Four have a Fantastic Adventure

Trip Start Oct 15, 2007

Trip End Aug 24, 2008

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Flag of Canada Salmon Arm, British Columbia, Canada
Saturday, November 17, 2007

Leaving Jasper was a frustrating experience. The train was on time...but after it had waited in the station until about half an hour before departure time, it became apparent that there were too many passengers, so they set about splitting the train into bits, then shunting it back and forth, up and down past the station as they gradually filled the gaps with more carriages. This, according to the announcement, was to take fifteen minutes. A little over an hour later, we were off.

Hanging around pointlessly on railway platforms is bad enough. Standing next to a bloke whose baseball cap and T-shirt both bear the legend "JESUS. That's my final answer." is infinitely worse. Seldom have either of us come quite so close to smacking someone in the nose and asking where Jesus is now, eh? Probably not the effect he was after.

We asked the train staff why there was such a delay. It seemed quite a simple principle: if the train's full, it's full - don't sell any more tickets...or, if the train's sitting there doing bugger-all and the station's heaving with Americans and their suitcases, don't leave it until you need to start boarding to double the length of the damn thing.
"We had to enlarge the train for all these unexpected passengers. This isn't all that big of a delay really, these trains can run five hours late sometimes."
Right. That's your answer is it? Not "Sorry". Just "Sometimes we're extremely, outlandishly, terribly crap, so just being really crap is fine". What a way, as the saying goes, to run a railway. Still, he gave us free coffee, so it wasn't all bad.

Eventually, we arrived at Kamloops in the middle of the night. We had been due at about half past ten but it was well past eleven when we arrived, and ordinarily we would have accepted this as just being what happens with Canadian trains, but we were being met by some old family friends of Jacob's, so we felt rather guilty. However, Sandy and Robin, the aforementioned friends, were perfectly understanding.

Sandy is an old friend of Jacob's Mum's from when she was working in Canada, Robin her husband. We had not, until that point, ever met, but we got on with them quite fantastically well. Back at their place in Salmon Arm (about an hour from Kamloops), we got to nattering over cake and home-made wine, and didn't get off to bed until after two, the day's travel time notwithstanding.

The following day, Robin cooked us breakfast and we had a look at the view from their balcony in daylight. It's probably not possible not to want to live there once you've done that. Big omelette seen off, the four of us headed out into the woods for a walk. Sandy and Robin love to hike locally, so know (and help to maintain) a lot of the mountain trails. Imagine the archetypal landscape of the Canadian interior: mountains, lakes, rivers, snow covered conifers. Well, there you have a pretty good picture of where we were.

Despite our damp feet, we had a fantastic time, which was made all the better for Robin and Sandy's knowledge of the various flora and fauna (well, we didn't see the fauna, but they pointed out the tracks to us in pretty reasonable detail). A return to the house, a load of clothes set to wash (when of no fixed abode, make use of laundry facilities whenever they present themselves), a brief nose at e-mail, and the smell of curry preparation came floating down the corridor. Then the home-made fruit wines began to make an appearance.

Robin and Sandy make wine, and it's not the diabolical home-brewed lighter-fluid which some people turn out, it's really, really good stuff. As with traditional grape wines, some of them just taste like the fruit from which they've come, whereas others are far more complex. They accompany a curry pretty well too it seems.

Besides mountains, booze and curry, another shared interest (between Jacob and Robin at least) is motorbikes, so Jacob went out to the garage to drool over Robin's GoldWing...and to be delighted at the offer of borrowing it to explore next time we're there. Sounds like a date.

After sitting and putting the world to rights for a while, we trooped down to the basement to visit the winery, and set about tasting the wares. The details are understandably a bit on the blurry side, but as well as the various raspberry offerings, there was a plum wine which was quite spectacular. Making booze is going to be investigated in earnest upon our return.

Up the following morning a little later than expected (even without an evening of wine tasting, Jacob is notoriously awful at getting out of bed), we breakfasted, packed up the car, and set out for Vancouver.