Traveling Grouch

Looks like I hit the eggnog! I won't regale you with a trip description today. Instead, I'll wish you a Merry Christmas and a blessed New Year. We're not traveling today, and I'm good with that. Maybe next Christmas...

We bundled ourselves into a sleeping car on the Canadian train from Toronto to Jasper. I won't say much about those three days on the train. You probably already know how I feel about it. It's like watching TV Okay, so some of the views were great. The cabins are a little different than the Amtrak cabin, but about the same size. Meals in the fancy dining car came with the room. Oh, my, those folks know how to cook a meal! I probably gained five pounds, which made it even harder to fit into the tiny room! We arrived in Jasper about four hours late, in the dark, in the rain. The local station folks helped us get a cab (ten dollars no matter the length of the drive in Jasper). I slept poorly in a hotel bed that didn't rock and sway. HA! Not really. I slept like a rock. Darling developed bronchitis while on the train, and we couldn't go to the Jasper clinic because we arrived on Labor Day, a holiday in Canada as well as the USA. The hospital next to the clinic was open, tho

We stayed two nights in Toronto, at the lovely Omni King Edward Hotel. I was delighted to be off the train and in such a beautiful city. Our trip package sent us off the first day for a two-hour ride to Niagara Falls on a travel bus. I wasn't sure I was going to like it, but our tour guide regaled us with stories of history, philosophy, geography and botany. I did not know Canada boasted so many wineries. We learned of ice-wine, which I did not even know existed.  We stopped at a university which teaches wine-making and sampled wines. The ice-wine was delicious. I won't even go into the details of that here, but might include it in a different post. We met Christina and Birgit, two lovely young ladies from Germany, while on the tour bus. Of course, Darling mothered them during the trip, and they doted on her. Me? I got to wander around with three lovely women for the entire tour! We took a helicopter ride over the Falls (wow, that was amazing), the boat ride to the Falls (wet,

😜 There's a joke I told Darling almost every day of our trip across the Great Northern Lands. It only works if you hear me say it, so you'll have to ask me when you see me, but it starts like this: "How do you spell Canada?" The final leg of the USA trip (on Amtrak) took us to the border in nine and a half hours, then close to another two hours to get to Toronto. That's a long time in a seat that differs little from a plane seat. "Yes, but you can get up and walk around." True, but a plane ride would get me there in a couple hours and I could walk around in Toronto. "There's the scenery!" Yes, there is. In a plane, I confess there just isn't much to see out the window. Sky. Clouds. Thunderstorms are more interesting, but I haven't flown through one of those in years. On a train you do  get to see the landscape as you travel. The river view astounded us, and Darling took a lot of lighthouse pictures. In the first two hours. After th