The Next Connection (6th October

We are very worried that we will not make our next connection as the scheduled stop in Winnipeg did not occur until the small hours of the morning instead of yesterday evening.  The coach we are catching at lunchtime tomorrow may not have allowed for this amount of delay so we may have to try and ring (where?? when??) to see if we can get on a later coach.

The track seemed smoother last night or perhaps we are getting used to the motion.  There were the usual stops and starts but today apparently we shouldn't be delayed further; but the question is how much time can we make up?  We also awoke to a completely different scenario from the endless prairies of yesterday - snow!  It's looking very pretty in the trees and I don't think it will delay the train (unlike the UK) but it is snowing quite hard - and as I write this - we have stopped!!!

Breakfast was actually quite similar to the brunch - fried eggs, omelette, pancakes but also porridge (oatmeal) - unfortunately made with water but made a change! and toast - had to ask for brown!  Oddly enough the coffee served at breakfast is awful, but coffee obtained from the flasks which are topped up all day, is actually not too bad.

We tried phoning the coach company at the next station with mobile reception, using the phone from one of the employees.  Staff have different providers so we should be able to phone again later today but still no idea of arrival time so have escalated this issue to the service manager as we feel VIA Rail HQ should be liaising with the coach company to sort this - no way can we do anything further with insufficient information.

Lunch was good with onion soup (not as good as French Onion), then salad and grilled chicken wrap spoilt really by macaroni in some sort of salad cream.  Dessert was vanilla ice-cream (had once and pronounced boring) or some sort of sponge cake which actually tasted very nice.  The afternoon was whiled away with the clocks going on yet another hour and then wine tasting, cocktails and dinner.  The latter was not up to the usual standard - a veal chop pronounced bland, and supposedly chicken kiev - nowhere near enough garlic.  Dessert (thank goodness we are back to frugal eating soon) was a delicious carrot cake.  After all this we decided to amble the full length of the train so went first right to the front  - through economy (what do they do about food as we couldn't see anywhere to buy items?) - where we saw an open baggage carriage where a dog was being exercised - wonder how it will cope with the extra hours being cooped up.