The phone rang at six AM with my automated wake-up call. Hngh. Far too early... but time and trains wait for few men, and I'm not among that number! I dressed, made sure everything I left was packed, and performed an express checkout before leaving the hotel.
After another cab ride, this one back to Penn Station. As there was no gridlock at 6:30AM, this one cost half as much as the one going uptown. As I took an escalator down into Penn Station, I spied a bakery to my left, and homed in on it as a source of bagels.
... they had those, yes, and they had cream cheese with loxy bits, but no slices of smoked salmon you could layer on. Mrf. I made do with the loxy cream cheese, bought a loaf of challah to haul to Kitchener, and trundled toward the waiting area.
When taking Amtrak with intent to cross into Canada, you must inform them ahead of time of your name and birthdate so they can run a background check -- the Canadians don't want felons, for example. Then, once at the departure station, you get little tracking tags for your bags, including purses and backpacks. I didn't know about the luggage tags; I got a pair, attached them, then set myself to scrape half the cream cheese off the poppyseed bagel, as they'd applied it in sufficient quantity to also be used as, say, spackle.
This run of the Maple Leaf used Amtrak's older coach fleet: no footrests, and no luggage stowage space. I put the big suitcase in the seat next to me to fend anyone actually sitting there, and after we'd left New York I'd hoist it into the overhead bin. Mostly, I expected to be able to sleep or at least drowse my way through upstate New York once the crowds thinned a bit.
The train trundled along te Hudson River Valley, starting naturally in Manhattan. The Hudson is impressively broad here, near its mouth. The far shore, more than a mile away, was covered in winter-bare forest to the feet of massive cliffs rearing up from the valley floor. The cliffs petered out north of New York City, leaving the forest behind. Aside from the occasional residential, industrial, or agricultural outpost, that was pretty much the ride: a river off to port side with trees beyond.
I drowsed most of the way to Albany, finishing the last pages of the Amber omnibus and starting in on a Niven novel called Rainbow Mars, although it was hard to hold my attention in my fogged-up state. The snow, which was patchy around New York City, covered more and more of the ground as the train trundled inland, until it was completely covered at some point before Syracuse.
You may have noticed I haven't logged many conversations with fellow travellers -- that's because there really isn't anything to relate. Nobody much wanted to talk, unfortunately, a product of the increased background paranoia of cities like New York.
Near Rochester, they handed out customs declaration forms to those of us going to Canada. It was actually a pretty simple form: who are you, why are you going to Canada, how long will you be here, that sort of thing. I wondered if they wanted me to declare my teabags or the loaf of challah -- I figured I could always declare it if they saw it in my bags.
A body of water passed to the port side of the train. After briefly consulting the map, I realized that that was Lake Erie. Erie! The Great Lake that sits on top of Cleveland, bringing water, snow, and various other blessings to it and many other cities and towns. But here it was only a couple miles across, and you could see across it, which confused me utterly.
The Niagara Falls, New York train station sits in an industrial wasteland. A moment after that, though, we crossed the narrow neck of water separating Lake Erie from Lake Ontario, the river held in place with more large cliffs. This, then, was the border. I was now in a foreign country for the first time in my life.
Yeah, I know, it's only Canada. Don't steal my thunder!
We pulled to a stop in Niagara Falls, Ontario, and waited for Canadian customs officials to board the train. There were two: one dressed for the office, and one dressed as a cop, complete with handcuffs and sidearm. It was actually fairly anticlimactic: they collected the forms, re-asked the questions that were on them with a focus of whether we were going to a farm or not, check our passports, and let us on our way.
Ontario, it turns out, looks a lot like Upstate New York, or even Northeast Ohio. The glaciers left their mark on all these places, leaving long, low ridges in their wakes when they left any hills at all. It's more deciduous forest of a beech-maple succession, scattered with the occasional hemlock, oak, and pine. Also like those other two, sugar maples loom large in the native tree population.
It was another two hours to Toronto. I studied the map in the National Timetable (my Bible this month), and realized that the town of Aldershot was actually much closer to Kitchener than Toronto was. Oops. I'll know for next time!
My cell phone, I'm happy to report, worked as advertised in all urban areas during my stay in Canada. I don't know how well my rate plan worked or didn't work, and won't until the bill (which I cringe to think about) comes through. The Palm, though, was deader than Nixon once we'd gotten out of range of the towers for Niagara Falls, New York, as I'd expected.
The train pulled into Toronto's Union Station on time, at about quarter after seven in the evening. This was the third Union Station I'd stopped in (after Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.), but the only station ever to provide absolutely no assistance to people in wheelchairs in getting from the trains into the station proper: all others had had lifts, or the platforms were elevated, or something. In Toronto, there were only the stairs. I hear it's because they expose handicapped children at birth and let the polar bears eat 'em.
And if you thought I was serious, you obviously missed the lines for grips, clues, and senses of humor. Sheesh.
I didn't want to just let my bag clunk down the stairs, as my iBook was in it, so it was left to me (yes, human assistance was also lacking) to hoist and schlep my not-inconsiderable suitcase down the stairs and into the arrival lobby. Most vexing. Moreover, I hadn't told Gus where to meet me within the station, and as he didn't have a cell phone, this might just turn interesting.
It turned out not to be, though: Gus was waiting by a coffee stand, poised where he could see the river of travelers flow by. He'd just sat down with a cup of tea, expecting the train to be all kinds of late -- surprise, it was on time. Actually, every train I've been on has been acceptably on-time, with the exception of the Coast Starlight, back at the beginning of our adventures -- I'm left to conclude that that just paid everything else off in advance. What's more, several of the longer service stops en route were built with pad against just such contingencies: we were scheduled for an hour in Canadian Customs, for example, but arrived twenty to thirty minutes late, and were finished ten minutes early -- we waited out the last ten minutes to assure an on-time departure.
Gus is one of Hrafnar's Extended Family: we hugged and laughed like brother and sister, and held hands as we left Union Station and emerged into a briskly chill night. I say 'brisk,' but most of my Californian readers would be left quite chilled by a forty-degree evening such as Gus and I were enjoying. After awhile, I admit I did have to zip up my coat, but only because it was about three-eighths of a mile to where he'd parked so I could drop off my suitcase.
Gus drives a respectable blue minivan, into which we loaded my clothes. I mentioned carefully that I needed to do rather a bit of laundry (my last encounter with a washing machine had been ages ago in Gainesville, Florida), and he graciously offered his own washer and dryer to be used for the cause.
After depositing my bags after insistence from Gus that I wasn't paying for dinner, we perused the local dining options. Well, there was Japanese, Greek, a somewhat famous Toronto restaurant near the car that asserted its prominence in regional cuisine--
I frankly didn't care and was even willing to try poutine (french fries smothered in gravy and cheese whey, a Quebecois favourite) (yes, that qualifies for 'ew,' unless you're Canadian), a fate from which I was saved by the local restaurant.
Nothing exotic here, really: the same fare you'd find south of the Lakes, except it was a little easier to find fish, and some English fare was also presented (like shepherd's pie). Also, cabbage rolls featured prominently on the menu, right under the shepherd's pie under 'Hometown Favourites.' That's cabbage leaves wrapped around a bit of filling, usuallly ground meat with rice. My mother was quite fond of them (under the name "Pigs in a Blanket"), although we only had them once or twice.
Dinner was thoroughly mediocre, I'm sad to report: we had a sampler platter for an appetizer, some ribs with barbecue sauce, mashed potatoes, and lemonade. The sampler platter was all of deep fried foods, including the 'quesadilla' which any Californian would sniff at and declare a taquito: a corn tortilla wrapped around a mainly meat filling, then deep-fried. The chicken wings weren't so bad, but the available sauces were salsa and the yellow sweet-sour duck sauce one expects in packets from Chinese restaurants, or perhaps from a drive-through with your chicken fingers. Then, the main course: I found the sauce appealing: a sweet-smoky flavour I associate with the Carolinas' style of barbecue, as opposed to the more potently spiced elixirs of Texas. The ribs themselves were adequate, though a little tough. The potatoes were well-executed, and I enjoyed them, but the lemonade was insufficiently sour. This disappointed Gus, who wanted to show me Good Things about Canada, as part of his Cunning Plan to Make Us All Move Out There.
Toronto is about a hundred kilometers (sixty miles) from Kitchener, accessible mainly by Queen's Route 401, a six-lane freeway woefully inadequate to the traffic that has to use it. We were late enough to avoid any traffic, and Gus skillfully avoided rush hour, so I can't compare the traffic jams to any others I've seen.
Ah, the metric system! Well, I knew the rough equivalents in my head for kilometers. Road signs were all in kilometers or reasonable fractions thereof and expressed in meters; I'm reasonable at mental math, so '500 m' to '1/4 mile' was trivial (and lossy, but close enough for kingdom work). Temperature was less familiar, but I had a working knowledge of the Celsius/Farenheit conversion, and everything translated to 'wear your coat' anyway. And Canadian roads, how do they number them? This may not be of any interest to anyone but me, as I find roads endlessly fascinating, but through observation and inquiry I divined it thus:
Kitchener is one of those cities, like Cleveland or Pittsburgh, that had its heavy industry boom, then busted when that fell apart in the seventies and eighties. It's a small city, trying to remake itself as a high-tech center with its Siamese twin, Waterloo. It had the feel of a working-class bedroom community to me. Gus lives right downtown in the bottom half of a duplex with his wife Laureen and their two children, Peter and Margaret. We arrived just as the children were being tucked into bed, with Laureen soon to follow, whereas Gus and I stayed up an hour or so later, catching up on the gossip.
I tried to call Mike and let him know I'd arrived safely, but none of his phones answered. I knew he'd be at Hrafnar that evening, so I called up to Greyhaven and let Diana know I was all right. She and Gus talked briefly, too.
Around eleven Eastern, while I was gathering my things for a bout of writing before bedtime, and I remembered what time it was. Facing west by south-west, I raised my mug of tea in a silent toast to Hrafnar, my kindred, twenty-five hundred miles away and nestled in the hills aboved San Francisco Bay. Hail to you all -- among whom I hear my missives make popular reading.
Good night!
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