Greetings from Newark International Airport where I join you at this early hour waiting for the 7:00am flight on Air Canada to Vancouver to start my great fall adventure. My working title is Fall Foliage through Domes: A Canadian Rockies and Cross-Country Rail Adventure. This flight will be my only form of air travel (well except for the helicopter ride our tour package includes).
The trip consists of first taking the Rocky Mountaineer’s Golden Circle via Whistler Route in GoldLeaf Dome Class Service on modern Colorado Railcar Ultra Domes, which I’m going on with my grandmother, where I’m immensely excited about spending four full days traveling first on the last railroad to be completed through the Canadian Rockies followed by the first completed route, most if not all (it would be in summer) in daylight. In a luxury I’m expecting to be a different world from Amtrak, all with an outdoor viewing platform to spend portions of the trip feeling the cold and hopefully not to rainy Mountain Air, getting outdoor photographs.
After those ten days I’ll put my grandmother back on a flight to Syracuse and my traveling will go from luxury to budget, staying in hostels or with friends the way I generally do. My plan is to first spend almost two more weeks in the Pacific Northwest traveling on Amtrak Cascades (which doesn’t run dome cars but the Talgos are an experience I’ve only previously sampled to themselves) the length of the corridor probably down to Eugene with multi-day stops in Seattle and Portland and I think I’ve figured out a way to get every intermediate Amtrak Cascades Station as well.
Next I’ll board the train of my first (and still only Pacific to Atlantic in full) cross-country trip, the Empire Builder, in coach but sitting in a Superliner Sightseer Lounge for most of the trip back halfway east, getting off in St. Cloud for a ride (if the trains on time otherwise I have bus backups) on a bus to the norther end of the Northstar Commuter Rail into Minneapolis.
After that I’m onto Milwaukee and then Chicago where I have almost two weeks and am right now thinking of side trips to St. Lewis and Detroit, before I’ll take the oldest dome of my trip, Amtrak #11031, their only dome car left, running for just two round trips on the Cardinal for fall foliage viewing purposes. I’ll be on November 5, the dome will join the train until Washington where it doesn’t fit up the Northeast Corridor and I’ll have to return to my coach seat to speed up to New York.
I hope to be writing almost daily updates on this my blog, at least during the evenings when I can find free wi-fi while in Canada. In the US I can send them via my iPhone.