By Valerie Stimac, San Francisco Chronicle; March 29, 2019
The grumpy gentleman across the aisle decided he’d rather make this journey by car, but it was a little late for that. We were three hours east of Vancouver in British Columbia’s fertile Frasier Valley, on the first of a two-day narrated train tour. In total, our train will journey the 594-mile route to Banff, a town in Canada’s Rocky Mountains surrounded by some of the range’s most iconic peaks.
Running the “First Passage to the West” route, our train, the Rocky Mountaineer, runs along one of the great scenic train routes in North America. Vancouver’s urban jungle quickly gives way to the distinctly Pacific Northwestern landscapes of pine trees and mountain peaks. The train I’m on is a contemporary time capsule, a nod to the earliest period of mass land transit when luxury, personal space and appreciation for the journey were more common parts of the travel experience.
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