The Euramerican Route   It strikes me that there are two rather unique ways to go around the world. The most obvious is to do so around the midsection of the globe, the equator at 0°, which I shall call the “beltline” route. By doing so you would take the longest, and most impressive, distance around. Or, although it seems rather a cheat (albeit a fun cheat), you can go to one of the poles, at 90°. Standing at say, the North Pole, you could take what I shall call the “tiara” route at the top of the world by walking around the pole in a circle through all 24 time zones in a few seconds. Better yet, you could theoretically put your foot on the pole and stand in all the time zones at once without even moving.

I shall do neither of these. I’m taking a route approximately halfway between the tiara and the beltline, and I’ll call it the “necklace” route at 45°N, in an attempt to stay in between the two extremes. If you accept what I’ve purported in an earlier piece, that within the continent of Eurasia, for all practical purposes Europe extends to the Pacific because of Russia, this route becomes a de facto Euramerican route.

Cyrillic 3   Perhaps Торонто didn’t cause too much of a problem. If that’s the case, you should know what this is:

Three new ones, only one is really new. Copy and tally.

Latitude: Forties & Fifties   This midroute will actually be swinging a bit further north than 45°, and, to gain flexibility, I’m going to describe the route as staying within the Forties & Fifties, referring to degrees of latitude north. New York, the starting and ending point, will actually be the point furthest south of the entire rail trip at 40N43°. Saint Petersburg will be the point furthest north, barely squeezing in to our parameters at 59N55°.

I am not concerned that Seoul is the only spot that is too far south here and out of our range at 37N33°, since it is only a connecting spot for flights and is therefore an external part of this World by Rail trip.

Since degrees of latitude are a given on this trip as being within the Forties & Fifties North, I will usually just note them in parentheses as being of incidental importance, to show that we’re staying within that range. For the sake of clarity, I will also round out most degree measurements to whole degrees, dispense as often as possible with the degree symbol itself, and use W and E only when absolutely necessary.

Cyrillic 4   You’ll now be able to recognize, and go for a ride on, the:

One new letter. Copy and tally.

Longitude: Quadrants   On our South American trip, the point was to go South, and latitude was primary. The case will be the same should I go North next year. But this is a West-East trip, and instead, longitude is primary. Using the hemispheres to me doesn’t define the issue clearly enough, and I want to use quadrants instead. By this I mean:

from Greenwich/London at 0° to mid-North America at 90°W is the first quadrant;
from there to the International Date Line at 180° in the mid-Pacific is the second;
from there to to mid-Eurasia at 90°E is the third;
and from there back to Greenwich at 0° is the fourth.

Starting in New York I will begin by completing the latter part (the last 18% westbound) of the 1st quadrant, then the 2nd, the 3rd, the 4th, then finally the beginning (the first 82%) of the 1st quadrant going back to New York.

[Note: I’ve said earlier that the day-to-day method of measuring longitude is actually to refer to time zones instead. With 24 time zones, that would come out to 15° per time zone in a perfect world, although time zones are in reality grossly distorted for political reasons. I will refer primarily to longitude, counting up from New York at 74 to the Date Line at 180, then down to 0 at Greenwich, then back up to New York at 74. I will refer to time zones as well.]

Cyrillic 5   You’ll note that Торонто is the capital of:

Crossing North America   Historically, establishing transportation routes connecting the coasts in North America was primarily a drive westward from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It is to me an amazing parallel to the Russians wanting to connect the coasts of Eurasia, which for them became a drive eastward from the Atlantic (Baltic) to the Pacific. It is for me a delight to travel on this trip on both continents on both rail connections that eventually developed.

In both situations, overland routes came first, each perilous in their own way. Ocean routes followed. For North America it was the long sea route around Cape Horn, which Bev and took (partially) last year. For the Russians to reach their settlements in Alaska, it was also a matter of going around Africa and Eurasia. [See Fort Ross, 2001 Series 8.] A North American alternative was to sail to Panama, cross it overland, then sail to the other coast. The difficulty was the danger of disease on that short overland crossing. The Panama Railroad, which long preceded the canal, did help. [See 2004 Series 4.] But the large transcontinental railroads were the final answer. Most of these projects started in about the 1880’s or thereabouts in Russia, the US, and Canada, and all eventually reached the Pacific, in one direction or the other.

There continue to exist four transcontinental train routes in the US, and we’ve crossed one way or the other on all. From New York to Chicago there’s the Lake Shore Limited, connecting there with the Empire Builder to Seattle/Portland, the California Zephyr to San Francisco, and the Southwest Chief to Los Angeles. Those routes all of course require two trains. The only actual transcontinental one-train route in the US is the Sunset Limited from Florida to Los Angeles.

In 1993, Bev and I, staying in Florida, had reason to visit the west coast, then New York for a wedding. We decided to do what we called our Amtrak rectangle, taking trains to all four corners of the continental US: Sunset Limited Florida to LA; Coast Starlight via San Francisco to Portland; Empire Builder and Lake Shore Limited to New York; Silver Star/Silver Meteor to Florida, for a total of 8,128 miles by train.

In Canada we had traveled on the Canadian twice before, once to Vancouver via Banff and Lake Louise, once via Jasper, changing to the Skeena to Prince Rupert, to get the Alaska State Ferry to Alaska. Although we had driven to Eastern Canada, we’d never taken the train there, which was the basis for my establishing the route of the present trip, from New York, but then also from Halifax across Canada to Vancouver, coast-to-coast by rail.

The Canadian Pacific established the first Pacific route in the early 1880’s. Two other companies established the second, and eventually merged to become the Canadian National. All passenger routes are now run by VIA Rail Canada, which has now consolidated all Rocky Mountain routes through Jasper and no longer to Banff.

The name Canadian National is clear-cut; it just means that the government has/had a hand in its operation. Much more interesting is the name Canadian Pacific, which looks similar, but is quite different. In the early 1880’s, Canada was a tiny country clustered around the Saint Lawrence River on the east end of the continent. When the CP decided to build, and people thought it was folly, by the way, it was connecting this tiny country in the east with the Pacific Ocean, and that’s what they were saying in the name Canadian Pacific, in other words, from (tiny, eastern) Canada to the Pacific. If they had named it something like the St Lawrence and Pacific, my point would perhaps be clearer.

I need to digress: I was just reading in the Globe and Mail here in Canada that, since all west-coast ports are clogged with traffic in the US and Vancouver, the Chinese are looking for another port to export to all of North America. They’re trying to get a toehold in Prince Rupert, with its good rail connections, which lies in northern British Columbia, not far from Alaska. The irony is, Prince Rupert is the port that’s physically closest to China anyway. Sailing the normal north Pacific route not that far from Alaska, Prince Rupert is the first Canadian or US port you come to with rail connections to the interior of both countries.

Cyrillic 6   

This Trip   The World by Rail trip started humbly, eight minutes from my front door at the subway. Early on May 15 I walked over to the Rector Street station, where I took the subway to Pennsylvania Station for a day trip on Amtrak’s Adirondack to Montréal. The train went north up the east bank of the Hudson to Albany. After the Hudson Valley, we swung over to the Champlain Valley and followed the west shore of Lake Champlain to the border. Across the lake you could see the Vermont shore, not far from which lies Middlebury.

There were plugins on all trains for the laptop, either at the seat of the two day trains I took, or else in the sleeping compartment. I was able to spend hours re-editing all the old e-mails into Word documents, which I entered via copy-and-paste onto the website at hotel stops. Now I am finally able to get to the current letter.

New York, Albany, and Montréal all line up at about 74°W, so are actually quite near the western end of the first quadrant, which is at 90, with only 18% of its distance to go. Otherwise, you can note northward movement from New York (41) to Albany (43) to Montréal (46).

Much of downtown Montréal is just contemporary glass skyscrapers, but in my free afternoon, I walked over to Vieux Montréal, the old part of the city that, since our first visits years ago, has been beautifully restored. A clever recycling of buildings was a World Trade Center, which had a modern glass structure connecting a whole block of different early 20C office buildings. There are squares with street life, charming restaurants, historic houses. On the balcony of the City Hall is where de Gaulle gave his “Vive le Québec libre” speech. In past years we also noted how Québec City, further up the St Lawrence, had also revived its Basse Ville, which has stone buildings going back to the 1600’s. In my first three cities, Montréal, Halifax, and Toronto, I stayed in traditional railroad hotels attatched to the stations.

That evening I took a sleeper on the Ocean to Halifax, Nova Scotia. The name of this train has the record of being the longest lived in North America, dating from 1904. Halifax, lying to the east and therefore one time zone in the “wrong” direction for this trip, with a longitude down to only 64 (45), is to count as my alternate starting point for this trip, in order that I can cross Canada by rail coast-to-coast, Halifax to Vancouver. The port of Halifax, with its rail connection, has been a main immigration point for Canada, as well as embarcation point for troops.

There are wonderful things to see in Nova Scotia, all too far from Halifax for my one full day there to revisit, so I rented a car and went down the Atlantic Coast to see the old historic villages of Chester (settled by New England loyalists), Mahone Bay, and Lunenburg. But closest to Halifax I did revisit the charming town of Peggys Cove. As the sign says on entering the village, it was founded in 1811 and has a population of 60. It juts out on a rocky outcropping. The village itself has brightly-painted cottages, settled around a tiny harbor, with fishing boats. It’s no wonder that it’s a favorite subject of artists.

A bit further beyond, the large rocky outcropping rises facing the sea, with a lighthouse on it. With other visitors I spent about an hour climbing up and down the rocks, looking at the sea. A lobster boat pulled close to pull the lobster “pots” up from underwater to empty them. Do keep in mind that Nova Scotia is just beyond the famous “rockbound coast of Maine”, with only the Bay of Fundy separating them, and the coast is similar. There were warning signs to be careful while you “savour the sea”, in Canadian/British spelling. I loved that phrase. Savoring the sea was just what everyone was doing there. Being on an ocean liner in the middle of the Atlantic is another great way to savor the sea.

I’ve discovered some interesting parallels in my route to and out of Halifax and what will be my route to and out of Vladivostok in a few days. First, to get to both destinations, I have to go the “wrong” way to the east first from where I was just before. Also, in both cases, the train route has to leave in a northbound direction first, before hooking sharply west, in order to avoid another country. Here the train route avoids the US (Maine). In Russia, the train route does that to avoid China.

I took the Ocean overnight back to Montréal, and connected to a day train to Toronto at 79 (44). This is actually my first point west of New York at 74. After a night there, I took the Canadian for three nights in a sleeper to the Pacific. This is my fifth and last train in North America since New York. Both the Ocean and Canadian have a park car, which is what I would call an observation car. This is the last car with a rounded end and windows all around, so you can see left, behind the train, and right. Both trains also have several dome cars, where you go upstairs to sit under a glass dome higher than the train’s roof for a very nice panoramic view. It was particularly impressive after Jasper, going through the snow-covered Rockies. Across the plains, from the dome car you could see the train roof straight as an arrow, but in the mountains, it looks like a silver serpent as it undulates around the curves, looking either forward to the front or backward to the rear.

I’m just going to mention some cities and towns to illustrate the progress west, and to some extent, north or south within our Forties & Fifties range. After Toronto we left the first quadrant at 90 and entered the second just before Sioux Lookout, Ontario, at 92 (50), which is just north of Duluth. Winnipeg was 97 (50), Saskatoon 107 (52), Edmonton 113 (54), Jasper 118 (53), ending at Vancouver, on the Pacific, at 123 (49).

I’ve now been in all five Canadian time zones for the first time on a single trip. I first went east, the “wrong” way, to Halifax down to Atlantic Time at Greenwich -4, then back to Eastern at G-5, Central at G-6, Mountain at G-7, and Pacific at G-8.

Cyrillic 7   One European city follows another: Лондон

Straight-Line Borders: The Northwest Angle   A map of Europe shows close to no straight-line borders. What’s there is is WW2 related, some straight lines where Russia claimed bits of Finland, and the dividing line of East Prussia between Russia and Poland. Latin America has a few, near Belize and Guatamala. Most of Asia has none, with the exception of West Asia (Middle East), where the Ottoman Empire was carved up after WW1 so that most of the countries there (Iraq, Israel, Kuwait) have straight-line borders. Africa has many, based on colonial divisions. Australia, the US, and Canada have many internal straight-line borders, amazingly so. But the one I want to discuss, which is also pertinent to this trip, is what has to be the longest straight-line international border in the world, the one that separates Western Canada (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia) from the Western US (Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington). This was the compromise border agreed on between the two countries to divide up the western areas, however, as so often is the case with political decisions, there was not one, but two clumsy decisions made, and therein lies my tale.

Let’s start at the beginning. What starts out way in the east as a land border (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York opposite New Brunswick and Québec), including some straight lines and some squiggles, becomes a squiggly water border for an amazing distance, starting along part of the St Lawrence and going throught four of the Great Lakes. Between eastern Minnesota and Ontario opposite, the border is almost completely water, with tiny bits of land border here and there, running along rivers and through lakes. The squiggly border then arrives at a large lake, Lake of the Woods, and ominously turns north for a distance, before swinging west. There is a largish peninsula pointing out from the western shore of the lake with channels north and south of it. The squiggly border, as it swings west, enters the north channel ... and stops when it hits land.

What can be made out of just analyzing this data right off the map? I see two things. First, as this zigzag border enters this major lake, the swing north before turning west shows that the border-makers were intent on getting a larger piece of territory on the US side then turned out to be. But then when this twisting line suddenly stops at the point where the end of that north channel hits land, it is obvious that no one had any idea of what would happen beyond that point in the future. One can assume some time then passed.

Eventually the decision was made to set that long straight-line border between the two countries going way out west. That line could have been in many positions, but oddly enough, that line did actually hit Lake of the Woods, and not only that, it hit the water right next to that peninsula. The only thing is, it hit the channel to the south of the peninsula. The straight line from the west was at the south channel and didn’t meet the squiggly line from the east in the north channel.

There is an easy way to solve things and a hard way. When politics is involved, it’s usually not the easy way that’s chosen. The easy way would have been to have moved the old squiggly line out of the north channel into the channel south of the peninsula. That would have made sense, since the border had suddenly run north in the lake anyway, for no good reason. But apparently the old squiggly border in the north channel was cast in stone, and most likely, no one wanted to give up that peninsula jutting in from the west shore.

So the awkward solution was chosen, which ended up giving this area the name The Northwest Angle. At the point where the squiggly line hit land, a north-south line was drawn. Northward it ended up forming the border between Manitoba and Ontario, and to this day, Minnesota borders Ontario to the east of Lake of the Woods, and Manitoba to the west.

To the south, it eventually intersected the big Straight-Line Border at a right angle, which explains the word Angle in the name of this area. Nothing explains the word Northwest here, because nothing is particularly northwest of anything else.

So who cares? Here’s the end of the story. That north-south line between the channels ended up cutting off this good-sized peninsula from Manitoba, and Canada, to the west of it, leaving the peninsula part of Minnesota, and the US.

Fortunately, the US and Canada are friendly, because that peninsula is actually cut off as well as West Berlin was from West Germany. To this day, you can reach that area by staying within the US and Minnesota only if you go by boat across the lake, or get a private plane to fly you in. If you wish to go by land, you have two international border crossings to contend with, leaving the US and Minnesota, entering Canada and Manitoba, then crossing again after a number of miles to the peninsula. I’ve never visited this area, but I imagine there are all sorts of problems involving school attendance, voting, and the like for those living on that largish peninsula. On any map of the US, the Northwest Angle stands out quite obviously in the middle of the country.

Cyrillic 8   

This one’s more of a challenge, with three new, unusual letters. But you know the novel. Work at it.

To go along with that, here’s the name of the female lead character, famous for the theme from the film named for her:

Straight-Line Borders: Point Roberts   If clumsiness ruled at the east end of the big Straight-Line Border, surely the west end worked out well, right? Reason must have ruled. If you think so, surely you jest.

At the western end, the straight line ends where it comes off the mainland and hits waters connected to the Pacific, at Boundary Bay. Even that name sounds logical. That much does make sense. Vancouver Island juts quite a bit south, and the southern end, which includes the British Columbia capital of Victoria, should not have been cut off by the straight line.

Starting now from the Pacific end, a curved line comes in around Vancouver Island to keep the island Canadian, and then zigzags between small islands, making some Canadian, some US. The easy solution then would have been for this curved line to have met the straight line up at Boundary Bay, which would have been the end of the story.

But we need to turn again to the awkward solution having being chosen. The curved line was drawn instead to continue to curve northwestward, so, therefore the straight line continued west to meet it at a very sharp angle. But this solution caused a problem.

Welcome to Point Roberts. Point Roberts hangs south from the mainland like a uvula into Boundary Bay. It should logically be part of Canada and British Columbia, since it’s so tiny and since that’s what it’s connected to, but by extending the straight line westwards, it gets cut off. Only the upper 2/3 of the peninsula is in Canada and British Columbia. The approximate lower 1/3 is part of the US and Washington State. It’s almost like a mini-Korea.

Americans in Point Roberts can reach the rest of the US directly by boat, or by private plane. Does this sound familiar? They can shop locally, but for major purchases go into Canada to shop. There is an elementary school, but beyond that, students are bused 26 miles, crossing the international border twice, to go to high school in Blaine, Washington. I’m sure voting can be a problem.

A digression: George Vancouver was the captain who first explored this area, but he is unfortunately over-honored. They named the city after him. They named the large island that Victoria is on after him, which already has to cause a bit of confusion. Not to be outdone, the people of Washington also named a city after Vancouver, but at least they were kind enough to use the name at the other end of the state, opposite Portland, Oregon.

Cyrillic 9   

Vancouver   I had set up my one day in Vancouver carefully. The Canadian came in in the early morning, and I had a rental car waiting for me at the station. I drove through downtown and out around the shore drive in Stanley Park, which projects spectacularly into Burrard Inlet. It is a geographic oddity that, after the Fraser River comes rolling all the way down from the Jasper area in the Rockies, and the train and highways follow its canyon, Vancouver just ignores it. The river passes through the southern suburbs of Vancouver, since the city faces northward into fjord-like Burrard Inlet. The day being clear, the snow-covered mountains on the north side of the inlet that Vancouver is famous for were totally visible. I crossed the bridge northwards to get water and city views back from the mountain area.

Afterward I drove perhaps a half-hour south of downtown into the thriving southern suburbs of Vancouver. Sure enough, the suburbs continued right down Point Roberts to the border crossing into the US. I crossed over and drove around the community to the south end for the views. My impression is that it is pleasant enough, but is an economic backwater because of its isolation, and is not thriving as much as it would if it were part of the community its attached to. There was only one way out again, and one followed signs to “Border Access” to return to Canada. Locals apparently carry some sort of a card and have a special lane to enter and exit.

I had arranged for a hotel near the airport, halfway back to downtown, which is physically located in the city of Richmond BC. I returned the car to the airport, where I’ll fly to Korea tomorrow, and had the hotel shuttle bus pick me up. I had the hotel on Starwood points, and they put me on the top floor with a view of the snow-covered mountains to the north. I have been sitting and absorbing the view.

Richmond shows a strong Asian influence due to heavy Asian immigration to Canada in recent years. All the restaurants around the hotel are Asian of one sort or another. This should not be confused by the traditional urban Chinatown as in downtown Vancouver, New York, San Francisco, and elsewhere, which usually encompasses a working-class population. Richmond is solidly middle-class and suburban, with low-rise shopping and plenty of parking lots. It’s much more contemporary Asian.

This point brings to mind what the word “Asian” means, and I’m surprised at what I’ve decided. In the discussion of the artificiality of dividing Eurasia into a European part and an Asian part because of historic and cultural reasons, I also discussed the different parts of Asia. When talking about Asian restaurants and the Asian-American community, in no way is any reference being made to West Asia (Middle East). No one would think of Arabs or Israelis as “Asians” in this sense. Nor would Siberians in any way be referred to as “Asians”, which is why I maintain that Europe extends de facto to the Pacific. It would be possible, but a stretch to understand “Asian restaurant” to refer to Central Asian (Afghani) or South Asian (Indian). It now occurs to me that when we say “Asian” we mean “East Asian” and nothing else: Chinese, Korean, Japanese, as well as Vietnamese, Thai, and the rest of Southeast Asia. I had never thought before how specific the word really is when one refers to the “Asian” community.

I checked out a few restaurants. English is definitely a minority language here, written as an afterthought below the main entries on a menu. Know how to use chopsticks, or don’t eat. The restaurant clientele is apparently wholly Asian, as the staff and clientele of the hotel seem to be as well. I ended up having a Mongolian barbeque in a restaurant next to the hotel, which we’d had before in Florida. It was great, and I had a good chat with the waiter. It’s a good thing I can use chopsticks. The waiter did leave a fortune cookie at the end. It said, and I kid you not, because I have it in front of me as I write:

Indeed.