Four Days on the Canadian

Between Christmas and New Year's, my partner and I took the train across Canada, from Toronto to Vancouver. Four days, four nights, nearly three thousand miles. We'd been talking about it for ten years.

Our cabin was the size of a closet, with bunk beds that folded down out of the wall. We spent most of our time in the dome car, a glass-roofed carriage at the back where you can see the sky in every direction.

The first day was endless snowy forests and frozen lakes. The second was prairie, flat and white and beautiful, with a pink sunset that seemed to last for hours. On the third morning, we woke up in the Rockies, with peaks so close I could have touched them.

We played cards with a retired couple from Saskatoon. We ate dinner with a young musician from Montreal who played his guitar in the dome car at night. A group of us watched the stars over the mountains on the last evening, wrapped in blankets.

When we reached Vancouver, I didn't want to get off.