined it might be, but it did pass a few hours.
A rather loud group of young adults (I’d bet just slightly older than college age) boarded at Whitefish. Because the train was so crowded, the conductor had given all the Whitefish passengers specific seat assignments, rather than just having them seat themselves (the more typical Amtrak practice). A newlywed bride had been assigned to the seat next to me, and her husband had been given a window seat several rows back. Understandably they preferred to sit together, and they asked if I’d trade places with the husband. While it was a bit of a chore to gather up my stuff, I was certainly happy to oblige. As a bonus, the person on the aisle next to my new seat was leaving at Sandpoint, Idaho, just a couple of stops further on. Not many people board in the wee hours, so there was a good chance I’d have an empty seat next to me most of the night.
I might as well have had an empty seat there already for all the hospitality my new seatmate provided. I said hello, and she nodded as I made my way past to the window seat. She then turned away and didn’t say a word the entire time. I wonder if perhaps she didn’t speak English. She was not unpleasant, but she might as well have been mute.
The new seat was directly next to the stairs that led down to the toilets. At first I got a rather nasty whiff of them, but then shortly after that the car attendant announced that there was a problem and the toilets in our car were closed. For the duration of the trip, people in our car would have to use the toilets in the coach one car back. I’m not sure what they did to deal with the smell, but it wasn’t really a problem from there on. I managed to sleep surprisingly well.
… Surprisingly well indeed. I noticed when my seatmate left at Sandpoint, and I grogged awake when we got to Spokane, and there was movement as they split up the train into two sections. From there it’s about a three-hour haul (which was actually closer to four hours on this particular run) on to Ephrata, and I don’t remember a bit of that. They announced breakfast over the loudspeaker when we got to Ephrata, which made me decide it was officially morning.
The weather had definitely changed overnight. We had obviously gone through freezing rain. I could see out the windows, but thick ice had collected at the sides, and there were blobs of ice in random patterns here and there around the glass. Outside the world was white. There was snow in Whitefish, but it looked light and patchy. In central Washington the snow cover was thick, and it would remain so almost all the way to the coast.
I made my way to the rear coach and used their toilet, which wasn’t nearly so clean as ours had been. (It may well have just been another day or the additional people using it, but it really was filthy.) Then I decided to have breakfast in the diner. While none of the diner meals is exactly cheap, breakfast strikes me as the best overall value. (Lunch is definitely the worst.) I had scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns, a buttermilk biscuit (that seemed to be leftover from yesterday), and coffee for $9. That’s about the same price a family restaurant would charge, and the food is similar in quality to what you’d get at Perkins or Country Kitchen. Tips are additional, of course, but they would be in a restaurant as well. A bonus is that there is no sales tax on Amtrak purchases.
Even though the diner was nearly empty, they insisted on seating people in multiple parties together. I was seated across from a couple from North Dakota who were visiting their son who lived north of Everett. This was the second Amtrak trip they’d made in rapid succession. Just before Christmas they had gone east to visit their daughter in Baltimore. The couple was retired from farming, and they were really enjoying traveling around the country. They were interested that I was a teacher and were quick to tell me that their grandchildren attend Catholic schools.
We were about halfway between Ephrata and Wenatchee when I finished breakfast, right in the heart of apple country. The countryside was filled with orchards, which in late December were nothing but bare branches in the middle of the snow. It’s strange to think of apples as a row crop, but that’s exactly what they are in Washington. The neatly pruned trees were planted arrow straight, just like corn or beans.
The seat next to mine had been empty since Sandpoint, and I was rather enjoying the luxury of a double seat to myself on what was still a very crowded train. The car attendant assured me that the empty seat would fill at Wenatchee, and I made a point of tidying up and making sure my stuff was not blocking the available seat. Oddly, when we left Wenatchee (an hour and fifteen minutes late) the seat was still empty. In fact, I think it was the only empty seat on the entire train.
I was amused by the seat tag that one of the Wenatchee passengers had been given. The code for Seattle is SEA, but his handwritten tag said “SAE”. It brought me back to my college days, when “SAE” stood for the stuck up boys of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. This guy had the sort of old-time hippie look that is typical of many people in the Northwest, and I don’t think he’d have fit in well with the brothers at SAE.
My itinerary called for me to get into Seattle at 10am. There was a forty-five minute layover there, and then I’d catch a thruway bus (contracted by Amtrak with another company) on to Vancouver. While they apparently often hold those buses so connections can be made, with the train running more than an hour behind schedule, I wasn’t sure just how the connection would go. I did know there was another bus later in the day, though, and I figured if worse came to worse, they’d put me on that one.
As the crow flies it’s really not all that far from Wenatchee to the metropolis on Puget Sound. Roads and railroads, though, go nowhere close to straight in the Cascade Mountains, though. In good weather it’s a three-hour haul from Wenatchee to Everett on Amtrak. Today we’d need all of that and more. There was heavy snow in the Cascades—both in the air and on the ground. The temperature was just barely below freezing, with all the streams flowing freely. There was no question that it was winter, though. The mountains were fully covered from foot to peak, and the evergreens in the forests were bent over from the thick snow that covered them. Whole towns were literally buried in snow. I recalled my sister talking about getting feet of sow when she was growing up out in Colorado. That’s exactly what they had here in Washington. People who had just been skiing in Whitefish remarked that this was the most snow they’d ever seen. I could certainly agree with that; it was a most impressive sight.
I was very glad to be going over Stephens Pass in the Cascades in a train that weighed countless tons rather than in any sort of a motor vehicle on the highway. The train tends to serve as its own plow (although we could see actual plow trains parked on sidings near the pass). U.S. highway #2 continued to parallel the tracks, and it was definitely not a road I’d want to drive on. A line of SUVs was headed up the pass, presumably headed to a ski resort at its summit. They all stopped partway up to put chains over their tires, and even with added traction they were struggling to make it to the top. It didn’t help that they seemed to be using old-fashioned snowplows on the road. In Iowa these days we have massive plows that really can cut through enormous drifts. In Washington, though, they were attempting to clear a major highway with not much more than the blade the farmer used to clear Margaret’s driveway.
The railroad actually doesn’t go over the pass at all. It avoids a pass that’s really not all that high (4100 feet) by going through the eight-mile Cascade Tunnel. We stopped just beyond the tunnel because there was supposedly a problem with one of our locomotives. A freight train on the other track stopped and assisted our engineer in making whatever repair was necessary, and in about fifteen minutes we were moving again. It was literally downhill all the way to the Pacific, but with the winding tracks, it was still slow going.
The vegetation changed as we made our way down the mountains. It’s all evergreen forest at the top of the pass. Just slightly lower deciduous trees that had shed their leaves were mixed in. The snow lightened up (though it was still more than we had back in Iowa) the lower we got, and before long we were in a forest of still green deciduous trees. Snow was falling among the trees like you might see on a fall day back home. By the time we reached the outskirts of Everett the snow finally turned to rain, and it might as well have been springtime.
I couldn’t help but notice that gas in Washington was quite a bit more expensive than it was back in the Midwest. The prices were all over the place, but the cheapest price for the cheapest grade was $3.119. I’m still not really used to that “2” at the front of gas prices, and while I got a taste of 3’s last summer, it’s still quite a shock to see prices like that.
We were still in the Cascade foothills at 9:50, ten minutes before we were supposed to arrive in Seattle. They had projected that our ETA would be around 11:15, half an hour after my bus was scheduled to leave. Shortly after making that announcement they announced that Vancouver passengers should exit the train in Everett, which is about an hour north of the terminal. They were diverting the bus to stop there, so we could make our connection. We were nearly to Everett, and it turned out that when we got there we had to wait nearly an hour for the bus to show up.
It would really make more sense to have Everett be the default connection for service to Vancouver. It’s a much more pleasant station than Seattle, and it’s also a lot closer to the border. The reason they don’t is that they’re basically buying a few seats on an express bus that’s designed to transport people between the two big cities; connecting with trains is an after-thought.
Everett is an old industrial city that has morphed into a suburb. The train station is part of an urban renewal project that is attempting to bring new life to a very run-down downtown area. Its main purpose is to serve commuters who take Sounder commuter trains south to Seattle. The place also houses the local Greyhound station, it’s a major interchange for local buses, and it houses the public library and city hall. The station was very formally decorated for the holidays, which made it stand out that there were absolutely no other Christmas decorations in downtown Everett.
The couple I had eaten breakfast with met their son at the station. Unfortunately they also found their luggage had been sent onto Seattle instead of leaving the train with them. The station attendant assured them it would be coming back up on the Cascades train this afternoon. Their son told them it was no big deal, but of course it would be a hassle to have to come back to claim the stuff.
I quickly read through the local papers and a rather encyclopedic booklet that explained how to use the local transit (which is surprisingly cheap—as low as 50¢ for a bus ride and only $4 for the longest possible ride on the commuter trains). Then I had coffee and a scone ($4.39) at a pretentious little coffee bar in the station. The napkin told me I was drinking “the top 1% of the world’s coffees”. Perhaps it was. It certainly tasted like coffee, but then so does the bottom 99%. At least in the station, unlike on the train, they brewed it strong enough that I could enjoy the flavor. The most entertaining thing I saw while I sipped my coffee was a train of eight engines—nothing else, just engines.
There were only about half a dozen people making the transfer from the Empire Builder to the thruway bus. Most interesting among them was a young man with a fiery red beard who had boarded the Builder at Cut Bank, Montana. He was from Cut Bank but actually lived in Portland. His wife was from Vancouver. He had been at his own family’s home for Christmas and was now going up to visit his wife’s family for New Year’s. His wife had been working in Oregon on Christmas Day, so she had gone north yesterday on the Cascades train.
At 11:30 the station attendant announced that the Vancouver bus had arrived. I wheeled my luggage out to the busway, where a red and white CanTrail bus was parked. The driver was a sixty-ish Chinese man. He opened the storage bay beneath the bus and seemed annoyed when I placed both my brown wheeled bag and my blue tote bag in there. I’d have been hard-pressed to get the blue bag in the tiny overhead bins, though.
The bus was almost entirely full. Once we boarded there were maybe five or six empty seats on board. All the other passengers had boarded in Seattle, and only a few of them had connected with any train. I sat next to a woman from a small town on Vancouver Island who been doing her after-Christmas shopping in the States, taking advantage of the Canadian dollar’s dramatic rise and the U.S. dollar’s plummet. She had apparently taken this bus numerous times. In downtown Vancouver she transfers to another bus, which boards the ferry for the crossing to the island. She gets off in Nanaimo and waits there (probably at the same shopping center where Steve and I had lunch years ago) for family members to come and get here.
It was awkward leaving Everett. While the station is literally right next to Interstate 5, there is no exit nearby (which is probably another reason they don’t make this the standard connection). We seemed to wander all through the decaying downtown before we finally got on the freeway. I-5 itself was absolutely packed. It’s six lanes until well north of Everett, but it could use at least eight.. Even in areas that looked very rural, the road was full of traffic, and the 60mph speed limit lets you know you’re never far from a lot of population.
We fought a variety of precipitation as we made our way northward. It was probably good there was as much traffic as there was, because much of that precipitation was in frozen from. There was snow and freezing drizzle, but I think the busy highway was merely wet, not really slippery.
I spent a fair part of the trip northward filling out a Canadian customs “landing form”. The form is the same one they give out on airplanes, and its wording is definitely geared toward those arriving by air. The form was complicated (and worded awkwardly in both French and English), but eventually I figured out I could honestly answer “no” to all the various questions.
It took about an hour and a half to get from Everett up to the Canadian border at Blaine. Buses are not allowed to cross the border on I-5. Instead we had to take the last exit in Washington, which is marked “8th Street – Truck Customs”. Those few people who live in or have friends in Blaine presumably care about 8th Street; pretty much everyone, though, is heading for the border. While it’s technically “truck customs”, this is apparently the favored border for local traffic. I’d read that the I-5 border routinely backs up for more than an hour in both directions. The car lanes at truck customs most often move faster than that.
Before we reached customs we stopped at PAC-CAN, a set of twin duty free shops on opposite sides of the border. I didn’t even get off the bus, but several people stocked up on cheap cigarettes and booze. Others used the restroom or bought pop or water. We stopped for about fifteen minutes and then pulled forward about fifty feet to the customs building.
The only time I’ve crossed a border by bus before was in Europe. Even before the days of the European Union, crossing European borders was a joke. Unless there was a reason to suspect there might be a problem, the luggage stayed in the storage bay underneath. An officer came on board and either checked passports or just waved us on. The delay was a few minutes at most.
In the post-9/11 world, crossing the U.S./Canadian border by bus is quite a bit more involved than that. We arrived at the border shortly after 1pm, and it was almost 2:00 when we finally got done with the formalities. The bus parked outside the customs building. Then the driver put on rubber gloves and unloaded all the bags. He placed the bags on a conveyor belt similar to what you’d find at baggage claim in an airport. Once the bags were there he directed all of us to enter the building and claim our bags. Only after everyone had claimed their bags would the customs agent (a surly young blonde woman) start processing people.
People could go to the agent one family at a time. However, the vast majority of people on the bus were traveling alone, so it took quite a while for the individual agent to get to everyone. She was very thorough in her questioning, too. My interview was typical, and it lasted a couple of minutes. She scanned my passport and asked where I came from and why I was going to Canada. She seemed to find it particularly odd that someone from the Midwest would be coming to Vancouver for just a short stay but seemed satisfied when the train trip across the Rockies was part of the vacation. She wanted to know if I knew anyone in Vancouver and kept pressing that question repeatedly. She went through a variety of questions about things I might have with me that would not be allowed in Canada and didn’t seem to believe it was possible I didn’t have drugs or weapons with me. (She’d have been welcome to search my luggage, but she didn’t.) She asked me to show her a return ticket to prove I’d be leaving Canada when I said I would and then asked what my employment was in the States. Finally she was satisfied and let me proceed.
With both me and the others she processed, the agent seemed most concerned about people immigrating to Canada. While I got lots of questions, she seemed to be doing quite a bit of racial profiling as she interviewed others. A black man in front of me was questioned more than twice as long as I was, and several Asian people had their luggage searched. A Hispanic couple was not allowed to enter Canada. They were detained and told they would be walked across the street to the U.S. customs station, where they could wait for a bus back to Seattle.
Everyone else re-boarded our bus, and eventually we made our way onward. Just across the border we made our way through a series of traffic circles (called “roundabouts” in British Columbia) and stopped to let off a single passenger at the Pacific Bay Resort in Surrey. I have a feeling many people book this hotel thinking it is right along the beach. In fact it’s well inland and affords a view of nothing other than highway 99, the northern extension of I-5.
We joined highway 99 and made our way northward. There’s a small stretch of farmland just north of the border, but soon we were into urban sprawl. We were supposed to stop in Richmond (where Vancouver International Airport is located), but apparently no one wanted to get off there. Instead we made our way down a series of highways that were not quite freeways (multilane highways with some exits and some stop lights) through New Westminster and Burnaby. Eventually we came out onto Knight Street in the eastern section of the city of Vancouver.
There’s nothing about Vancouver that looks particularly Canadian, but it’s definitely not an American city either. Southeast Vancouver cheaply built stucco and cement block homes set on tiny tree-filled lots. Knight Street is mostly a business strip, and while a lot of its businesses have the same names you’d see in an American city, they are packed more closely together and are more likely to have “parkades” (ramps) than parking lots.
We probably passed two dozen gas stations as we made our way down Knight Street. I’d quickly find (and later confirm) that at any given time there is exactly one price for gas in all of metro Vancouver. It’s like a small town that way, where all the stations quickly adjust their prices if any one changes theirs. Today the price on all the signs was $1.101, a most unusual price indeed. Canada has always priced gas using every tenth of a cent, not just the 9/10 we have in the States. It’s really weird, though, to use 1/10 instead of an amount that would make the price seem less than it actually is. The price is, of course, a buck ten a liter. At the current exchange rate, that would work out to about US$4.08 a gallon. I suppose I should be thankful for $3 gas when I see prices like that.
At precisely 2:45pm (15 minutes late) we arrived at Pacific Central Station on the outskirts of downtown Vancouver. Pacific Central is also Vancouver’s inter-city train station, and it’s located directly across the street from the former Expo grounds where the world’s fair was held back in ’86. While it’s a lovely old station (like a smaller version of Chicago’s Union Station), there was nothing at all familiar about the place. I don’t think Steve and I ever looked to the east when we got off the SkyTrain downtown.
I hadn’t eaten anything since the scone in Everett, and that was more than four hours ago. There was a McDonalds in the station, and I thought I might catch a bite there. This was one of several places I found that prided itself on “healthy alternatives”. In fact their menu board didn’t list a single hamburger or other sandwich, just various wraps and salads—all at astronomical prices (like $7.99 for a salad). They obviously sold the more traditional McDonalds menu items, as that’s what everyone in the place had on their trays. I couldn’t tell you what any of that stuff cost, though. What’s more, since the service was abysmally slow, I decided it wasn’t worth finding out.
There’s a pleasant little park in front of the station. Guide books warned that the park was unsafe, but on a drizzly afternoon there was certainly nothing to worry about there. If there were any unsavory characters, they’d sought shelter elsewhere. Here in Vancouver, by the way, the drizzle was not freezing. It was merely cold and miserable.
(c) 2008 davidmburrow@yahoo.com
The background music on this page is the Christmas carol "O Little Town of Bethlehem".