Greetings from Vancouver! We arrived back this afternoon on the Rocky Mountaineer’s First Passage to the West Route. I have finally recovered my computer cord and it is wonderful to be able to type this update instead of thumbing it out on my iPhone Screen like the rest of them. I’m still processing photos which will not be a short process considering the fact I have a full day of photo gathering planned for Vancouver tomorrow since it is my only weekday in the city and the only chance I’ll have to get West Coast Express. I have planned an itinerary that will get me to every stop except for the last, Mission.
The train ride itself was wonderful if quite a bit different with more traditional scenery. It started by getting some excellent shots of the long consist with quite a few cars deadheading to the yard in Kamloops entering Banff at 8:52 MDT since the train originated in Calgary. It was wonderful going around and through the spiral tunnels t and following the Kickinghorse River all the way to Golden where we followed the Columbia River. The next highlight (I’ll do a full trip log with photos soon) was going over Rodgers Pass and then stopping in Revelstoke where we were delayed because of the Royal Canadian Pacific, a luxury vintage 1920s train. Next it was passing Canada’s Golden Spike monument while I ran in and out of eating lunch. Then we were off around Shuswap Lake, the houseboat capital of Canada before it got dark out and we had a quite late arrival at 8:42pm PDT in Kamloops where we hopped on our motor coaches off to the Thompson Hotel which was more than adequate with a free upgrade to the family room (it had three beds in it) for the night.
The second day was quite a bit shorter than the first but was equally impressive. I walked down from our hotel to the Kamloops station with its wide road like platform for the Rocky Mountaineers’ buses getting more photos of our now shorter train since so many cars were just deadheading from Calgery to the yard in Kamloops. The train than followed the remote Camloops Lake before proceeding down the Thompson River before it flowed into the Fraser, taking the original CN route (now used by all westbound traffic, the former CP is used for eastbound) all the way and me loving the photos from the open platform through the railyard all the way into Vancouver where we arrived an hour early at 4:30. I then walked out of the station after getting my photos of the rather impressive station building, picked up my Amtrak ticket for Monday morning and walked all the way to our hotel where I met my gradmother and we had a small late dinner (we were in the first seating for lunch) at a Japanese noodle shops, not quite believing our adventures were over.