Our traveling retirees: Riding the ‘Canadian’ across the continent A train trip across Canada was long a dream of Dawn and Charlie White. Dawn’s retirement last year made it possible. After flying from Portland to the Vancouver, B.C., airport, we walked to the Sky Train station, and had a smooth ride, with a transfer, to the Canadian National train depot. We boarded VIA train no. 2, the Canadian, about 8:30 p.m. and found our compartment. The compartment was quite small, with a water closet and sink in the room and a nice shower with a changing room down the hall. Our car had six compartments plus four old-fashioned Pullman areas. The beds were comfortable. The track is smooth; Dvorak’s Humoresque No. 7 comes naturally into your consciousness as the train rolls along. The train has three dome cars with 360-degree views. The food in the diner was excellent and too plentiful. We got three full meals every day, with tasty desserts after lunch and dinner. The staff brought around hors d’oeuvres every afternoon; fruit, juice, delicious muffins, and coffee were available all the time; and there was wine tasting in the afternoon. Our first day was in the Canadian Rockies, and they are simply magnificent. They are so good, in fact, that in the documentary film on the American West, The Real West (narrated by Gary Cooper), some of the mountain scenes were shot in Canada, not the U.S.A. The train climbed continually from Vancouver for 14 hours, and Mt. Robson, the highest point in the Rockies, came into view about noon, hiding its summit in fog. But many other treeless, snow-capped mountains were out in all their glory. Dawn’s photo of Mt. Fitzwilliam, taken across Yellowhead Lake, is so appealing it is now our computer’s screen saver. The second day we crossed the plains of Saskatchewan, looking out at perfectly flat wheat fields as far as one could see. The verdant Qu’appelle Valley, contrasting with yellow wheat fields, seemed a rural paradise. The next day was entirely in the Canadian Shield, with the trees at their height in fall color. The bright red of the maples contrasted with the green pines and cedars and the white bark of the paper birches. The Shield is full of lakes and streams (Canada has nearly half of all the fresh water in the world!) and water was always visible. The Shield is immense—we traveled around a thousand miles in this wonderland, with only two towns and a few settlements. But eventually the Shield gave way to the farms in settled Ontario, with maples and birches providing the color. It was about noon Thanksgiving Saturday when we arrived just a few minutes late in Toronto, end of the line for the Canadian. In Toronto there were virtually no cars nor people on the streets; it was Thanksgiving Saturday. That was not the case in the train station, however, as seemingly infinite lines of Thanksgiving passengers were waiting before each train gate. We traveled along the Lake Ontario shore for a while, and then north into the Shield again. We arrived in Ottawa a few minutes ahead of schedule and our host, former PSU student Willard Mullins, now a retired professor from Carleton College, was there to meet us. We spent Thanksgiving Sunday at Jones Falls on the Rideau Canal, which was built shortly after the War of 1812, partly as a defensive measure assuring an allCanadian supply line in case the Americans invaded again. We had a nice Thanksgiving dinner and then hiked over the locks and up the canal, stopping at a restored blacksmith shop where the smithy forged a heart hook and at the principal defensive structure where we could look out the gun slits in case the American invaders were coming again. Ottawa is a delightful city. At one of our dinners, one of Will’s guests was one of his former students, now a professor himself. It was nice having three generations of professors-students. The new War Museum in Ottawa is superb—and much too large to cover in a few hours. It is divided into periods—we were particularly interested in the early period when the French and the British were vying for continental control, and the period 1770 to 1870 when the principal enemy threat was the United States. The public markets in Ottawa are splendid—it was a nice place to end our seven-day Canadian Odyssey. Mt. Fitzwilliam and Yellowhead Lake, taken as Via’s train, the Canadian, went through Yellowhead Pass. Photo by Dawn White
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