you may or may not know about my mildly epic train trip across canada at the beginning of september. here it is:
september 2nd: my parents took me to the viarail station in edmonton around 10:30 p.m. i boarded the train at 11:30, and my parents have a hard time letting go, so they walked me all the way to my car and then snooped around my cabin before each hugging and kissing me six or seven times and saying goodbye. after putting all my carryon stuff into my (tiny! but cosy!) single cabin, i snooped around all the nearby cars for about half an hour as the train pulled away from edmonton. i fell asleep pleasantly surprised by how comfortable the bed (which folded down from the wall) was.
september 3rd: we passed through saskatoon and winnipeg. prairie, prairie, prairie. i love the prairies the best but i was a little tired of seeing them. in the dining car on this train, they insist that everyone eats in groups of 4s. it was mostly non-canadian seniors on the train, so conversation was easy enough, although i would have rather eaten alone. the food was incredible. really. between meals i either napped (my first night's sleep wasn't fantastic - the noise of the train was hard to deal with. plus i was too excited.) or went up to the dome car to watch the scenery and listen to my ipod/read "conversations with god"/write letters. i also had some nice conversations with one of the only non-seniors aboard the back half of the train (the front half apparently had a lot of student-aged people sitting in coach, but i didn't go up there because i am not a big visitor in the first place. however, if i HAD gone up there, i would have seen a girl i know through caitlan (we all went to cathedral grove together last christmas). i ended up seeing her as we got off at the stop in montréal (she was staying, and i was heading on to halifax).
september 4th: northern ontario! lakes! forest! quiet! maybe i will spend more time up there sometime. maybe jessica and caitlan and i will build our introvert cabin up there. i worked on my cree books (which are coming more slowly than i had hoped) and i think they are pretty cute. i talked more with the non-senior citizen boy i had talked to the day before, and it turns out that he is preeeetty interesting. his high school activities were football, choir, drama, and the robotics club. he once made a giant venus flytrap robot (16-foot moving jaws, that could apparently pick up a human!) for a high school play. he invents things and has patents for them. he kind of reminds me of stéphane in "the science of sleep," just in the way that he creates things. neat. i think his spirit is gentle and good.
september 5th: i disembarked from "the canadian" (the train between edmonton and toronto) and took a less comfortable commuter train to montréal. there, i bumped into carly, one of caitlan's friends who i had met last december when caitlan and a few of her friends and i went to cathedral grove for a day. apparently we had been on the same train for the last 3 days, but i had been in the back and she had been in the front, so we never saw each other. funny. in the evening in montréal (which easily had the nicest train station in the country, as far as i could tell) i boarded "the ocean," the train that would take me to halifax. my room was considerably bigger than the last train, and had its own shower, but i didn't find it as comfortable as the first. that may have mostly been because: a) the blankets weren't as cozy, and b) the bed was set up so i had to sleep perpendicular to the train's sides, rather than parallel (like the first train). i didn't get much sleep the night before, so i pretty much just ate supper and went to sleep. i slept through most of québec, which was kind of a bummer but i hope to spend some time there sometime in the indefinite future, so i'm not too worried.
september 6th: my train arrived in halifax shortly after lunch. i took a cab to erica's. i'll write about my time in halifax in my next post.