Friday May 29, 2009
Since some people are leaving the train in Jasper, which we should reach about noon, breakfast is being handled differently today. Instead of breakfast beginning at 6:30, there will be a continental breakfast in the dome car and a brunch beginning at 7:30. No lunch. So at 6:30 we trekked down to the dome car for coffee but the pot was empty. Good news was that there were packets of Honey Nut Cheerios for Glenn and there was one banana left. Before long others came looking for coffee and once the attendant reappeared he brought another pot. We heard a lot of complaints from passengers mainly about the lack of water and the cold. I don't know if I mentioned before that normally you each get a bottle of water in your cabin every night but they ran out after the first night. What - they couldn't send somebody out for water during their four hour stop in Winnipeg, or any of their other stops?
Anyway, at brunch Glenn had bacon, eggs and toast and I had waffles with berries. Sat with the man from Squamish again and a humourous Chinese fellow from Vancouver.
We passed a pond with a large beaver house which would have been easy to photograph if I'd been ready with the camera. In fact, we passed many beaver houses and I never got a picture of one. It became sort of a joke with the people around us in the dome car when I'd miss house after house. Even with the camera on and ready to go, by the time you see something and get the camera focused it's too late.
For over an hour we sat by a lake west of Edmonton, blue in the sunshine, waiting for a freight train to pass. Freight trains take precedence. I'm not sure if the one we sat by for so long was Lake Wabamun - once used for float plane landing practice by the Royal Canadian Air Force, or Mink Lake. Some docks and boats line the shores of the lake. Mostly blue sky, high cloud. Red-winged blackbirds periodically visit the small fir tree out our window. I can't hear them calling but can tell they are when their wings and tail feathers fluff out.
An announcement came on asking people to limit their time in the dome cars to half an hour. Reading, dozing, viewing, it can be easy to sit in there for hours. No doubt those cars will be packed once we get into the mountains.
Apparently the tracks were being cut ahead, whatever that means, and we had to stop for more freight trains. We are now two hours behind schedule for getting into Jasper.
Mountain sheep
We saw three black bears, one quite small, elk and mountain sheep.
There seemed to be not much snow around Jasper, but then the mountains seem flatter and less spectacular than down around Banff, I think. It is interesting though to see the rock formations.
There was some snow
Views in & around Jasper
Hooray they're finally cleaning the windows and we'll be able to see better for the rest of the journey through BC.
And we're on our way although we were delayed so long that there isn't much daylight left.
Above left: These are the new concrete ties that are replacing the old wooden ties.
Right: According to Glenn, the silver structure contains equipment which monitors the condition of the freight car wheels and detects "hot boxes" when axles are overheating and transmits warnings to the trains engineer.
We had supper with a lady from a small town in BC and a man from a different small town. They weren't together. She was a crusty older lady who had done a fair amount of cross-country horseback riding in the interior BC. She left the table before dessert and then the man, who had barely said a word up to that point, slowly began to open up. We found out that he had retired from the railway and had lost his wife a year and a half ago. So he seemed a bit sad and at loose ends, but was such a sweet soul that I wish we'd met him earlier in the trip. He was departing well before Vancouver to visit his son at a place on a lake.
Glenn and I had chicken with scalloped potatoes and we shared a cheesecake dessert.
What a beautiful day for it. It would have been perfect for a picnic... if I was ever to have a picnic.
I don't remember statice being two-coloured like this but maybe I never paid attention to it.
There seems to be more Angel's Trumpet flowers near the entrance this year. A highly toxic plant, it is best not to touch with bare hands. I may have said it before but I do like its canteloupe colours.
This flower probably wouldn't win a beauty prize. In fact, the blackish tops remind me of horse droppings we sometimes see on the streets in our neighbourhood. Our visitors noted that the flowers had a smell. I rubbed the black part and, sure enough, noticed a smell thankfully not like horse droppings but more like popcorn. We didn't know what the plant was called so we popped by the plant identification booth and were told the plant is a Cassia but the name is being changed to Senna. The species is S. didymobotrya. Also called... ta-dah... popcorn plant!
New in the gift shop window is this carousel horse. Up until now there was a zebra in the window. Opening date for the carousel has now been moved to December. It looks like there will also be a rabbit, frog and camel among other animals. Apparently there could be up to 30 in all. The animals have been selected by the garden's owner to reflect different areas of the world that visitors come from. Each is hand-crafted from a single block of basswood and hand-painted by a company in Sun Valley (near LA) California. A figure can take up to 18 months to complete. 
