Canadian Rail Vacation
(Note: Clicking on any photo in this travelogue will bring up an enlarged version of the image.)
Sunday, August
19
Home to Banff, AB, Canada
Bill Henderson is an angel. He takes delight in being helpful to other folks, and kindly agreed to store my car while I was away, and ferry me to and from the airport. I showed up at his house at zero-dark-thirty, and he whisked me out to Newark in about 25 minutes at that hour for my flight to Calgary, Alberta. The standard tour as set up by Vacations By Rail is a loop that starts and ends in Vancouver. But we couldn't find a standard tour that fit both Jenny's and my availability, so we cobbled together pieces of two adjacent tours that started and ended in Banff. Great, I thought. Fly to Calgary instead of Vancouver; shorter, cheaper. And so it was for me. But since Jenny lives in Vermont, it made more sense for each of us to fly separately, rather than to drive 230 combined miles to some common airport and fly together. And there were no direct flights to Calgary from any airport convenient to Jenny. So she wound up 9 hours in transit from Boston to Chicago to Calgary. The tour company arranged coach transport from Calgary to Banff where we were to meet up.
I arrived in Calgary and found my bus connection. We headed west across the Alberta plains as flat as a tennis court with some serious mountains in the far distance. On the flight, I had noticed a young fellow with an expensive-looking cello case, who also wound up on the bus with me. We struck up a conversation about flying with instruments and other related topics. He was a recent Boston School of Music graduate living in Brooklyn, doing freelance work, and headed out to a recording gig in Banff. We had common acquaintances. I thought to perhaps meet up with him and his friends that afternoon and wander the town, but as it turned out, my hotel was not convenient to his, and we passed out of each other's lives like the proverbial ships in the night.
The tour was to take place in 4 stages. (Refer to map).
As the bus approached our destination, those mountains got even more serious. They sprung abruptly and vertically out of the flat landscape like God's own ramparts. And we wound up those ramparts to the tourist town of Banff. As I later found out, it's an inviting and entertaining place to wander. But the bus took me through the town, and up the winding road on the other side to the Fairmount Banff Springs Hotel.
This was the first of several Fairmount Hotels we stayed in. This is not my usual fare, which normally tends towards a Motel 6 or a spare room in somebody's house. The night time photo of the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel does not do it justice. It looms a stonepile on a mountain crag like some fairytale castle, and impossibly tall. I say impossibly, because if one were to build a stone structure that high, the walls would need to be 40 or 50 feet thick to support the weight. It's got to be a steel structure clad in stone inside and out. There are stone arches in the interior that hide steel beams. There are restaurants and shops and function rooms and spas and swimming pools and grounds and gardens tended by an army of landscapers and gardeners. You can (and I did) get lost in the place.
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This Fairmont hotel, like those in Jasper and Whistler were originally built by the Canadian Pacific Railroad in the 1880s in order to lure rich passengers to the railroads. According to William Cornelius Van Horne, general manager of the CPR, "Since we can't export the scenery, we'll have to import the tourists." I found the place endlessly fascinating. Way more posh than I'm used to, or even comfortable with. Apparently meant for better-heeled clientele than us. We were hit with some serious sticker-shock the first time we ate in one of the restaurants. $30 for the breakfast buffet. True, it included an omelet prepared to your order; but it wasn't a particularly tasty omelet. Or particularly big. It especially annoyed me, because I was essentially a captive consumer. The hotel was several miles from town, and there were no other restaurants nearby. One of the tourguides on the train later told me that Van Horne deliberately built his hotels at some distance from the station so as not to annoy his guests with the noise, cinders, and general lower-class environs of the railroad. We ate from the snack bar thereafter at the Banff Springs Hotel, and dined off-premises at subsequent Fairmonts when possible.
During the check-in process I encountered a phenomenon I was to hear many times over the course of my trip. The latest buzzword seems to be "Perfect!" It's kind of like the older "Cool!" or "Groovy!", or the more recent and much overused "Awesome!". Except it's to be used in specific situations. Example:
MIKE: I'd like to use the Fitness Room, please.
DESK CLERK: Certainly, Sir. What's your room number?
MIKE: 423.
DESK CLERK: (delightedly) Perfect!
I don't get it. Is she complimenting me on having performed the difficult feat of having memorized a 3-digit number? Do I look like a 4-year-old? And, for that matter, how is she so sure I got it right, anyway? At first I thought it might be a Canadian thing. But I realized that I've also heard the term from people taking orders or information on the phone as well. Maybe some marketing wonk thinks it makes people feel good to be complemented. I dunno. It's groovy, I guess.
I arrived a little after lunch at the hotel, but Jenny wasn't due until that evening because of her longer flight time. So I went exploring. Wandered through the garden, and then went down about 3 or 4 flights of steps that led down the cliff to the Bow river at the base of Bow Falls. Bow Falls was barely high enough to be called a "falls". It was more like a steeper slope at the base of a series of rapids. But there was a considerable flow of water running through that section, and would have made class 4 or 5 white water for a kayaker.
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I found myself surprisingly tired walking along the river and up and down all the stairs. That feeling returned the next day on my morning run. I do a mile every other day. Not much, but my lifestyle is otherwise pretty sedentary, and I need to remind my heart and lungs what they are supposed to do for a living. My heart and lungs gave me an argument, and I couldn't even complete the mile without slowing to a walk for a while. It concerned me. As it later turned out it was the altitude. We were about 4000 feet up, and it was enough to affect me. I was back to my old self after I got home.
Jenny showed up around 10:00 and we went to bed early to be up early for the coach departure the next morning.
Monday, August
20
Banff to Lake Louise
Up at 7:00 (Hey! I thought this was supposed to be a vacation!) in time to run (ineffectively), shower (luxuriously), and breakfast (expensively). Then down to convene with the group to load into the busses. Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full. If there was one down side to this vacation it was that it seemed we were filing into and out of busses a lot. At least the tour took care of transporting our luggage. It seemed a little strange to just leave our bags in our room, and find them teleported to our room at the next hotel when we arrived. The drivers were also our tourguides, pointing out various attractions along the way. They were mostly pretty well informed, well spoken, and entertaining. We were all put on wildlife alert, and urged to sing out if we saw significant fauna. I spotted an elk alongside the road just outside of Banff, and thought I was off to a good start. But that was the first and last I caught. We also got a brief glimpse of a small black bear scuttling into the woods later on, and some bighorn sheep. Also lots of eagles, ospreys, and other birds.
Our route followed the Bow river and the Trans-Canada Highway (Route 1) to Lake Louise. It was also the same route we were to take by rail on our return journey, as well as the route of the first trans-Canadian railroad built in the 1880s. Route 1 is undergoing a long-term expansion from 2-lane to 4-lane. It climbs up the river valley through forested mountain slopes with higher bare peaks behind. We reached Lake Louise in a couple of hours, but passed it by to see some other sights, including the famous Spiral Tunnels in Kicking Horse Pass. (Damn! Why don't they have great place names like that in New Jersey?) These are two rail tunnels dug into the mountain to alleviate the steep grade of the first Canadian rail right-of-way across the Rockies. The grade of the original route, the so-called "Big Hill", was twice as steep as was permissible in the railroad's charter, and was constructed as an expedient to complete the line within the limited funds of the CPR. As a result, from the time of the line's opening in the 1880s to the Spiral Tunnels' completion in 1909, anywhere from 2 to 4 locomotives were required to pull trains up the 15 mile Big Hill eastbound from Field to the Great Divide. And runaway westbound trains down the Hill led to countless wrecks and deaths. The Tunnels were dug in a loop that climbed uphill, emerging from the face of the mountain close to where they entered, but about 50 feet above the entrance. The two tunnels were situated so as to add several miles of track between the same start and end points, thereby reducing the maximum grade of the overall route to within safe limits.
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Our coach stopped by an overlook above the Lower Spiral Tunnel where we could see both ends of the tunnel. Had our timing been right, we could have seen a train entering and exiting the tunnel, crossing over itself. But it was not to be. There was an interesting display at the overlook with historical information and old photos. I could have stayed longer at this site, but we were hustled back on the bus before I had a chance to take it all in. I was continually at odds with the tour's schedule, either wishing I had more time at a particular site, or antsy to get on my way again.
On the last leg of the rail journey a week later, we did go through the tunnels on our way back to Banff.
We got to Lake Louise by lunchtime, and settled into our 2nd Fairmont hotel, the Chateau Lake Louise. Again an enormous elegant structure with beautifully landscaped grounds overlooking Lake Louise. This glacier-fed lake was the perfect Alpine setting, brilliant turquoise colored mirror-smooth water framed by looming mountains. We took a footpath along the lake, maybe half a mile long, which then narrowed and climbed steeply towards the lake's glacial source high above us. We encountered climbers scaling the vertical rockface, lots of Japanese tourists sporting trendy and colorful outdoor gear, a very bold chipmunk that came right up to me and demanded I feed it, a wealth of flat stones just perfect for skipping on the smooth water, and various other diversions. I had hoped to follow that path on a loop high along the mountainside back to the hotel. But I was feeling the altitude (and perhaps my years) and pooped out after a couple of miles. I headed back down the way I came, while Jenny continued around the loop. I napped for a couple of hours until she returned tired and happy.
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23. Sunrise.................. . |
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.....................Lake Louise . |
For all their opulence, I found the Fairmonts surprisingly lacking in what I would have considered some pretty basic customer services. Publicly available computers for Internet and email access were either absent or available only for limited hours at a fee, and not particularly convenient. Free Internet access is something I would expect in the lowliest No-Mama-No-Papa Motel. Also, our room at the Chateau Lake Louise was not air-conditioned. While the room wasn't particularly hot, the window opened only a few inches, and it was pretty stuffy. I postulated an inexpensive means of cooling the rooms: The waters of Lake Louise were, as I mentioned, glacier-fed, and probably around 40°F or colder. I think a heat-exchanger in the lake would have provided excellent cooling without any significant warming of the lake itself. I'll pass that on to the authorities when I get around to it.
