On the Road 2011 #3

Breakfast on the train is always interesting and fun. The service is as good as any restaurant and the food is consistently tasty. The menu is a bit limited and does not cater to vegetarians, breakfast is easily made meatless. The home-fries were were nothing special but the scrambled eggs were absolutely perfect. (It was interesting to note that some of the diners had menus that had no prices on them but ours did. I think that those from the sleeper cars pay a flat fee for the whole trip which includes food. Later in the day there was an announcement that for certain travellers there was bingo. But not for the folks from the cheap seats. The class systems is alive and well on our trains !!)
 
However what I like best about eating on the train is the company. There is not enough space in a dining car for everyone to eat alone. Therefore they always sit you with someone else.. No matter how anti-social one might feel in the morning, if you want breakfast, you eat with someone else.

The first morning on the train I was sat with a gentleman (who turned out to be sitting just in front of me). He was coming back from visiting his daughter who lived somewhere north of Quebec City. He loved the train - in part because he hated driving. Which was interesting as he was a professional driver. He drove for a motor coach company that did tours. Much of his driving was between Winnipeg, his home town, and the nearest USA casino.We spent much of the long and leisurely breakfast talking about border issues and how one needs to be careful about paying tickets and in generally following the law if one wants to go back and forth across the border. My fellow diner told a few stories about drivers who had smuggled in cigarettes and had lost the ability to drive across the border. I was surprised to find out that if a passenger was refused entry to the USA, the bus company had no responsibility to get him back to his place of departure. If rejected, the person is left at the border and needs to find his on way back. There are no refunds.

After breakfast over we walked back to our car and our separate seats to spend the next 12 hours or so of daylight sleeping, reading, listening to music and sleeping some more. Not a very hard life at all.