Day 9 – Jasper to Vancouver

It is amazing the inner calm one can summon when on holiday, we arrived at the train station for our afternoon train to Vancouver to be met by a smiling guard who told us 'Sorry folks, the train is gonna be a little late' 'How late?' I asked, 'Oh, about 7 or 8 hours" 

If a smiling guard had said that to me at Victoria Station in London I would have had no choice other than to immediately leap over the counter and beat him to death with whatever was close to hand. As it was, on holiday, in Canada, relaxed, I simply smiled and said 'Can't be helped'. 

In yet another display of how nice Canadians are, the woman who ran the B&B we had stayed at let us back into our room to watch DVDs for the evening. I settled in with a 2 litre bottle of Ridin' Dirty (not just a beer but a beauty contest www.ridindirty.ca) and watched ice hockey and Chuck Norris commercials.

The train finally pulled into the station at about 10 but we then had to wait for a further hour and a half as there is only one track out of town and a freight train needed to get through. The annoying part is that our train ride through the Rockie Mountains – which is billed by sad, anorak-wearing, hot-flask carrying train spotters around the world as one of the true great train journeys – started in pitch darkness. An old lady in the seat in front of us stopped the guard and asked him to wake her 'When we get to The Rockies', 'Well this is it ma'am' he replied, waiving his hand in splendour towards the non-existant scenery 'This is as good as it gets'. An african elephant in a tutu playing a tuba could have been snowboarding past at that exact moment. It could have, but we'll never know.

I watched a couple of films into the early morning and crashed out at about 1am dreaming of zombies and bad Canadian red wine.