October 5 - Vancouver to Kamloops

We caught our bus to the train station at 6:45 am (way too early).  The train station was stuffed with people.  Turns out that 712 people are riding the Rocky Mountaineer today. 

They certainly are doing this operation up well.  We were greeted with Champagne and juice, a pianist was playing at a grand piano in the middle of the station and we were welcomed with a bagpiper who piped us aboard the train.  

And as we were leaving the station all of the Rocky Mountaineer staff were out lining the tracks to wave us on our way.  There must have been 30 or 40 or more of them standing in the rain waving.

Unfortunately it was a bit rainy and definitely overcast.  We didn’t really have any sun all day.  However, the ride through the Fraser Valley and then the Thompson Valley was just beautiful.  

We passed some interesting old churches.

We are in a dome car so we have lots of windows to see all of the high mountains around.  They car also had an observation deck so that you could go out onto it to take pictures without having reflections from the windows.  Of course, it was pretty cold and windy out there so we didn’t spend a lot of time on the deck. 

Often we were going around curves and we could see the train ahead of us and behind us... 

and trains on other tracks.

There were a number of bridges we saw (but didn't go over most of them).

There were interesting (colorful) rock walls along the way...

One area had avalanche sheds over the tracks.

There were beautiful stretches of river...

and even a waterfall.

We spent a lot of time in the dining room of the car.  They had two seatings for breakfast.  We were in the second seating so they brought around cinnamon scones with butter and jam so we wouldn’t starve.  When it was our turn to eat we had a full, to order breakfast.

Since we were in the second seating for breakfast they then brought around cheese and fruit to keep us from starving while the first group had lunch.  Because of the snacks no one was really hungry for either breakfast or lunch…but we ate anyway.  By the time we arrived in Kamloops we were so full that we decided to not bother with dinner.  Of course, when we arrived at the hotel they had fresh baked chocolate chip cookies so we had those for dinner.

We arrived at Kamloops at about 5:30, which is earlier than they usually arrive.  We were greeted by all of the staff waving to us and also by mounted police.  Such royal treatment.

Since we didn’t go out tonight for dinner we were able to get through most of the photos from this trip so far so we aren’t too far behind.