Epilogue: What's so great about Canada

Here are, looking back, 10 things that make Canada special, different and worth visiting and getting to know:

• In Vancouver, the taxi that took me from the airport to my hotel was a hybrid -- as are most taxis in Vancouver.
• Bearproof garbage cans in Whistler and Banff, and the widespread availability of trash receptacles that are also recyclables receptacles. Would this be too hard in the States? Canada seems to manage it. One woman I spoke to even told me that the social pressure to be green is so great that she would rather carry an empty plastic water bottle around than be seen tossing it into an ordinary garbage can and not a recycling bin.
• The bus in Vancouver with the electronic destination sign on its front that said, "NOT IN SERVICE," and then, "SORRY."
• A nude bicycle parade in Toronto (which I missed!) with police protection to stop traffic.
• The Opus Hotel in Vancouver, and possibly others, offers free parking for hybrid or other small-carbon-footprint vehicles.
• Tim Horton's. Everywhere.
• Loonies and Twonies. Not because they're one- and two-dollar coins and that's better than bills (I'm not sure that's true), but because the names are so cute and have caught on so universally.
• Beer. Lovely beer.
• The national sport isn't what you think. It's lacrosse. Despite that, the theme music to "Hockey Night in Canada" is considered a second national anthem.
• Joual. It's the French dialect spoken by the Quebecois, and if you learned textbook Parisian French, it's endlessly fascinating to identify all the ways pronunciation differs. Having almost every public sign written in two languages is also entertaining and educational.

I miss it already and can't wait to get back. But first, I need to go someplace dull and quiet to rest up for a while.

The Rule of Three dictates that you won't get any sense of closure until I tell you I had lunch with Joff the Wandering Kiwi in Toronto the day I left. He is still working his way eastward toward Halifax and was settling in in Toronto just as I was packing up.

I'm so jealous. I love the Maritimes ...

June 14: The play's the thing

I could have gone to Niagara Falls. It's only about an hour and a half from Toronto, and it is, I always tell people, one of very few famous tourist sights that truly does not disappoint. Stonehenge and the Statue of Liberty are smaller in person, lots of Washington is blocked off to thwart terrorists, the Sphinx had a very bad nose job. But two natural wonders, despite being cliche destinations and, admittedly, overrun with camera-wielding tourists in RVs, live up to the hype: the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls.

You can't die without seeing the Falls. Brave the crowds, pay for the parking, walk past the crap souvenir shops, find a good vantage point and just stare at that massive cascade. It beggars description. The sheer size of the hole in the ground, the height from which the water falls, and all that glassy, surging, foaming torrent ... it takes your breath away. The sheer volume of water is boggling to contemplate. And do the Maid of the Mist. Don the poncho and ride out there toward the rocks and into the spray, and hear the story of the little boy who went over and survived, and all the unfortunates who didn't.

I could also have gone to Niagara-on-the-Lake for the Shaw Festival. The only reason I didn't is that I've done it many times before. Why? Because it's terrific, that's why. The Shaw Festival serves up a varied menu of top-notch theater every summer, and there's a little bit of everything: Shaw plays, obviously, but also musicals, comedies, dramas, older, modern ... and the town just couldn't be more charming. If you go in high season you may have to crowd-surf a bit, but they're there because there's so much to see and do. If it's too crowded or touristy in NOTL for your tastes, you can taste wine at the many wineries around the Niagara region. The countryside is just gorgeous.

But it happens that on the particular day I had free to take in some theater, I was drawn instead to the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario. (How lucky Torontonians are to be within two hours of both the Shaw and the Stratford!) They had a production of "Hamlet," and I'm a Shakespeare fan who'd never actually seen that play live. And although I'd been often to the Shaw, I'd never been to Stratford. Time to broaden my horizons!

Once you get out of the Greater Toronto Metropolitan Area, which takes nearly an hour in exhilarating traffic (I like a challenge), and you get out toward Kitchener, you are suddenly engulfed in delightful rolling farmland, green and cow-bedecked and beautiful. The drive into Stratford is very pretty, and the theater nestles among beautiful gardens full, at this time of year, of gently waving flowers of many kinds and colors.

I've been so sleep-deprived, I was terribly afraid I wouldn't make it through a three-hour play. Sitting in a plush chair, in the dark ... I dreaded nodding off sometime after "oh my prophetic soul" and waking up to see bodies all over the stage.

But I hardly needed all the coffee I slurped: The play was remarkable. All the principals were wonderful -- Ben Carlson as Hamlet, Scott Wentworth and Maria Ricossa as Claudius and Gertrude, Geraint Wyn Davies as Polonius, Adrienne Gould as a childlike and then animal Ophelia -- and I loved the 1910 Edwardian costumes, all browns and grays and whites to convey mourning and desolation and cold Scandinavian winter. The sets and effects were minimal but very evocative; in outdoor scenes it would occasionally snow, but instead of having buckets of fake flakes, just a sparse sprinkling would flutter down now and then, as on a day when an overcast sky can't make up its mind (hmmm ... just like a certain title character).

The most amazing thing to me was how conversational and natural Shakespeare's dialogue sounded. There were laughs! More than a few! Nobody ever gets Shakespeare's jokes anymore. But you know he leavened even his tragedies with some lighter moments. This production really let them come out, and I never realized how many funny lines there are in Hamlet -- granted, a lot of the comedy is in the delivery. The actors and director have the work and the credit. I've never seen a funnier, more real "Hamlet," and any actor or theater-goer who's been intimidated by Shakespeare or "Hamlet" would find this production a real eye-opener.

And so back to Toronto in the golden evening, back through the farms and the suburbs until the CN Tower was back in sight, and a night in the venerable and luxurious Fairmont Royal York Hotel. It's an oldie, but a goodie, smack in the middle of downtown and across from Union Station. For a long time, it was the tallest building in Toronto, and its massiveness still holds its own against the metal-and-glass towers that now surround it. The health club is surprisingly large for an older hotel, and it includes a pool and whirlpool, where I soaked away the chill of open graves in Elsinore and the tension of Toronto traffic.

It's hard to believe that a few scant hours after leaving the Royal York, I was landing in Pittsburgh. So we come to the end of this two-week odyssey. I'll close with an epilogue and the last batch of pictures soon.

The final thrilling chapters ...

The two weeks are up, but don't tune out just yet. There is more coming: a write-up of my last day, in which I leave Toronto and go see a play, and some final summing-up-type thoughts looking back on the whole experience. And more photos, of course, from the walking tour, the bike ride and the Distillery, freshly imported from my camera and hand-sized for you.

Friday the 13th: Boats, bikes and a distillery

The day started when I met Andrew, my guide from Sights on Bikes, who gave me a bike, lowered the seat for me and led me to the ferry dock right below my hotel-room window.

(I'm staying at the Westin, in a room that looks out across the lake at the Toronto Islands and the city airport, which I had the pleasure of flying in and out of in a single-engine plane in a previous life. Coming to Toronto, for me, is like going to a party and seeing old friends, some of whom are the kind you sort of cough and force a smile for.)

The day was turning into a splendid and sunny one as we got on a ferry to make the short trip across to the islands. The islands are a tight cluster in Lake Ontario just across from downtown Toronto, so close they were once a peninsula until the thin tether uniting them washed away in a particularly violent storm. They're a delicious place to bike, because the only cars allowed on the islands are service vehicles -- delivery, lawn care, home maintenance, etc. And there are homes. But more aboot that in a minute. (I'm going native.)

We had just barely coasted off the ferry when we came to a surprising historical marker: The site of Babe Ruth's first professional (and only minor-league) home run, hit in 1914. The islands were settled in the 19th century by people escaping the city's summer heat and mugginess, and by 1914 they were pretty well built up, with the Toronto Maple Leafs playing in a park where the airport is now.

By the '40s, Andrew told me, the islands were a populous city neighborhood. But in the '50s, the city decided to clear out all the housing and turn the islands into public parkland. This did not go particularly well, as you might expect. Whole communities were evicted, resettled and their neighborhoods burned to the ground. By the '70s, the last holdouts refused to go, had a faceoff with the sheriff and drove him out. So a compromise was reached, whereby an enclave of homes were allowed to remain, but the property cannot be owned outright. Homeowners sign a 99-year lease. (This happened in 1980, and no one is sure what will happen when the 99 years is up.) The homes are not owned and therefore cannot be sold to a third party, though they can be willed to immediate family. The homes can only be modified in certain ways. Prospective homeowners enter a complex lottery system, and Andrew told me he knew of a woman who has been on a waiting list for 15 years and has not yet had the option to buy an island home. The upsides of all this draconian control, though, are that (a) the house prices are kept at fair market value, not driven up to absurd heights by the desirability of the location and the limited number of homes; (b) if you buy a house, you have to live in it, so there's no buying it as an investment and then selling it to Japanese developers who want to put luxury lofts in its spot -- also, you know your neighbors and there's a real sense of community; so (c) the island remains charming and rustic instead of turning into a vile forest of multimillion-dollar ugly condos populated by vulgar snots, belching filth into the lake.

Having been to a lot of resorts spoiled by development, I think this is absolute genius.

Look at this castoffs drop-cart they have. You can put stuff you don't want but someone else might on this cart, and things are surprisingly neatly hung up or otherwise displayed.

Even if it's incredibly hard to live on the islands, despite the health of your bank account, anybody with ferry fare can whip over there and enjoy the old-fashioned amusement park for the kids, the fountains, the scenery, the beaches. There's even a clothing-optional beach! No, we didn't go, but Andrew told me about a woman from San Diego on one of his tours who absolutely insisted on going to the nude beach because she wanted to see it. So he indulged her, and when they got close, a naked man emerged from the trees and the curious woman was so startled she drove her bike straight into a fence, temporarily losing her purse containing her passport, etc.

We saw the Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, which used to be on a point but is now, thanks to the lake's reshaping of the island over time, far inland. That sculpting process has been halted by a seawall that should retain the islands' current shape. There's a boardwalk along the wall, from which you can see that the lake is unbelievably clear for a Great Lake with a lot of shipping traffic and urban areas on it.

Andrew and I stopped for lunch at the Rectory Cafe, where I had an amazing mushroom and feta wrap in a setting so enchanting that I wasn't a bit surprised to see the staff setting up tables for a wedding reception. The restaurant looks down across a lawn, through a gate and out at the sparkling water of the lake. The breezes were gentle and the food was delicious.

Then we were off back to the ferry, so I could move on to the Distillery, one of Toronto's newer happening places to hang out. In 1877, the Gooderham and Worts distillery was the largest in the world; now its 40+ buildings are the biggest collection of Victorian industrial architecture in North America. The carefully renovated buildings are now home to art galleries, high-end home furnishings stores, specialty shops and funky places to eat and drink.

While the interiors at the Distillery are very modern and funky, the exteriors have been kept so true to their original industrial form that it's a popular place to shoot films, including "Chicago" and "Cinderella Man." Of course, the original dirt streets and floors had to be covered during the renovations, and I was amused to hear that the bricks to pave the streets came from Cleveland, when that city ripped up its old brick streets to replace them with asphalt.


Matthew Rosenblatt, one of the developers, explained the idea behind the overhaul: to create a place for locals, not tourists, with no chains, no overt historic emphasis (no costumed re-enactors, no docents), and find vendor/tenants who are passionate about what they do, not necessarily passionate about being canny businesspeople. At right is a coffee shop that is high-end, purveying reportedly some of the best coffee in Canada, but it's funky rather than pretentious. And then there's the former dessert chef who opened Soma without ever having owned a business before. Soma has fantastic gelato -- I tried both the Ontario blueberry sorbet and the Sicilian pistachio gelato, and they were both glorious, especially the richly nutty gelato -- and also handmakes chocolate truffles. You can watch them make chocolate through a glass wall. I also tried a drink there that was unlike anything I'd ever had before. The chocolate shot is pretty much hot melted chocolate, dark and rich and darn near pure, but when you drink it, after a moment you realize the heat in your mouth and down your throat is not just temperature. The chocolate has chili in it, and the heat and mild burn sliding over your tongue and down your throat, along with all the sweet richness of the chocolate, is overwhelmingly sensual. Then the other hints of flavor develop, the whiff of ginger, the whisper of orange peel ... they serve it in a very small cup, like an espresso cup, and it's still an outrageous sensory overload. I don't know if I can ever go back to Hershey's.

I had the privilege of meeting and chatting with former Bostonian Jane Corkin, who showed me her photography gallery. I can't say much about the art, because I don't know anything about art, but I found it interesting to look at, and Jane supplied colorful details about the artists. The gallery, like most spaces at the Distillery, is all original brickwork, adapted structure and reclaimed wood. The wood everywhere is worth noticing, because it tends to be very thick, having come from former shop floors and barrel racks. Jane is wry and passionate and smart, justly proud of her realm but friendly and down-to-earth. Meeting her is the kind of experience the Distillery was conceived to provide to people like me who don't generally hang around art galleries because we find them a bit intimidating.

Art appreciation being thirsty work, I sampled some of the wares at the Mill Street Brewery. A helpful beer geek who manned the taps ("Don't just try one or two -- try all of them") rattled off a long, long list of awards Mill Street concoctions have won, but I must endorse the very light and drinkable Organic Lager and, at the other end of the spectrum, the Coffee Porter. Wouldn't want a lot of it, but it's good stuff in a short glass.

I had dinner at Pure Spirits. I had to try the cold watermelon soup made with gin, and then I had some black cod that was melt-in-your-mouth sweet and tender. Van Morrison tunes competed with the live music ramping up outside as the shadows got longer.

Not bad for Friday the 13th.

June 12 for real: Toronto on foot

In the morning, I met Bruce Bell, who is, seriously, Mr. Toronto. He has had himself declared unpaid curator of so many historic hotels and other buildings that he has a different badge to put on every time he crosses a threshhold. Not to mention the plaques around town that have his name on them because he got them placed.

Why? What's so great about him? My God, Martha, he knows everything.

A walking tour of Toronto with Bruce is a kaleidoscope of history, architecture, pop culture, politics, folklore, survival skills, trivia, gossip, eulogy, design, esthetics and ice cream. He'll point out the biggies, like the CN Tower and the Rogers Centre next door, where I once watched a baseball game through the Rogers' open roof from the transparent floor of the CN's observation deck, but he'll make sure you see the whimsical sculpture and tell you the artist's name. He'll explain where the lake shore used to be before it was filled in, and where the train yards have been reclaimed for more amusing venues.

And he'll remind you when to look up. Anyone who's learned anything about urban architecture knows that most of the coolest stuff is way above eye level.

Like the Ontario College of Art & Design building that looks like some kind of weird gift package on stilts. It is, quite simply, a box (with windows) way up in the air, held up by brightly colored supports and reached by a sloping tunnel presumably containing stairs. It could only be an art school, am I right?

And then Bruce pops us into Malabar costume shop. It's truly overwhelming. You have never seen so many costumes in one place. They're grouped on racks with labels like a bookstore's or library's: Clowns, roaring '20s, can-can girls, military ... and on and on and on. Rent or buy. "This place is CRAZY at Halloween," Bruce confirms.

After taking in the grand twin arcs of the newest City Hall and the massive mall called Eaton Centre, we enter a former Toronto Dominion bank that's now a hotel, the Suites at One King West. It's grand and ornate (Bruce says, "They wanted you to look at all this and think, 'My money is SAFE here'") and still delightfully bank-y inside, with what was once the largest vault in Canada still staring sternly up at visitors from its showcase at the bottom of a flight of steps.




Another gorgeous and grand old edifice is nearby: the Bank of Commerce building, once referred to as Canada's Empire State building for its magnificence. It's opulent and gilded and massive, and Bruce says even Europeans crane their necks and goggle at the faraway, palatial ceiling.

It had an equally gorgeous sibling, but that one was knocked down to make way for Canada Trust Bank. It's hard to resent a sleek black skyscraper created by Mies van der Rohe, who also did the Seagram's building in New York. Whether you like the starkly clean lines and shiny surfaces or not, you have to concede that the effect is slick, sophisticated and heavy in the way expensive and well-made things are always heavy.

(Even lightweight top-end electronic gadgets will always hark back to that, when you close a compartment or press a button and get that solid, dense, satisfying click.)



It's also not without grace. Round glass bowls of yellow daisies sit at every corner of the ponderous marble teller counter. Bruce points them out and explains that that is not decoration -- it is design. Mies dictated their specific color and placement. ("Listen, the building's done, but only if you remember that every day you have to get bunches of daisies -- yellow daisies -- and put them in fishbowls at every corner of the counter." "I'm sorry, Hoskins, did our world-famous architect just demand that we bring the bank flowers every day? In fishbowls?" He did, and to this day, it gets them. The have a standing order with a grower. Maybe with fish, too.)

The old CEO's office, now used as a meeting space, is very "Mad Men," with its posh, '50s-looking furnishings (they're so good, no one dares change them), stunning view of the city and largest single-piece wooden table in the world (sez Bruce). It's a conference table so massive it had to be helicoptered into place and the roof of the building assembled over it. All I could think was that it must have come from one hell of a tree.



Bruce pointed out the King Edward Hotel, scene of many celebrity bivouacs. Windows in a suite at the top of the building were once looked out of by the Beatles on their first trip to Toronto, and what they saw below them was a surging mob of fans in the street. John Lennon returned there with Yoko years later for the famed Bed-In for Peace. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor scandalized the city by shacking up at the King Edward before they were married, though the far corner of the Sovereign dining room downstairs is where Burton popped the question and brought the ring bling to dazzle Liz.

OK, I'm starting to go all tabloid. It's truly frightening how easily that comes. I should also mention that we saw, I think, three out of four or possibly even four out of five Toronto city halls, only one of which is still used as City Hall (you can't fight it, but you can move it), many other distinguished old buildings and the St. Lawrence Market -- which incorporates the facade of the first city hall as an inward-facing wall. All the while, Bruce was dropping in tidbits like, "Queen Street is blocks and blocks of trendy shopping. It's well-known and an icon. If you say to friends, 'Let's do Queen Street tonight,' everyone knows what you're suggesting and what that'll be like. And it's descriptive too, in a way everyone immediately recognizes. As in, 'Oh, she's very Queen Street.'"

And, as we passed an unfortunate, ragged woman sitting against a building babbling to herself and banging two rocks together, "She's an heiress. Her family has a fortune, but they don't care, just let her sit here and bang her rocks."

There are a lot of ragged people in Toronto. The city has the same homelessness/panhandling/mental health issues most major American cities have. I find this both reassuring and profoundly depressing. If Toronto has this problem, we're not alone, and it must be a hard nut to crack. On the other hand, if Toronto has this problem, that means even the Canadians can't solve it, with their well-developed social saftey net and generally more inclusive, less Darwinian attitude toward the impaired. Maybe there is no way to solve it.

I also glimpsed the famed PATH, the network of passages and stairs that links most big downtown buildings to most others, so that Torontonians can get all over the place without having to go outside. You make your way down to big pedestrian concourses -- their retail makes them look like sunken shopping malls --and move from building to building to stay out of the cold and snow. The weather may be bad here in the winter, but Toronto has gone a long way toward making weather optional.

For dinner, I went right to the top: 360, the spinning (verrrrrry slowly) restaurant up the CN Tower. The food was good; the view was outstanding. You just sit there with your wine and your girlled salmon, and you watch Toronto rotate slowly beneath you. You can pick out your hotel or the theater you've gone to, admire the lake, watch planes take off and land at the little city airport and watch the sun sink and the lights come on. Unfortunately, my visit coincided with a train-wreck evening that left people standing and waiting for their tables for over half an hour. Getting into the tower is like getting into Ft. Knox, so it seemed a bit much for people with reservations to have to wait so long with nary a bench or chair to take a load off. The maitre d' assured the cranky that this was absolutely not normal.

But that view ... makes you forget ... and a little fruit crumble helps too ...

June 12: Toronto on foot

I arrived in Toronto and spent the afternoon on an absolutely fascinating walking tour with Bruce Bell, historian, author, plaque propagator, guide and fellow "South Park" fan. I hope to get time to write about it later today -- maybe if it rains, as promised. The one thing my schedule doesn't allow for is actually writing about what I've seen.

But I'll tease it now by telling you that Bruce knows Toronto inside-out, forwards and backwards, and if I can convey to you a tenth of what he showed me, you'll hardly be able to stand NOT being in Toronto for another minute. I always knew this city was cool, and now that is a much more educated judgment.

So for now I'm off to do some biking ... oh -- more photos coming soon too, as soon as I get some time ...

June 11: Freedom Canadians?

You think of French-Canadians as being in Quebec; that's their turf, and the rest of Canada is historically British in origin.

Wrong.

Think about the analogous territory and settlement of it farther south, when everything north and west of, say, Philadelphia was wild frontier, disputed, thinly populated, the land of Indians and fur traders, missionary priests and isolated forts. Think about the French and Indian War. I'll wait.
Winnipeg is pretty far from Quebec, but it has one of the largest francophone communities west of the Great Lakes. You drive out of town toward the east just a few miles, and you could swear you've leapfrogged Ontario and materialized in La Belle Province. In fact, cross the Esplanade Riel bridge in the middle of Winnipeg and you are in St. Boniface, where you will get a friendly "bonjour." It used to be a separate city, and not wildly keen on its big anglophone neighbor, until it was swallowed in the early '70s and became part of Winnipeg. (Not without a fair amount of grumbling.) Its magnificent former hotel de ville (city hall) is now the home of Tourisme Riel, the tourism and heritage organization for St. Boniface, final resting place of the (in)famous patriot/traitor and founder of Manitoba, Louis Riel.



The St. Boniface Museum, which houses a vast collection of Riel artifacts, is housed in the oldest building in Winnipeg and oldest log structure in North America, and St. Boniface Cathedral is actually a basilica. The wooden roof of the original building burned, but the stone walls remain next to a modern replacement next door. The skeleton reminded me of England's Coventry Cathedral, the stone ruins of which are now a kind of war memorial (it was bombed and burned during World War II) next to a modern replacement. My enthusiastic student tour guide, Michelle, told me that all the windows, including a huge rose window, exploded to smithereens in the blaze, so, unlike Coventry, St. Boniface doesn't have any evocative bits of colored glass clinging to the edges of the holes in its walls.

It does have a historic cemetery in which Riel and most of his immediate family are buried. He was hanged in Vancouver for essentially making a career out of fighting British hegemony in what was evolving into Canada and carving out a place and rights for those of French and Indian descent -- particularly mixed French and Indian descent, which is designated Metis and has special legal standing in Canada. Riel himself had a French father and Indian mother. It was quite common for French voyageurs -- 18th- and early 19th-century traders in furs and other goods between the frontier and Quebec -- to have a wife at home in, say, Montreal and an Indian "country wife" and kids in Manitoba. Boys will be boys, if they can get away with it.

Anyway, Riel is a very controversial figure, being a freedom-fighting hero in French and a pernicious rebel in English. They definitely dig him in St. Boniface. His name and likeness are everywhere. He's a big part of the francophone heritage here, along with the voyageurs. The Festival du Voyageur is Western Canada's biggest winter blowout, second only to the marquee Winter Carnival in Quebec.

Michelle also showed me some of St. Boniface's other treasures, like the firehouse and the train station -- Winnipeg's first and only for many years until Union Station was built. The firehouse is a particularly charming old building, with a couple of vintage fire engines displayed in it and a tower used for drying hoses in the old days. As with a lot of Winnipeg, St. Boniface's funky old structures have ducked the wrecking ball -- and a very good thing, too.

After lunch, I tried to find the Royal Canadian Mint and largely failed. It's on the outskirts of town and not overly signed. It's almost like they don't want too many people to know where it is, which is understandable. I didn't have time for a tour, so I just stared through the glass at the rows of machines stamping out jillions of Canadian coins and hefted the giant gold bar held in place by a chain and a security guard. It was fascinating -- I wish I'd had more time.


But I needed to get back to Fort Gibraltar, a reconstructed version of the fort at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers that kept trade safe for the North West Company, competitor of the Hudson's Bay Company. A boatload of voyageur re-enactors had landed earlier in the day, and the fort was full of men, women and children dressed as period fur traders, bourgeois company men, Indians and Metis. I was invited to share tea provided by a bourgeois gentleman, and it was a real treat and authentic as possible. There was tea in ceramic mugs or tin cups -- without the luxury of sugar -- wedges of scone with double cream and lemon curd, slices of cake, candied ginger, small dark squares of chocolate and crustless sandwiches. I joined a table of mostly rough characters in the men's quarters (I think they lured the kerchiefed Metis women in with the chocolate) and enjoyed the easy bilingual fluctuations of the conversation.

Afterward, there was an archery demonstration. In what had to be nearly a full gale. (It didn't rain till evening, but the wind was fierce.)

I had dinner at a cafe/bakery called Baked Expectations on trendy Osborne Street. Something for everyone: decadent pastry AND beer and wine. A place like this would be a truly dangerous addition to any neighborhood.


Tomorrow: Toronto. Let me remind you to scroll down now and then to look for new pictures in old posts. I'm catching up more every day.

June 10: That ball of flame in the sky -- what can it be??

Mr. Sun finally graced Winnipeg with his presence. And even a bit of warmth. It made a world of difference.

Started the day with an improved attitude and a walking tour of the Exchange District, beginning and ending at Old Market Square, a revitalized brick-paved source of concern and site of funky gatherings and concerts in the middle of downtown ...

(Pittsburghers will find this eerily familiar. In fact, Pittsburghers will find Winnipeg eerily familiar: the architecture, the once-mighty economy that deflated fairly suddenly in the 20th century, the preservation of old stuff, the constant efforts toward revitalization, the name that unfairly makes a great punchline, the green buildings, the strange street "grid." Note to Neil Young fans: I've been to Portage and Main.)

My guide, Veronica, was extremely knowledgeable and genuinely excited about what she was telling us. She pointed out a couple of dry-goods stores that had gone on to unforeseeable new lives (one is green condos, the other houses a co-op of groovy businesses where each employee buys a share and no one is in charge -- I kept hearing Terry Jones saying, "I didn't know we 'ad a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective"), Winnipeg's first auto showroom and a block of old storefronts that's been absorbed into Red River College. That was really amazing. The old exteriors and alleys have been enclosed but mostly left intact. Stairways are made to look like fire escapes. It's all been rehabbed to be green and clean and safe and modern, but there are big patches of old brick walls, woodwork, windows. I've never seen anything like it.

Veronica also showed us the old newspaper row, where Winnipeg once had three competing newspapers in the same block. The conservative paper and the liberal paper were cattycorner across a small intersection. Can you IMAGINE? The local pubs must have hosted some awkward and tension-filled lunch hours, even before the editors came in to haul AWOL reporters away from their libations.

Finally, she took us inside Winnipeg's Pantages theater, a spectacular old burlesque house that's returned to its original lush, slightly gaudy glory. Among the popular acts in the burly-q days were Wilbur the Man Who Grows (with the aid of a trap door in the stage) and Felix the Mind-Reading Duck.

I kid you not.

After the tour, I had a delightful cross-cultural chat with Veronica and her colleague Neil (hey, Veronica, did I spell that right?) aboot dialects, shibboleths and how everyone but yourself talks, no disrespect, kind of funny. Note to Canada: On this trip, I've been hearing less "eh" and more "hey," as in, "You were glad to leave the umbrella home today, hey?" Putting an h in front of "eh" is not fooling anyone, hey?

A short drive took me to the Costume Museum of Canada, which has a really splendid exhibit of wedding dresses through the centuries. The gowns are extremely well-preserved and have interesting explanations of who wore them when and where. You forget that the white wedding dress is a relatively recent custom, and the collection has some really lovely and/or odd frocks in pink, blue and even browns. There's also a very enlightening history of the high heel, which may sound like a visual root canal to men, but you know what I learned? Men used to wear high heels too, and not just in France. Men rode horses in high heels. Again, I kid you not.


I ate lunch at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, whose restaurant, Brio, opens onto the rooftop sculpture garden and makes a mean Caesar salad. The gallery is notable for its extensive collection of Inuit art, something you don't see a lot of down in the States.

I ended my day in Assiniboine Park, a large and beautiful park on the outskirts of town. It has gardens and a cricket ground and a little train and even a zoo, which I took a stroll through. It's a small zoo and a little behind the curve in terms of getting animals out of cages and into realistic habitats, but there's a lot of evidence of vigorous fund-raising, so I'm sure efforts are under way.

The zoo has wandering peacocks making that peculiar meowing sound you always hear in the background of English costume dramas. I've seen loose peacocks before, but today I saw males in full-on fan-erecting mating display mode up close and in person for the first time, and I can only describe it as terrifying. I don't know how the peahens remain calm. The guys snap all those tailfeathers up, and if the female gets at all close to them, they vibrate all the quills simultaneously. The males are literally quivering all over with lust. The quills make a rapid rattling noise that sounds almost exactly like a tabletop electric fan. It's impressive, perhaps beautiful, but somehow profoundly unseemly.

Wouldn't have missed it for the world.

June 9: "That's it! We're all going back to Winnipeg!"

That quote is a Simpsons reference.

Before we say goodbye to Regina, which I did at 5:30 this morning so as not to miss a single drop of rain in Winnipeg, I want to say that I had low expectations for that modest little city, but it really grew on me in the short time I was there. It looks and seems like exactly the sort of place that young people flee in droves -- a bit down on its luck, wholesome and neighborly in a way restless youth might find corny or constraining or dull -- but I ate brunch on Sunday before heading out to Moose Jaw in a joint called La Bodega that seemed to be the happening spot for a vibrant young demographic. The place was absolutely ringing with the giggles and lively chatter of the pierced, the pigtailed, the natural-fibered, the goateed and couples joined at the hip as only the very young care to be. There is a university in town, of course. Let's hope Regina can keep at least some of those unkempt heads before they all run off to Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal. Surprisingly, unlike Pittsburgh, Regina can't offer them cheap housing. Ordinary 3-bedroom ranch houses or similar are going for a good $300K there. In Regina! Where the weather is doing its best to KILL people 7 months of the year! Go figure. Well, the parks are nice.

Anyway: Winnipeg. So far, it's extraordinarily wet. Relentless rain. I'm going to be here for another two days, so I hope to God it quits.

Today, after a desperately needed nap, I hit the Manitoba Museum, a massive, thorough, well-conceived survey of Manitoba's history beginning with ... I kid you not ... the cooling of the Earth's crust! Again! Boy, when these prairie provinces do history, they don't walk in in the middle of the movie.

Kidding aside, there's lots of stuff here, and a surprise around every corner. For example, an entire sailing ship. It's a replica, but it was seaworthy and did some ceremonial travel in the late '60s. The original Nonsuch sailed into Hudson's Bay in 1668, opening Western Canada to trade; you can climb on the replica, which is full of beautifully carved wood, tiny bunks, not a lot of closet space or cupholders and a steady stream of excited children.

There's also pretty much anything and everything else that has ever gone on in Manitoba, from the polar bears and Inuit to the dioramas of people, native and otherwise, and critters of all sizes, extinct and otherwise. There's a whole gallery devoted to the Hudson's Bay Company, a reckoning of the wave of immigration in the late 19th century that added some spice to the predominantly British settlement that came before, and an extensive and detailed evocation of '20s-era Winnipeg as a bustling boomtown, in which museum walls are replaced by realistic storefronts, some of which you can enter.

The biggest surprise at the Manitoba Museum found me in the lobby before I even entered the galleries. Someone called my name, I turned around and it was Joff! The Return of the Kiwi! I knew he was bound for Winnipeg to visit friends, but who'd have thought we'd be in the same museum at the same time mere hours after my arrival in town? He was on his way to see the planetarium show, but it was good to see a familiar friendly face.

The one thing I never imagined this blog would develop is a recurring character. Besides me and, you know, Dudley Do-Right. I'm so pleased. This makes it literary.

After I left the museum I went to a place for lunch on a recommendation (not Joff's) and have to admit it was the first truly disappointing meal I've had since I cleared customs. It was in kind of a health-food place that had a juice bar. (Note to self: Never trust a menu that includes the phrase "liver cleanse" or trumpets the availability of "organic hemp and almond milk.") I ordered a salad with the optional shaved bison, just because I wondered what they look like naked.

(Rim shot.)

Who knew bison was so fatty? I can't remember the last time I walked away from a $12 salad, but at least there was a 7-11 next door. I squished around the neighborhood for a while under my umbrella while I ate some nuts, but there weren't many people out and most of the shops seem to be closed Mondays, so I went back to the hotel to try to dry out.

Tomorrow is another day, however, and I have a beautiful view from my window at the Hotel Fort Garry that promises grand architecture, bridges and parklands. And by golly, I am going to get out there tomorrow and see it even if I have to wear a wetsuit.

June 8: Away to Moose Jaw

You have to go. It's such a great name.

I drove from Regina to Moose Jaw, and for the first time since I got to Saskatchewan, I realized I am really on the prairies. Miles and miles of miles and miles, flat as a pancake. It's not a long trip; it took me about 45 minutes, because the speed limit is about 70 mph for most of the way. And why not? You could see an obstacle miles away.

Moose Jaw is a Western town right off the studio lot: wide, perpendicular main drags, blocky storefronts crowding them, an impressive train station smack at the end of Main Street like Dad at the head of the table. And you have to give the city fathers and mothers credit: The town could have faded into nothingness when its heyday had passed, like so many others, but thanks to its name, a few lucky breaks and some tireless marketing, it remains a destination.

The Tunnels of Moose Jaw is a tour into a labyrinth of steam tunnels that were (re)discovered only in 1985, reportedly by a truck that fell into them. They're still not completely excavated, and one of the guides said they're actually owned by a guy in Vancouver. (How does a person come to purchase an abandoned network of tunnels under a town hundreds of miles away?)

There are two tours, the "Chicago Connection" and the "Passage to Fortune"; each is 50 minutes, takes you to different cleaned-up and elaborately decorated (with historical settings and artifacts, not wallpaper) sections of the tunnels and is highly theatrical, with costumed guides involving visitors in a storyline. I personally have been a bootlegger, a coolie, an artist and a doorstop. The Chicago tour is based on the theory that Al Capone was running a smuggling operation from Moose Jaw during Prohibition -- despite the fact that there is no historical evidence he ever set foot in the town. Kind of odd, but good fun, if you can remember that it's historical speculation rather than a re-enactment of any sort.

"Passage to Fortune," though, while based on fictional/composite characters, is packed with factual information about the mistreatment of Chinese immigrants in turn-of-the-20th-century Canada. Things were so dire in China after the Opium War that people were willing to pay exorbitant fees to coolie brokers to get to Canada to make their fortunes -- only to discover they were essentially indentured slaves with no hope of returning to China or bringing family members over for years, if ever. The Canadian government, which didn't really want them except that they were cheap labor for the railroads, extracted an increasingly outrageous "head tax" on Chinese immigrants, and white Canadians treated them with vicious racism. They worked ridiculously long hours for the railroad or in laundries, doing dangerous, injurious work with no medical attention, crap food and little sleep. It's a really ugly chapter in Canada's history.

So I felt kind of arrogant and disrespectful going over to the Temple Gardens Mineral Spa for a long soak in the hot pool and a body wrap. For a little while, anyway. The huge, shallow pool is a wonderful place to forget your problems and everyone else's, too, and relax. You can boil yourself in the whirlpool area, or bob through a passage into the open air (without getting out of the water), where the water is hotter and the cool air and occasional kisses of rain on your shoulders remind you how extraordinarily good it is to be alive.

The body wrap was supposed to do all kinds of nutritive things to my skin with vitamins and detoxifying botanical elixirs, but the whole point, ultimately, is that it feels fantastic to get scrubbed down, slathered with fragrant herbaceous goo, wrapped up like a leftover taco and left to bake in a darkened room. Then comes a refreshing shower, another slicking of moisturizer and it's time to remember what your name is and how to drive. Oh, and put your clothes on. Do that first.

In my wanderings around town I spotted several of the Murals of Moose Jaw, which are just what the name says. Forty-six murals by different artists depict aspects of local history and culture, and they really brighten up the blank sides of those utilitarian 19th-century buildings.

The show wasn't over when I left to drive back to Regina. I wanted to get back before it got dark, because that highway is unlit and I saw elk crossing signs. Enough said.

Saskatchewan calls itself the "Land of Living Skies," and driving east on the Trans-Canada at sundown, I found out why. As is the case where the land is flat, the sky is HUGE, and this sky was a surging lava lamp of activity. Behind me, the sun was going all molten in a crucible of ragged dark clouds. To the right was a slate wall of storm clouds and distant rain. To the left and overhead was a slow-motion churn of shapes in shades of gray. The bottom layer was so low, it couldn't have been more than a few hundred feet, but it was broken and showing higher clouds in lighter colors. It's a good thing the road is almost entirely flat, die-straight and free of sudden hazards, because my eyes kept turning upwards. I think that drive put something into me that the Chinese laundry had taken out.

Finished the day with a luscious meal at the Cathedral Free House in Regina, then repacked and enjoyed a brief nap before dropping the car at the airport and boarding a flight to Winnipeg.

June 7: Regina in the rain

I have been informed that it is hotter than the hinges of hell right now in Pittsburgh and even in Toronto. Huh. When I left Pittsburgh, it had been cold and raining for like a week, and guess what! I brought it out here with me! I have now not seen more than about five minutes of sun since I left British Columbia, which would bother me less if it weren't so cold. To be fair, these temperatures (highs that don't crack 60, or single and low double digits Celsius) are below normal for this time and place.

Still, the Regina Farmers Market was slightly forlorn in the morning. I got in from the airport, having flown in from Calgary, a little after 9 a.m. and discovered that the weekly farmers market was conveniently across the street from my hotel, the elegant Victorian Hotel Saskatchewan Radisson Plaza. (Queen Victoria is very much present here, as you'd expect in a city named for her title. Pronunciation tip: The i is long, unlike the girl's name. One of the main intersections in town is the corner of Victoria and Albert.)

ANyway, the forlornness of the market was mostly superficial and visual; the 10 or so vendors huddled under dripping awnings while a handful of shoppers wandered by under umbrellas. The wares were plants -- mostly flowers -- and baked goods, homemade preserves, honey, beeswax. And sushi. Yep.

But the more time I spent there, the less forlorn it became. People seemed to know each other and the vendors, and there were friendly greetings and chat and warm smiles despite the damp chill. One of the flowering-plant vendors seemed particularly popular, and people were strolling away from his stall carrying geraniums and other blooms in pots. I stopped at a stall with bread and rice crispy treats and purchased a cookie. Or tried to. When I handed the vendor a $20, she said, in a vaguely European accent, "You got no change?" I didn't. "It's OK," she said, with a dismissive wave of her hand. "You take the cookie, you pay me later when you walk by again."

So I got some coffee, broke the $20, and that's exactly what I did. It was worth the extra walking in the drizzle to watch her face light up.

Regina reminds of Pittsburgh. It has a steelmaking past, an immigrant population (I see a lot of Eastern European churches in the phone book and names on signs and businesses) and a friendly, unpretentious vibe. People smile and say "hi" and joke about the rain as you pass on the sidewalk. An older couple stopped me from feeding a parking meter and explained that Saturdays are free.

Fortified with my coffee and cookie, I took a spin around the imposing Saskatchewan provincial parliament building and then drove out to the RCMP Heritage Center, excuse me, Centre to see what the story is with the Mounties. Now, it's easy to poke fun, and I've done it, with the whole Dudley Do-Right, Jeannette MacDonald-and-Nelson Eddy, bright red tunics and funny hats thing, but I came away from the Heritage Centre with a greater understanding and new respect for the RCMP and what they stand for. Even though the first thing I thought when I drove onto the campus (it's also a training center, excuse me, centre) and spotted an RCMP cruiser was, "Wait -- they have CARS? What a gyp!"

PM John A. MacDonald founded the North West Mounted Police in 1873 because as trading and settlement extended westward, there were clashes with the Indians and general lawlessness, and MacDonald specifically wanted to avoid the kind of war and carnage that had been happening in the American West. So yeah, they have the word "police" in the name, but they weren't meant to be ordinary cops going out there to enforce laws and arrest people. The Mounties were also meant to be diplomats, peacekeepers and social workers who strove to maintain fair and friendly relations with the Indians and order among the rough characters streaming westward to work on railroads, trade, mine or whatever. They were trained to be creative and resourceful and flexible, not just the toughest guys in town or ruthless enforcers. Though they were pretty implacable about chasing down bad guys, which is how they got that "always get their man" rep. They chased some miscreant all the way down to Nevada, where I bet those red wool tops were pretty damn uncomfortable.

The RCMP was all about community policing before that was hip. MacDonald (Sir John, not Jeannette) borrowed the idea from Sir Robert Peel, for whom English "bobbies" are named. There was a great quote in the multimedia show, which I recommend -- it has hokey moments, but it's fun to watch and really gives you a sense of the more modern work the RCMP is doing, in the CSI line -- and I'm sorry I missed who said it, but the idea was so insightful coming from someone in the 19th century dealing with a frontier that I scribbled it down in the dark: "It is not law we want in this country, but justice."

That right there, I think, is the essence of what makes the RCMP different from a standard police force. Not so much the horsies.

After lunch I went to the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, which starts its look at Saskatchewan's history with the cooling of the Earth's crust. Actually, the geological and paleontological stuff is quite interesting and well-presented, as are the displays about native culture. It's a very worthwhile museum at a bargain rate (suggested donation for adults: $2).

I went for a walk in Wascana Centre, an enormous park with a small lake in it, but the weather got punitive and I couldn't do much besides walk. The rain didn't deter the many rowing crews who had been having some kind of competition and were thronging down at the marina (you can rent canoes and kayaks when it's not a pouring race day), or the ducks, geese and pelicans (no kidding! was NOT expecting pelicans), and, inspired by them, I walked around the lake. I saw the Willow Island ferry, which can be booked on weekends to take people out to a small island in the lake for picnics. I can see the lake from my 10th-floor hotel room, the amazingly spacious Grosvenor Suite. Yes, I have at last realized my dream of staying in a hotel room fine enough to have a name.

The waitress who brought my dinner asked me if I was going to Mosaic afterward. Mosaic is an annual cultural festival, in which Regina celebrates its many ethnic groups with pavilions all over town. I had heard bagpipes and glimpsed a tent through the trees in the park but was too chilled and soggy to do anything about it. For a moment I toyed with the idea of going back there and seeing what the Scots were up to. "What happens in the pavilions besides music?" I asked the waitress. "Oh, food -- that's mostly what I go for, great food -- and people drink and party and have a good time."

Alas, I had photos to import, so I had to go back to the hotel.

Program note: I'm going to Moose Jaw to see the tunnels and sample the delights of the spa, but I won't be able to write about it until Monday because I'll get back late and have to be at the airport at 5:30 a.m. (!) Until then, here's hoping for better weather.

June 6: Stampeding into Calgary

I couldn't leave Banff without taking the waters, but the hot mineral spring that provided the original draw for tourists has been closed for over 20 years because it contains a unique snail. Well, a lot of them, actually. We visited the Cave and Basin historic site yesterday morning on our tour to see the cave where the hot spring was discovered (by railroad workers) and the bathing pools. The smell was impressive. Why people actually wanted to immerse themselves and get their noses close to such a vile sulphur funk is a mystery to me. And if the snails, which are about the size of lemon seeds, were there then ... yuck. I'm sorry, I just don't get it.

No, the way to enjoy the Banff spa experience without gagging or getting icky protected snails in your bathing suit -- no longer a real threat, since you can't even put your hand in the water because it might upset the snails -- is to visit the modern public spring facility on Sulphur Mountain up near the gondola or, if you crave serious luxury, to spend a day dipping and soaking at the Fairmont's spa. They've got a whole complicated ritual mapped out, which I adapted to shorten the amount of time necessary and cut out most of the "cold plunge" parts. But they have whirlpools and waterfall pools of different temperatures, a sauna and steam room, a dreamy mineral pool with underwater music (!) and two special rooms just for sitting comfortably, drinking tea, staring out at the mountains and congratulating yourself on being able to be there.

When I was thoroughly waterlogged, I tore myself away to drive to Calgary, leaving the dramatic peaks of the Rockies behind me for more modest treed hills, then patches of flat that hint at the prairies ahead. Calgary is amazingly vibrant and growing despite having winter temperatures that reach something like -40 (F or C? -40 is the same on both scales!). It's the youngest city in Canada populationwise, with an average age of 35, and personal incomes run very high while unemployment runs very low. There is construction everywhere.

I got a literal overview of the city from the Calgary Tower, Calgary's version of the Space Needle or CN Tower. From the observation deck you can see all the way back to the last line of Rockies, or straight down into the street, thanks to sections of transparent flooring.

Very nearby is the elegant and fascinating Glenbow Museum. It's an eclectic mix of something for everybody: art, history, culture, including a wonderful exhibit about the memorable pioneer characters of Alberta's history, beautiful Asian/Indian art, and a splendid and intriguing cross-cultural, cross-temporal look at warriors and warrior culture. Suits of armor, kimonos, battle dress, guns, spears, war bonnets. Stuff from all over time and all over the world, cleverly organized for comparison and contrast.

Throughout the museum is a remarkable emphasis on First Nations (what Canada calls its native peoples) artifacts, art, culture and point of view. Exhibits dealing with the white settlement of Western Canada and the expansion of the railroads include the role native peoples played and their impressions, attitudes and reactions. Historical and art exhibits also have sections devoted to women. Like women warriors, representations of Indian/Asian goddesses, pioneer women, women in the armed forces. When you look around the images and portraits displayed at Glenbow, you see many kinds of faces and names. The cool part is that none of this comes across as contrived or preachy; it seems very natural, smoothly integrated and comprehensive.

Wow.

There were schoolkids there while I was -- the museum does a lot to engage and cater to kids -- and they actually seemed interested and attentive.

I started to stroll down the Stephen Avenue pedestrian mall, but the weather got ugly. Fortunately, it cleared up later when I met my friend George, who lives in Calgary, for dinner and a stroll around Prince's Island Park. I'm glad, because the park is truly a gem and it would have been a shame to miss it. Our evening amble also ratcheted up my critter count by two: We spotted, within seconds of each other, a snow hare and a rabbit. The hare startled me, because it was huge by bunny standards.

Tomorrow I take to the skies once again, bright and early. I can't wait to find out how domestic Canadian security compares with American!

Photo note: I dropped some pix from the train ride to Whistler into previous blogs. I'm catching up slowly but surely and hope you'll stay tuned!

June 5: Banff

This morning I woke up in what was once the staff quarters of the Banff Springs Hotel but is now a very fine newly renovated guest wing of the Fairmont Banff Springs with a FANTASTIC view of the Rockies outside my window. (They apparently built the hotel backward, giving the staff the best views.)

After a very fortifying trip to the breakfast buffet, I took a three-hour tour (a three-hour tour, "Gilligan's Island" fans) of Banff National Park, on which I saw an elk and several bighorn sheep and learned that, in the early days of the railroad resort that Banff was in its early days, they put up bleachers around the town dump and let folks come and watch the bears rummage through the trash. Also saw some beautiful lakes, one of which was dammed and flooded a little town you can now visit with scuba gear.

Had an outrageously good lunch at Bison Bistro and Deli (bacon and cheddar sandwich to die for -- real bacon, not that limp Canadian stuff) and then went on an hourlong horseback ride. For the first time since I can remember, I got a horse that was actually of an appropriate size for my short stature. I always felt like the outfitters would take one look at me and give me the most enormous horse in the stable, preferably one with deep-seated psychological problems. My horse was a little stubborn (I tried to steer now and then, then gave up), but he was of a manageable size and well-behaved. And the scenery -- it almost makes it more gorgeous and romantic to bob through it atop a horse. I even liked going back to the hotel smelling of horse and leather.


Couldn't resist a trip up the Banff Gondola, which takes 8 minutes to haul you up (closed car) to the top of a mountain from which you can see EVERYTHING and Banff looks like a tiny miniature Christmas village. Mountains, mountains everywhere, a double ribbon of highway, a blue milky lake, a snaking river (the Bow), and a thin atmosphere that made climbing the steps to the cosmic ray monitoring tower (I kid you not -- it's no longer in service) one of the colder exercises in heavy breathing anyone's ever likely to encounter. Did I mention it's cold? Did I mention the gondola took me far enough up to be on the same level with snow?



Anyway, if you look back a few posts now you'll see I'm beginning to be able to add in remedial pictures, thanks to some tech support back in Pittsburgh. Thank you, David. I'll be dropping in more of those as I can get them sized and get time to add them. All will soon be shipshape and Bristol fashion.

Did I mention there are a lot of Brits here?

June 4: Across the great divide

I have spent the past two days on a train. But not just any train. The Rocky Mountaineer is the most remarkable train I've ever been on, and I've done the TGV, the Bullet Train, the overnight train from Helsinki to Moscow (back when Moscow was in the USSR) and the R5 Paoli Local.

First let me assure you I've taken approximately 817 million pictures, because there is never a blah moment. If there ever threatens to be a blah moment, visually, on this train, you come out of the trees and suddenly there are mountains crowding around you begging to be photographed, a surging glacial torrent below, sun breaking through clouds to spotlight an alpine meadow, cows posing serenely and the threat of a random moose up ahead on the right. It's almost more than a person who has been told all her life that Pennsylvania has "mountains" can withstand.

So, yes, there will be pictures, and you will -- you WILL -- say wowwwww. That's what I said, and I wasn't even sure what I was looking at, thanks to a cocktail hour that begins at 10 a.m. I told you this was a great train.

But for now, as once again it's nearly midnight and I have to be up with the larks (though not the garbage trucks this time, which I appreciate), let me just paint you some pictures with words. AT LAST, THE PHOTOS ARE HERE! SOMEDAY, MY PRINTS WILL COME ...

Starting with a phrase not my own that was stuck in my head like a piece of spinach between teeth for the whole two days: "The mighty rivers of British Columbia." Hardcore Monty Python fans will recognize that from the preamble of the Lumberjack Song. The rivers of British Columbia are indeed mighty, especially when swollen to slick creaminess by snowmelt. We privileged travelers in the Gold Leaf service category and Gold Dome coach got excellent views of several rivers while sipping, dining and gazing out the overarching windows of our rail car. For fresh air and guaranteed glare-free photography, we could descend the spiral staircase to the dining level and step out onto the vestibule, where occasional rain and the scent of diesel didn't deter dogged photographers, videographers and wildlife spotters from crowding the railings and getting hands and hair in each other's shots.

It's funny how even in the most idyllic circumstances, little things can frustrate you. Like when the perfect pristine vista would open up, I'd aim my camera, start to squeeze the button and tall, lush hemlocks or lodgepole pines would come marching along the riverbank and right into my shot. "Damn you trees!" I barked more than once. "Down in front! Where are the loggers when you need them?"

I'm not proud of it.

The service and food on the Rocky Mountaineer are both outstanding, and I was blessed with a very pleasant and sympatico seatmate -- see previous post. Joff, a Kiwi from Christchurch who can rattle off the Monty Python "word association football" monologue and also goose a balky laptop, saved my butt more than once and let me have his window seat for most of Day 2. Of course, I pegged him as an Aussie at first, because the accent is so similar and our car was absolutely bursting with Aussies. (Aussies and Brits seem to have made up a majority of our fellow passengers.) But he forgave me for that and for beginning the conversation with "I'm from Pittsburgh, and yes, those were my boys winning in multiple overtime last night" (Canadians are very interested to hear where I live, thanks to the playoffs), to which Joff replied, "I have no idea what you're talking about," so I accused him of being Australian.

ANyway, yesterday we chugged through the chilly rainforest along the mighty rivers of British Columbia (MRBC), spotting bald eagles, some outlined against the sky as if posing for currency, until we got up onto the Thompson Plateau, where the terrain changes abruptly into kind of a high desert look. Badlands. Scrub. Few trees, lodgepoles, sagebrush. It looked like the American Southwest, and I can understand now why Westerns are filmed in Canada. You want miles and miles of John Wayne scenery with nary a cell phone tower or interstate in sight, you got it. But the changeover from the cold, damp evergreen forest to painted, sandy rock faces is so fast, it's like someone stitched together the edges of two completely different and unrelated climates. Even the air out on the vestibule was dramatically warmer and drier.


We saw a couple of bighorn sheep, who weren't interested.

When we rolled into Kamloops, we were met by two men and a woman in matching Western wear (red shirts, cowboy hats, horses) who stood in formation and waved at the train as it rolled in. Our onboard attendants Candice and Leah noted that these people turn out in full regalia and horsalia to greet every arriving train. I got a better look at them when we got off to go to our hotels for the night, and they were all wearing gold name badges, though I was too far away to read them.

The horses' gold name tags, however, were affixed to their foreheads (harnesses, anyway), so I can tell you that the Kamloops welcoming committee consists of Beau, Maxx and Bonanza and the people they were wearing.


After a productive night at the Comfort Inn and Suites in Kamloops (I actually did laundry, which was a mercy to everyone closer to me than you are right now), we went back to the train for another day of mind-blowingly vast, majestic and unique scenery as we headed toward Banff and Calgary. The terrain and vegetation went back to the original theme, though we officially entered the Rocky Mountains and became surrounded by impossibly high, craggy mountains with snow-streaked peaks and turgid little torrents pouring off them. Creeks became milky with glacial mineral dust, and ponds and lakes became mirrors.

We saw a lone moose, reportedly a female. Then we saw a couple of black bears, possibly foraging for spilled grain along the tracks.

Never mind -- I can't do it justice. The camera can't either, but I'll show you some photos that will have you shaking your head and wondering if I Photoshopped them. In the meantime, I need to sleep off the Kokanee light beer and other festive beverages the generous attendants kept offering us. I leave you with a poem I wrote (not so much a poem as a hijacked song) that was read with great seriousness by an onboard attendant too young to appreciate its homage. Feel free to sing along and add your own "Oh she's ... etc." repetitions of the chorus:


Oh I'm a passenger, so give a cheer,
I ride on the Rocky Mountaineer!

I look at trees,
I eat my lunch,
I queue for the lavat'ry.
On Wednesday I left Kamloops
Headed up to Banff, AB!

Oh I'll drink orange juice but like free beer,
I ride on the Rocky Mountaineer!


I look at trees,
I search for moose,
I want to see a bear.
The vestibule is crowded
When I take pictures there.

Oh wear a Gold Leaf on the upper tier,
To ride on the Rocky Mountaineer!

I shoot through trees
At peaks and falls,
Bald eagles and ospreys.
I love a cocktail hour
That lasts for two whole days!

June 2: Run outta town on a rail

I should mention, as a farewell to Vancouver, that I got in a brief walk on the seawall at Stanley Park, the second largest urban park in North America. Saw a couple of harbor seals!

I spent the whole day today riding the Rocky Mountaineer from Vancouver to Kamloops through some more astounding scenery. That seems to be in unlimited supply out here. I'll finish my journey to Banff on the train tomorrow and write more about it then, as well as catching up on some other stuff from the past couple of days, but I spent my whole evening here at the Comfort Inn and Suites in Kamloops figuring out how to get these videos I shot on the Whistler Mountaineer and while ziplining up on the blog. It took four hours and a technical consult from my seatmate, Joff from New Zealand, who just happens to be a professional computer guru (how's that for a stroke of luck?), but I got three out of five of them into blog-ready form. They're pretty damn good quality for a camera about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Two are of the Cheakamus Canyon, shot from the train to Whistler, and the third is shot from a secure location attached to my harness, in the vicinity of my right pectoral muscle, while I demonstrate ziplining with the help of one of our Ziptrek guides. Please watch and enjoy!

TECH RAGE NOTE: Reaction to the third video has so far been, "It sure would have been cool if you'd left the camera running while you actually slid down the zipline" -- and of course, I DID. I can see that when I play the video, but apparently others can't. Which makes me furious, because I lost a LOT of sleep fooling with that video, and it apparently doesn't even work right. So I'm going to leave it up, but let me tell you this: If you play it, look for the length. If it's loading at less than 2 minutes, DON'T BOTHER WATCHING IT. I start sliding at about 1 minute 50 and go till about 2 minutes 20, but if the full video doesn't load for you, don't waste your time. And there won't be any more video if it's going to keep me up all night and then not even play. Boy, that makes me angry.

Zippity doo dah!

OK, encountering new and different photo technology difficulties, and this is a bad time for that because I want to talk about my ziplining adventure.

(A fellow blogger offered to size my pix in Photoshop if I'd send them. I got them loaded onto this machine, and now the e-mail doesn't work so I can't send them. Of course.)

Whistler, BC, is a picturesque ski-resort town nestled in the mountains. If you've ever been to any of the nicer ski resorts in the American Rockies, with their boutiques, restaurants and boot-friendly design, you'd feel a warm appreciation for Whistler, which is in overdrive as it prepares to host the 2010 winter Olympics jointly with Vancouver.

When I arrived there Sunday morning, I had an extraordinarily lavish suite at the Fairmont, with four rooms (one of which was a closet), two bathrooms, two fireplaces, a jacuzzi bath and a TV in the john. (The top two pictures here are the view from my window.) But I didn't get to stay in it long, because I needed to pop down into town and rent a bike for a quick taste of Whistler's favorite warm-weather pastime. Seriously, the biker boys take their bikes up on the ski lifts and ride down. Not that I would do that. But I did rent a bike and go for a few-mile ride out to Lost Lake and around that smallish (for a lake) body of water. It was chilly and gray, with occasional threatening stings of rain, so I didn't have a lot of company. But it was a good ride, and I got back, returned my trusty steed and prepared for the second, way more daunting activity for the afternoon: Ziplining with Ziptrek Eco Tours.

Ziplining, for those who don't know, is getting strapped into a harness, hooked to a cable and sliding down it like James Bond. Except you do it in a helmet, not a tuxedo. Ziptrek provided my intrepid group with three guides, and I have to salute them because they somehow managed to make me feel something less than abjectly terrified -- and that's a powerful testament to their air of confidence, competence, experience and calm, because I can think of a lot of things I like better than falling off a high thing over a roaring, snowmelt-turgid creek full of rocks. Like herpes.

I'm not good with heights. But here's the amazing thing I discovered when they strapped me in, hooked me up and told me to unclench my toes and take to the air: It's only really terrifying for the first 20 feet or so. Then that wussy part of your brain stem that can't quite believe dangling over a gorge is in any way safe or natural suddenly goes, "Oh hey -- I'm not dead yet." And relaxes just a teeny bit. Also, and more seriously, there are a lot of things about ziplining that blunt the screamy edge.

1. It's not free-fall. You're going down at an angle, not plummeting straight down, and you're always well aware that the cable is holding you aloft, so you don't get that sickening stomach-up-through-the-soft-palate uncontrolled plunge feel.

2. (Or 1a really) You're never crazy, out-of-control fast. The cable is not without resistance.

3. The harness really does cradle your butt and make you feel surprisingly secure.

So after five zips, I can say it's really, really cool, especially when I worked up the courage to look down for a few seconds. (That's not me in the picture. I just wanted to show you what the rig looks like.)

After the Ziptrek tour, I got some tasty dinner at a place called Earls where my waitress worked for Ziptrek. Small resort. And I found a Cows! Cows ice cream is a Prince Edward Island chain rumored to sell the best ice cream in North America. The raspberry chocolate chip is very nice indeed. I must sample more for a scientific analysis.

I have video. Of the ziplining, silly, not of me sitting around porking out at Cows. Someday I may figure out how to upload it. In the meantime, I'm still trying to get pictures for you. Hope there's time tomorrow!

Bed now. More later.