An Excellent Adventure
“Can I call you Keanu?”
“Shut up.”
“No really, you kind’a look like him.” “You do dude, no lie.” “Ja, yoo doo.”
“Woah.”
It was about 24 hours into the Toronto-to-Vancouver trip on Via’s Canadian Line across the country. The four of us were sitting in the bubble car (observation car? space car? c’mon, it looks like a bubble), crammed around a tiny table clearly designed in 1950 for (literally) little old ladies to play bridge at. The sun was about to set, but apparently the rest of the train had become sick of the seemingly-endless expanse of Ontario and had declined to join us upstairs.
I’m gonna miss Ontario
Joe the ex-Preacher was sitting beside me, and responded to our mutual introduction with the pithy observation above. I’m on the fence about the whole Keanu-similarity, but I’ll grant that with a ragged beard and a train-monotony glaze in my eyes, there might be some resemblance. The other members of our increasingly-disreputable group were Josh from Oz and Waleed the Swede (he’s actually Swiss).
“I think I’m drunk” Joe said. “For the first time.”
Joe is my age (mid thirties) and brought beers on the train (I forgot) so this admission was definitely unexpected, even from a former preacher. The three of us ragged him for a few minutes until it became clear that he wasn’t kidding. This was the first time that he had ever been drunk – on a train, in northern Ontario, with three strangers, heading towards exotic Manitoba.
Exotic Manitoba
We spent the next two hours cracking the usual dick-and-vagina jokes that guys will crack when no women are listening, including Joe at one point describing the birth of his first child with a very graphic visual of, uh, his wife. At numerous points he insisted he was going to hell. No one argued.
I’ve always wanted to take this train, and being unemployed and homeless provided the perfect opportunity. My company on the ride was pretty diverse – the youngest of our train fam was half my age, just back from 3 months in Israel, while I shared the honor of eldest with two guys who couldn’t have been more different than me and each other if this whole ride had been on a reality TV set. There were of course other people than our fam on the train, but they came and went while we were a constant (source of annoyance to the crew). There were a *lot of oldies, as Josh loudly called them, as you’d expect – who else has a week free to sally forth across the country on a land steamer?? But they did their best to ignore us, for the most part.
Seven of us quickly formed a good bond over beers, jokes, selfies and awe.
Awe
Our chairs in Economy weren’t quite as comfortable as a few travel blogs had led me to believe; the food available to us (outside of the dining car) was commissary-esque at best, though palatable and affordable; they regularly ran out of beer (despite us often illicitly bringing our own on board); and there were no functional stops, whatsoever, due to a delay which can’t fairly be blamed on Via.
Despite all of that, I can’t wait to take the trip again. The Canadian landscape is stunning, even in winter. I can’t begin to imagine how gorgeous it must be in the summer. When I wanted time alone, it was there, and when I wanted company, the best was to be had. At no point did I wish for the ride to be over (although I did wish us to be the hell out of Winnipeg as quickly as possible). I was happy to arrive in Vancouver of course, as the second stage of my excellent adventure, but I’m not sure I would have said no if Via had immediately offered me a return ticket.
“Hey, man, you awake?”
“Ya Joe, what’s up?”
“When I get over this hangover, and come to grips with that conversation, I think it’s going to be really cathartic for me. So thanks, Keanu.”
“You mean that conversation where you described your wife’s vagina?”
“… yes. That one. Thank you. This is my stop.”
