POST # 662
Last Wednesday, I once again had to say goodbye to Mary and Dora-dog, and head off to my next house sit assignment in Nanaimo. We arrived at the train station a few minutes ahead of its scheduled arrival time of 10:04 am. After saying goodbye, I headed onto the train platform, and soon, the Amtrak was arriving. And for the first time that I can remember it was on time. Well, almost on time. We departed at 10:06 am. It has always been much later to depart in past journeys, so I thought that we were off to a good start. I had some things that I wanted to do in Vancouver after my arrival, and so I was quite happy that we were on our way. About twenty minutes or so after leaving Bellingham, all of a sudden the train came to a very abrupt stop, out in the middle of nowhere. This had never happened on previous journeys, and I, like all the other people on board were somewhat confused by this sudden stop. After a few minutes, the conductor came on the intercom to inform us that the train had experienced a "trespass" and that we were going to be here for quite a while. It turns out that a "trespass" is the term they use for someone jumping in front of the moving train. Unfortunately for that soul, it was their last day spent alive. The photo above is where we were sitting on the tracks after this incident happened. Originally, it was the conductor who told us that we would be here for at least a couple of hours, but later on, the engineer came on the intercom to let us know that it would be much longer of a wait, due to the fact that when an incident like this takes place, the crew has to retire, and wait for a replacement crew. The replacement crew had to come from Seattle, and so we just had to stay put until that happened.
Well, it was shortly after 11 am when this incident took place, and the replacement crew didn't arrive until after 3 pm. We finally got on our way again at 3:30 pm My original plan was to be catching a 4 pm ferry, so that certainly wasn't going to happen.
I finally cleared customs at 5:26 pm and continued on my journey to the ferry terminal.
I now planned on catching the 7:25 pm ferry to head to Nanaimo. At the scheduled departure time, the ferry was just arriving at Horseshoe Bay, and we didn't get underway until 8 pm. So my arrival into Nanaimo was very late indeed.
I visited with Ann Marie for a little while, but I was looking forward to bed, as it had been a very long travel day indeed.
Silken was looking as relaxed as ever, so I guess that she was happy that her favourite house sitter had finally arrived.
grateful for every breath,
Paul
The Thoughtful Wanderer
PS. I learned on this trip that there are people that actually just do a day trip to Vancouver, and then head back on the returning train. For these passengers, once they finally cleared customs they had to get back in line and get on the train that they had just left, and head back to their original destination. So much for their day trip to Vancouver.
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