Hello, boys and girls, and welcome to episode 347 here on the Motorcycle Man Podcast. Joining me today here in the V-Twin Cafe is author Rick Antonsen. Now, Rick has been on the show before with his book Route 66 of Kicks, and he also played Jeopardy with us not long ago. But today, Rick is here to tell us all about his new book, Train Beyond the Mountains, Journeys on the Rocky Mountaineer. But first, before we get into that, the Motorcycle Man podcast is brought to you by Scorpion Helmets. Now, they're offering high-quality, innovative motorcycle helmets and technical apparel at an incredible value. So to learn more, get on over to scorpionusa.com and Wild Ass Seats. Now, you can improve your comfort and ability to stay in the saddle longer with a cushion from Wild Ass Seats. So if you're tired of those painful pressure points and fatigue, go to wild-ass.com and tell the real Craig Johnson over there that you want a cushion. Get that cushion today.
And don't forget to tell them that the Motorcycle Men podcast sent you. And of course, as always, tobacco motorwear. Now, for the best in casual riding gear for men and women, there's only one place you should be going, and that is tobacco motorwear. Visit them at tobacco motorwear.com, and our listeners will get 10% off your order when you use the code MOTOMEN. Everyone here at the podcast is wearing tobacco riding jeans and the California riding shirt, and I can't tell you how wonderful these products are. I wear them for every ride, and I won't ride without them. Your safety is worth it, so get on over to tobacco motorwear and get in Dave's pants. Time now for that interview with Rick.
Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Motorcycle Men podcast. This is Ted, your host here in the V-Twin Cafe, and joining me today, all the way from British Columbia. He's been on the show before. He's got a couple books out, quite a few books out, actually. He did the Route 66 Still Kicks book, and he was also on the show a few weeks ago doing our Jeopardy game, if you recall. Mr. Rick Anderson. Rick, so happy you could be on the show again. Thanks. Please, if you would, please tell everyone who you are and what you do. The world of destination marketing, responsible for tourism in Vancouver, British Columbia.
and worked a lot with American counterparts and the Destination International Organization based in Washington, D.C., which I had the opportunity to chair. And I left that about eight, nine years ago with the specific intent of becoming a full-time book author. And so I've done that. And Trailing Beyond the Mountains is just out. The subtitle is Journeys on the Rocky Mountaineer. And it's my fifth travel memoir, travel book, and my eighth book overall. So I'm kind of hitting my stride as a full-time author, though I would say it's a tough way to make a living nowadays. You think so?
yeah i think if you're if you're listening for the cash register ring it's it's got its challenges and and that's you know shared by many other creative undertakings i also do presentations at conferences on something called cathedral thinking which is a philosophy about the long term and the building of the cathedral which takes multi-generations so i enjoy that and i patch together a living and doing that and it's fascinating and super enjoyable And I played baseball this morning, so it's a good time of year. The weather's good enough for you to play baseball there where you are? It's great. Oh, good. In the Okanagan and British Columbia, I play baseball twice a week. It's a really good league. Oh, wow. That's great. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, but we always have good moments. Well, the thing about being an author and writing a book is that there's a tremendous amount of work up front. And then there is the promotion that you have to do afterwards. But during that whole writing time, there's no income. And one cocoons by nature. When people would say, how did you do during COVID? I would say I'm an author.
So authors are solitude. And by nature, we're used to kind of shying away and working a bit. A book like Train Beyond the Mountains or my book Route 66 that we've talked about before or Walking with Ghosts in Papua New Guinea, those books each have probably a year and a half out of my life, maybe spread over three or four years travel, writing time, research. But yeah, there's a lot of you that goes into the writing of a book and much of it is solitude. And a form of unemployment. Exactly. Right. So now you work. Well, your new book is a train beyond the mountains. And that's about a trip that you took by rail. And this is of interest, I think, to my audience, because, you know, we travel by motorcycles. But there is this other option that a lot of people don't explore. And so why don't you give us a brief synopsis of the book?
Well, first of all, the route that we covered is extremely popular with people in motorcycle because you're going through the Canadian Rocky Mountains, you're down to Vancouver, then you're back up through Whistler and up to the Caribou. So it's a fascinating, fascinating part of the world and active viewing for motorcycles. You see a lot of it. So I was with my grandson, Riley, who was 10 years old at the time. And I think, and I write about this, an early decision for most travelers is, do I go alone or do I go with someone else? And I thought to be on the Rocky Mountaineer, which is one of the most famous trains in the world.
was too special of an experience not to share it with someone. So I invited my grandson, Riley, to come along, and he said, Grandpa, you'll be so happy to have me there. Well, I hadn't gauged just how sarcastic and one-upmanship a 10-year-old could be, and how the tensions, which are always good for storytelling, can move the pace along. In sort of a Reader's Digest version, we got into the Rocky Mountains and in the Banff, got onto a train, the Rocky Mountaineer. I can describe it because it's a beautiful, beautiful train. And we traveled one day through the Rockies into a place called Kamloops, sort of toward the center of the province. You overnight there. So you're just traveling on the train by daylights, you know, missing in the scenery. And then the next day was along the Fraser River and into Vancouver. We then had some time in Vancouver, got back on another Rocky Mountaineer train, up to Whistler where we overnighted.
back on and up into the Caribou, where the Caribou Gold Rush was in the 1800s, and then overnighted there, and then back on the train up to Jasper, back again in the Canadian Rockies, and spent some time there. So the main narrative thread is the journey on the Rocky Mountain here. Wow. That was a nice trip. Sounds like a very nice trip. You know, I was curious why you didn't bring your friend Peter with you.
You know, Peter, as someone, one of the guys I play baseball with told me last week, he said, I just read your Route 66 book. And he said, that Peter guy did a lot of work to travel with. And then he said, you know, my three favorite lines of the book. And he listed them. They were all ones that Peter had said. So he was a lot of fun to travel with. But Peter and I are different in many ways. He got us lost once. I got us lost once. But it was, yeah, he was a great travel companion, which led to a great book. You know, the publisher of Route 66 magazine gave me a great cover blurb. He said, it's the best.
travel book I've ever read. Oh, that's awesome. That's quite a compliment. And quite an endorsement. But I'm sure your 10-year-old grandson did a much better job than your friend Peter would have done. Well, you remember Peter in the book, Route 66, every night he's negotiating a deal. Yeah, yeah. Every meal he's trying to do something like that and then we're debating which way to go because on Route 66, if you're on a motorcycle or like us in a Mustang convertible, you get lots of choices. And if you want to go down a gravel road or...
some patch that was only route 56 for a short spell then you know and maybe in the 20s maybe in the 30s then you can take those options sure so so that was fun the thing about traveling on the rocky mountaineer or train travel in general is that when you get on board you don't have any other decisions to make between having having a gin and tonic or a rum and coke or what you want from a really nice menu for your your breakfast or for your lunch the decisions on where you go and your timing is taken out of your hands and train travel relaxes people It's beautiful that way because you get to muse or ponder on things that you don't normally do. And I think motorcycle trips can be a lot like that, too. Once you set your way, if you're 100 miles ahead of you, your mind's kind of free. So on that topic, I have to ask, why travel by rail? So I've had the good fortune to travel on trains and...
36 different countries and it's a preferred way for me to go whether it's going across Siberia or into North Korea or through Belarus or Mongolia I love being on trains my expression of why is Just watching the world go by and being able to absorb it at a pretty slow pace without having to think about all manner of other where I'm going to stay the night and that most types of decisions. So I really like that. I like a long train journey, multiple days, really works well from my perspective. But I also think that train travel is an ongoing moment. And you find lots of introspection, but not just in yourself. The writer Paul Thoreau said that train travel is the last word in truth drugs. And I think that's true. You find people on a train.
For reasons that I do not understand, they will tell you their life story. They will divulge secrets. They will hint at things about motivation for travel or people they left behind that they wish they'd ride along on the train. They'll tell you things that you never hear on an airplane trip. Right. Wow. You know, the thing is, when most people think about travel, first of all, they don't think of travel by rail. Because most of the times they're thinking, if there is travel by rail, they consider it's like commuting. Did you think that it's a lost art?
What nicely said, one could say, I could paraphrase that and say that train travel is a lost art. I like that because people used to do it out of a necessity. Of course. And sometimes it was even between... great distances it was not by choice it was the only way to get there and it was much quicker than the prior ways like wagons or walking or horses or whatever so now it's been superseded if you want point a to point b and all you want to do is get there i would say don't get the train unless you're in japan where they've got the shinkansen that's going up 300k an hour pgb and in france of algebra it's just gone yeah but getting on board a train you do drop back in time. And you have sort of the shades of the 1950s and the 1920s. You have the romance of rail travel. You have that sense of journey. And I think motorcyclists get a sense of journey in a way that people in a car don't get. And I think that on a training, you get a sense of what it was like to be in a...
long gone era and you can let yourself go with that rhythm yeah it's very true you know anything with modern travel today it's special even by rail i imagine and you're gonna if you saw this you'll let me know did you see people still with their faces buried in their phones There was a bit of that, but the nice thing is that you do lose Wi-Fi connection. Well, that's a good thing. But still, people have downloaded games, or they've downloaded things. It's a bone of contention between my 10-year-old grandson, who wants some tablet time. And I'm thinking he's going to hang on my every word about history and geography and the background of how they used to make steam locomotives. But he wanted some tablet time. And I was after him at one point, and he was listening to Coldplay. And it was his choice of music. And he said, I'm just relaxing, looking out the window, grandma. And then another time...
He wanted to go down to the lookout platform. So the way Rocky Mountain Air coaches are designed, they're great. They're two level. And the top level is where people sit and enjoy the views. They have a glass ceiling. In fact, one of the Australians called it the glass train. But you can almost touch them out. It's all glass stone. It's gorgeous. But down below is just a terrific dining place. And the meals are fantastic. But at the back of the lower level is about a 10 foot by 10 foot observation deck.
And Riley became fascinated about being on the observation deck. And he would put away his tablet, and he'd say to me, are you going to keep your nose stuck in that book wrap, or are you coming down to the lookout deck? Right? So I did too shake. And we'd go down, and whatever goes through a 10-year-old's mind when they're on a train, it would, I think, fascinate us all. He'd lean over to the side of the ring, the wind in his eyes, the wind in his hair, and he wouldn't move for two hours. Watch him.
The country, he'd maybe say, what are those trees? What kind are they? Why are they so different than the ones two miles back? He would look, once he's at an old, dilapidated, two-story farm home, and it's no longer inhabited. He said, what happened to the people? Where'd they go? So things like that, through the eyes that are one-seventh the age of mine, make for a fascinating journey, and I think has made for a compelling story for the readers. Oh, absolutely. One thing you just touched on in there, it brings me up. I want to talk about the train itself. You mentioned the observation deck. Was that open air?
yes it was so so it's it's covered the cover is part of the second level so there would be people seated above you as it were but you have all of this in the open so this is a training there's no smoking allowed there's nothing like that you are enjoying the freshest of air in the rockies you get a little cool spell because you're still so much in the glaciers or the snow or if it's early morning and then you'll get the warmth coming by you can be on the observation deck on rocky down here going through the tunnels and that's both eerie and a bit alarming and immensely satisfying because it It goes dark all of a sudden, and there you are with all of a sudden new smells that are train smells. And it's powerful imagery. Wow. It's exhilarating. So now the train itself, tell me about the engines and the cars, the dining and the sleeping arrangements. Was it everything you expected it to be?
It was everything and more. Full disclosure, in the early 90s, for three years, when the Rocky Mountaineer was starting up, I was vice president of sales and marketing and loose ends, everything. And we were brand new to the business. We were learning on the fly. We had a sage old railroader who was an advisor to the owner. And every time there was an incident, a challenge, a problem, he would say,
It's all in the solution. No kidding. It's all in how you handle it. It's all in how you resolve this. So you were on the inside this whole time. I was on the inside for three years. But his actual phrase was, there's a problem. He would say, it's all in the recovery. Well, there were so many problems the first three years, 1991, 92, that we actually called it the recovery railway. And those things got fixed. But they were old Canadian Pacific CPR or CNR, Canadian National coaches in those days. So they were coaches from the 50s.
They're getting new ones every year, and they are gorgeous. They still have some coaches that are single-level, but they've retrofitted them all. So they're new and safe, and they have partial glass domes. But the big ones, the two-level ones, you're like riding in an open canister. It's beautiful. It's gorgeous. You're going to look everywhere. You see wildlife. You see mountain peaks. When the waterfalls are there, you almost feel them dripping on the glass ceiling. So in that way, it's lovely. It's smooth. There is no accommodation because they're...
unique selling proposition would be that you travel by daylight so you don't miss anything. And you're traveling in seats that are better than business class on airplanes. So you've got lots of moving parts and gadgets and reclining and heaps of elbow room. You can get up and walk around, which is another nice thing about train travel. And you meet people from all over the world. I would say that our coach was like traveling with the United Nations. There are people from Germany. There are people from the Netherlands. The Brits are there. The Aussies are there. There was a Japanese woman.
um lots of people in the united states from other parts of canada so you really feel like you've got that everybody's got a different story sure the train they tell you oh my god that's really really interesting so now how many days was the trip well we were gone a couple of weeks overall but we had mountain time and then five days on the train okay and it was it was interspersed so we had a bit of a spell in vancouver which was really nice back on the train then when we got off in jasper we had more time so we were at moraine lake lodge which is gorgeous stunning just one of those things where you feel You don't want to use the description that you've just dropped into a postcard, but you feel like you've just dropped into one of those people's postcards, except you're really there. And you can take a canoe out, and you can canoe to the other side and look up at this intimidating mountain and hike it. It was all great. And then we stayed our last evening in the book is at a place called Cathedral Mountain Lodge, right across from Cathedral Mountain. That's around the spiral tunnels, which are magical Swiss engineering, where the train actually comes in and curves around inside the mountain, comes out into the open, and goes back in and curves around, and then continues to head west. And when they built the tunnel...
Built the tunnel 100 and so odd years ago. Then he started out at both ends and ended up within like six inches of each other. That's amazing. You know, when I read that part of the book about anything like, wait a minute, is this tunnel going around? Are they curving inside this tunnel in a spiral? And I was like so amazed. I never even knew anything like that existed. But that's fascinating. That's part of the thing about rail travel that's just super interesting because you're going to see things you're not going to see anywhere else.
That's well said. You'll see things you don't see anywhere else in part because the railways got first choice. They got choices before the highways. They got choices that sometimes replaced old wagon roads. But they also often got land grants as part of their contract building the railways. So they got to identify where maybe communities would be. But they also had the main thoroughfare. So there will be places where the closest you will get to a river or to the ocean is on a train because that was the most level place they liked.
level or maybe a two percent grade right at most so so they got the beauty spots really did and so when you're traveling by train you get some of the best vistas on any mode of transportation wow now were the cars nicely appointed did you feel like you were it was like you're traveling in a different time period so it's interesting um i i i like that because because here's two answers one is that some of the newer coaches have a really cool retro feel to them by design so you've got every sense of convenience and modernity and and you know the food services is yeah you've got all of that on the other hand you also really know that you're traveling in comfort everything from the size of the seats to the the uh the walkway down the center to you know people will shout bear and then people get up and look out the window on the west side because that's where the bear happens to be and you've got room to do that which you would never have on an airplane or a bus or even in a car you can't continue to do that on board the right time you
you've got that and they've got very attentive well-trained staff so if you ask the question any question you can ask me the next two questions i might know the answers to they would if it was about history or geography or the environment or issues like when you're going by the adam river adam's river where there's spun and salmon spawning and then these are salmon come down on the adam's river they end up in the potentially in the Fraser River in the Pacific Ocean. Five years later, they come back to it. Not just the Adams River, but the actual creek where they respond. And they then respond. So what you would get if you ask that question from the onboard staff, they would be able to tell you the biology of that, the threats of the small fry from Global Army or new predators that are around because of changes in the climate. They're so knowledgeable that it means you're kind of...
Traveling with National Geographic. Oh, that's awesome. That was fascinating, yeah. Now, you said that there's no accommodations on the train itself. So where did you stay during those, you know, obviously you're not traveling at night. So where did you stay? Local hotels and things like that? Yeah, from Bath to pulling the Kamloops, which is a big sporting center. We have lots of tournaments there, whether it's baseball or hockey or whatever. And it's in a sort of quasi desert area. It's a community in the training world, or the world of trains, because so many of them route through there. It's right on where the Thompson River, the North and the South Thompson River are coming together.
there are lots of hotels and hotels there and so what happens when you get on in bath and you can go east west or west east but if say you get on a van you just have your day pack your luggage leaves them in a truck and when you get the can loops you get off you get on a company bus you go to your hotel you get your keys while you're on the bus oh there you go go to your room and your luggage is in your room so it's like an all-inclusive trip they took care of your oh that's that's because i was wondering if you know uh you get to your first stop and everybody's sort of like you're on your own go find a hotel and if you miss the train you're too bad it's all it's all okay It's all part of what they organized. And we stayed a night in Whistler. And then the next day we're going to Quenelle. And sometimes if there's a lot of freight travel, you spend time on sidings and you can get some delays. So they normally don't do dinner on the train. But at the last minute, they realized they were going to be late arriving into Quenelle. So they whipped up. I still remember it was this pasta and chicken dish, which was as good of a pasta meal as I've had anywhere. And it just comes out of this small kitchen. And they're feeding a full bunch of people. It all worked so well. But when we got into Quenelle, it's a Sunday night.
And we got, our hotel happened to be one that was two stories. And the staff were there. They kept the bar open. They kept their diner open in case anybody wanted food. And then they left the fire escapes open because not everybody wanted to wait for the elevator. People could walk up. All organized, all secure. And it just, they think everything through. They're like always, always around the band they had yet. Oh, so you didn't actually eat meals on the train? We did. We ate breakfast and lunch every day. Okay. And they were, they were like, they were the best meal. Really? It's, if you like view dining, the outside of the train is magnificent. So they, they have to compete. They want the onboard experience to be.
As good as the exterior looks, right? So they concentrate on that. That one night, they did dinner. But normally, they have seatings. They take half the upstairs group down for the first seating. You have your breakfast or later in your lunch. And then you rotate up and they bring the other group down. And it's seamless. But the menu has a handful of delightful options. And if you're like Riley, he was fascinated by smoothies. And they would just bring him smoothies. Or he would say, because he's a kid, and he would just say,
Can I have for lunch the crispy bacon I saw over there on that table at breakfast? And can I have that fruit you brought out? And they would always make it happen. It was surprising. In this day and age, we can get a bit jaded about travel not being comfortable or not being easy or you get bumped into airports. But when you're in the care of a train, like the Rocky Mountaineer, you're their responsibility. And they just want you to go. And I come out of the marketing world and...
The number one rule about marketing is that the best marketing skill is word them out. So when they see 70 people sitting on a coach, what they see is 72 people that they want to lead and tell the world. 70 advertisers is what they see. Exactly. Maybe this is a broad comparison, but would you consider it very comparable to maybe cruise lines?
So I haven't done a lot of cruising. And I used to describe it at the start of the Route 66 book that going on a cruise would be like spending seven days at a wedding reception. It steamed me, right? It's got all of them. Yeah, you got a point there. Yeah. So it's got some of the elements in that you're never going to go hungry. Right. And some of the elements in that you're taken care of. But there's nobody trying to get you to do games. There's nobody trying to entertain you. They will inform you. That's good. And I found it much more...
educational. You don't get interrupted all the time with the crew talking to you, but you get lots of it. And then they will go to the side. And the other thing they did, I must have heard five or six different languages spoken by staff. Oh, really? Because there were people from around the world. And they may have some English. You know, if you're German, they just love to hear the German language back to you. Say that there's a Japanese woman. I'll mention her because I never actually got to talk to her. She made a couple of comments, but she had an empty seat beside her. And it leads me to something that I think is about...
crowd. Like you and I talking about trips we want to take and things. And I didn't know whether she booked two seats because she wanted to be alone or maybe more likely someone else was supposed to be in that seat. And for whatever reason, could have been business, could have been illness, that other person wasn't there. And she was kind of melancholy, a bit off to herself. And she was as stylish as sort of seven-year-old Japanese woman could so often look, they look young and together and extremely playful. And at the very end, she said, because we were out and she had said, you know, Rick,
This trip means the world to you now. It will mean the world to Riley in 20 years. That would be all she would say because everybody knew everybody's names. So she called me Rick and she told me that. But at the very end, she said, and I think this was the key to why the seat next to her was empty. She said it very Buddhist-like. She said, the mistake we make is we think we have time.
And I think if she had been on that trip a year before, that CP cider would have been filled. And I'm of an age now where hardly a week goes by that maybe somebody you played baseball with last year, he's not around anymore this year. Every minute counts. Exactly. So I think that notion very seriously. If we have travel plans, if someone listening to this has travel plans, don't make the mistake of thinking you have time. Act on them. Get out there and do them. Make the memories now. You might end up leaving the memories behind with loved ones, but yeah. Exactly. Do travel now. The other thing is that COVID taught us.
Because before COVID, I was one of the people that put travel for granted. I took that if you got enough of the coin to afford, whether it's to go to the next state or the next province or go on a road trip or whatever it is, I took for granted that we will be able to do things like that, let alone getting on an airplane and going to Europe or somewhere extravagant. COVID taught us we cannot take for granted that easy ability to travel because we got clamped down for two years and didn't get to go anywhere. That's right. I mean, it takes somebody like yourself who, you know, travel is part of your livelihood.
yes and when you can't do that you can't do what you need to do you know to bring that income yes no i totally get it uh getting back to the uh to the train itself how often did it stop It stopped at the end of the day. That was it, really? That was it. So it didn't stop to pick up passengers. Rail service, passenger rail service in Canada and in the States with Amtrak has changed so much in recent years in that it is more of the distances. And I've been on a lot of Amtrak. I've been on the train they call the city of New Orleans, Chicago to New Orleans. And it was an amazing trip. And it had some stops, but they were few and they were pretty much far between. Gone are the days where, as you're approaching a...
a town and you're slowing down the train station if somebody had a flag up it meant that there's somebody get on the train that's gone in canada gone in in america but amtrak makes more clauses to drop people off and pick people up yeah but what they don't do anymore and of course used to do up until 50s and the 60s is is they could stop and let people off in the middle of nowhere if that's where someone wanted to get off either going on a hiking trip or more likely to be met by neighbors and go to the farm right so trains trains were tremendous in their service and it's you know canada was built specifically because of the canadian pacific railway cpr and cr are two of the biggest north american trail networks now the old lots of american railways they're just they are massive but british columbia so think vancouver and victoria that part was almost part of the united states because in the in the say 1870s early 1880s you know, Oregon was becoming a state, Washington was becoming a state. The year Canada was founded with the four Atlantic Canadas, 1867, was the same year the United States bought Alaska. Right, they needed a corridor up to Alaska. Right, so British Columbia was logical. And not only that, but the population of British Columbia, and like 1858, and then at the end of the 1800s, a lot of that with Americans coming up for the gold rush, the Fraser River gold rush, the terrible gold rush, and then the Yukon and Alaska gold rush.
The deal cut was that the colonies, say the colony of British Columbia, would join with eastern Canada. Think today's Ontario and Quebec and the Atlantic. It would join with that if they would build a railway. And that railway became the Canadian Pacific Railway, or CPR as it's better known today. And it got built. And that guarantee of building a railway is why British Columbia joined with the rest of Canada. And Canada became an ocean-to-ocean nation. Oh, there you go. See, now we know. A lot of people probably didn't know that. When the train did stop.
Well, like you said, it stopped at the end of every day. So I guess you had ample time to explore if there was any exploring to be done. So, for example, when you're in Whistler, you get in, you know, you had your lunch, you're in town, and you've got all that. So you can literally, if you want to make the time, you can get up high enough to do some summer skiing. And you can get up on the gondolas, the peak-to-peak gondolas. Amazing business. Or you can just walk around the place where the 2010 Olympics happened. Wow. So there's lots to do when that train stops. It's not just all travel and looking out the window.
Yes, you know, and in fact, if you're going, say, from Vancouver overnight in Camels and then going to Banff, you're getting off in the Canadian Rockies, one of the world's great destinations. And lots of people then spend a week or two weeks in the Rockies. Everything's from hiking to going up the Ice Steel Parkway to going to some of the iconic mountain climbs. So people do a lot of outdoor activities at either end of their journey. Wow. You know, I have this saying about being on a cruise ship.
If you go bored or hungry, it's your own fault. And I think the same thing can apply to rail travel like that. Yes. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, I've traveled across Russia on a train seven days with my two sons. And there's always something going on. And if you go to the bar car, you don't have to speak Russian to be fascinated by the personalities around and the shenanigans you see going on. You're watching either a stranger's court or try to outdo one another in card games or chess. You listen to this. Russian is such a great language to listen to. And that's just.
crossing one country i trained across america from from working with my sons in new york to chicago and then to san francisco and the people we met i mentioned earlier about about people having secrets of people giving them up there is something about train travel that if you're talking to someone it's like they think they found a counselor that is never going to because you don't know that you're a stranger but if you're having a casual conversation with somebody of almost any age let's say adult they begin to tell you on a train things that they know they've got the next hour or they might even have the next day if they don't finish their story or if they feel awkward they can leave and talk to you later on because it's easy to meet up again and you begin to hear from people who are thinking about a career change and they want an outside person's view or they are maybe headed somewhere to marry someone but they're uncertain about their relationship or they left behind an ill parent and they're wondering and feeling guilty about being on an enjoyable trip and people explain that and so for a writer then the good stories are always in a shower
Nobody wants to read about how good your meal was. What people like to read about is that you stubbed your toe or you embarrassingly said something to someone and then you had to recover on it. A book publisher once told me, nobody wants to read about an author who's a smarter traveler than they are. And I thought that was insightful. With me, it's not difficult because I'm not smarter than any of those who's reading my book. But they like to know that the challenges are real and the people you meet are sincere and they have real problems and that it's worth reading about. Wow, that's super interesting.
With regard to, we'll take the Rocky Mountain era. Do you think the history of this kind of rail travel, especially on the Rocky Mountain era, do you think it's understated? Yeah, yes, it is. And I would say the same thing is true in the United States. In fact, Rocky Mountaineer now has what they call Rocks to Red Rocks, which is Denver, into Utah. And it's a new one. They began a new trip. They began a few years ago. But what I've also been on, and Janice and I got engaged on a train in Alabama on our way between Florida going to New Orleans. And so there is something quite romantic of the feeling of being there. Oh, sure, yeah. Yeah, but part of that romance, I think, is the history. It's the image of early train travel. Think about it.
You know, the steam engine started to go out, you know, sort of in the 50s, the diesel was coming in, and then in the 60s, and the steam was gone as a load of travel. But when that first started out, you know, steam trains could only go so far before they needed more fuel, they needed more water. And when they stopped, people had to get off the train and eat. And it's a bit comparable to when we talked about Route 66, that in the early days, the late 1920s, the 1930s on Route 66, the vehicles that people had to drive, they... they didn't have big trunks so you couldn't take a lot of stuff they didn't have big gas tanks so you couldn't go very far so when you got to a new place on route 66 in the 1930s the vehicle you were driving it sort of rattled loose and you needed to get somebody to wrench it back together you needed gas even though you're only gone 100 miles or something so outside of all of the towns along Route 66 became these service roads, which became known as gasoline alleys. And that was because the cars had to pull in and get serviced every 150 miles. And people needed food at mall and mall shops. And they needed to stay in little singular motels that there was no other motel like them across the country. That individual sense of travel, I think you still have when you're on a train, be it an Amtrak or the Orient Express or the Indian Pacific in Australia or the Rocky Mountaineer. You feel very much that you're...
on a journey and the journey is 100 of the reason you're there yeah why do you think travel by rail isn't as promoted or advertised as much as other forms are i think in part because it's not as available as others are you can get connections anywhere in the united states by airplane or by car if you're patient and less maybe now from some of the bus services but you can still get everywhere everywhere and the training only runs on certain routes i think the other thing that has happened is that train travel has become because of the economics around it something that tourists do more than commuters. And so you get a lot of people who say they want to go from Los Angeles to Seattle. They love the idea of getting on the train. And the trains have great names in Amtrak, Starlight Express and such as that. But they like getting on the train. And visitors will do that a lot because they're going to see the countryside. And they don't have to pay attention to stopping the gas up or make any other arrangements. And I think people like that. So I think a lot of what is advertised about train travel in Canada
on Via Rail or the Rocky Mountain Europe or in the United States on Amtrak. I think a lot of the advertising, we don't see it because it happens abroad. It might happen in Europe or it might happen in Asia. A lot of it in Austria. Australians are great. When they come to North America, they usually come for six or seven weeks. And they love traveling by train because they want to get everywhere. That's amazing. See, I would think that something like rail travel, like what you experienced here in the U.S. at least, would be a great form of getting people out of their cars and economically. I don't know how much a trip like this costs.
I don't know if it's an affordable thing for the average family. Well, I think what you do is you then get on to comparisons of some cruise ship. Sure. High-end cruise ship. And Amtrak still has some food services that are great, and then they've got others that are more efficient food services, which I think is a disappointment. I love traveling on train and taking a sports jacket along and getting, not dressed for dinner, but getting up and going down to have a cocktail and then have a meal. That used to be what you could do on Amtrak. Less so now. On Rocky Mountain here, it's...
sort of um what would you call it sort of a casual elegance yeah yeah so they're not inexpensive to to do those journeys but i think it depends on on the experience you're anticipating and if you're anticipating that i'm going to have this time to myself i'm going to meet some really interesting people that speak different languages and come from different places talk about politics different You know, as a writer about travel, one of the things that I accept as my responsibility when I'm on a journey is to meet as many people who are different than me as I can. There you go. And what a better way to do that than on a train. I kind of compare it to those Viking River cruises. Yeah, right. You're on and off. You're on and off, right? Yeah, it's a great comparison. Oh, that's awesome. Now, how long was the trip total from beginning to end?
about two weeks two weeks about about two weeks for for us and and i wondered you know i i've i've had like you've had lots of great experiences that when you come back from a travel whether it's a month or it's a 10 days or three whatever when you come back from a writer point of view i often realize that the some incidents and anecdotes even if it's been to a quasi exotic place might sustain a blog or might sustain a magazine article but it's rare rare to have a journey that has tension, incident, anecdote, curiosity, rich, unknown history, lots of things like that, that would sustain a book-length treatment. That's difficult to find because you've got to have 80,000 really interesting words. And I write long, so I won't write 120,000 words and end up with an 80,000-word book because you're putting everything down. And then you just have to have it so it's enjoyable for the reader. But the train travel lends itself to that because you're constantly hearing other stories. But you have to insert yourself into that. And my preference is traveling with...
to people who are different because I already know what I think. And if I sit down with you, you've got a whole different perspective on things. I know because we've had lots of conversations over time. You and I bring different things to the table. That makes for a really interesting conversation. But if you and I were members of the same political party and went to the same church and ate the same food and shopped at the same shopping center, then we sit down to talk.
Where is the animation? And I think that when you're traveling on a train, you are meeting people who, before they got on board the train, they come from different politics. They come from different religions. They come from different eating habits. They're all different ages. They've had different careers, different working lives. And so when they open their mouths, if we listen, it's just remarkable what we learn. Yeah. Wow. It's actually right. It's kind of the same on a cruise ship. You're meeting people from all over the place. But a lot of times, again, you do meet a lot of the same people.
So conversation doesn't change very much. And then you can shy away from having conversations. Whereas, you know, on the train, on the Rocky Boundary, every time we went down for a breakfast or we went down later for lunch, you're sitting with different people. And they could be anywhere. I write about all these people and train beyond the mountains because...
There were two women from Texas, and one was a mother and the daughter, but the daughter was late 40s, career-oriented, really successful, and they were there taking some time with them. But they become fascinated from the days they spent in bed with three early women. pioneers, or one of them was an artist, one was a mountain climber, another one was a photographer. And they talked about these three women. Two of them from Philadelphia, and another one who had fallen in love with a fellow who lived in Banff. And these were socialites. But they traveled in the late 1800s to be in Banff, to climb the mountains, to pick the train, just to explore. And so these two American women on the train sitting across from us at lunch, they told me more than I knew about these three women from the States who had come and discovered their own new lives in Canada.
and wrote about it and painted about it, did amazing photographs about it. And I don't know that I would have thought about those three women who I then went on to read books about and research lots about had I not sat down with Riley across from two women from Texas who themselves were interesting, but they found interest in three pioneering women. And they talked about it all night, and it was invigorating. And that's what happens. That's what makes that kind of travel super interesting. Now, in your book, you did include some maps, which included the different routes that the train did. Did the train take all these different routes that you showed in your maps?
So the Rocky Mountain years, so for example, when we say Banff to Cantaloups overnight and then to Vancouver, you can get on to Vancouver and go to Cantaloups and Banff overnight. You can also go to Vancouver, Cantaloups, onto Jasper, or do that two days during every period. Or you can do the, we went north to Whistler, and then further north, Cornell, and then northeast to get to Jasper. And you can do that three night one in reverse. So people combine them all the time, or they'll, as grandson Riley and I did, we rented a car in Jasper, so we had this time back again in the...
In the Rockies, they just go with your own kind of rhythm. And that's, you know, those types of negotiations. You're trying to decide who gets to choose the music. And you get an hour of Riley's and an hour of Vine. And, you know, we're in the Rocky Mountains. And I want to play John Denver. And he says, who's Denver? Yeah. Right? He wanted to play Marshmallow or some other group, right? Or his younger brother, Declan, likes a guy called Bored With You. A guy who plays ukulele. And so...
i ended up when you're sharing space with someone gender two generations younger yeah and if you're open you know you're learning about their music and at one point um one point there's a scene i write about in the book where it's just riding me on the observation deck and he's uh he does a dance he just starts to dance and it's a little bit of a two-step there's a little bit of a you know hip thing and it's a not quite a jive and he's got it he's going around and then he stops and i said uh i said what was What was going on in your mind? What song was that? Because I could hear that he was singing a song. He said it's from the game Fortnite. And he says to me, you know, if you ask more questions about what I was doing, you wouldn't know that song. And he goes, yeah, that was a good dig, eh? That was a good dig. And so I started to ask more. Because I was thinking he'd just hang on my every word. But no. And so I tried to pay more attention to, because fortunately that was like the first or second day. And my behavior, my behavior, my son, who was his father, said to me before the trip, he says, try to be more of a friend and less of a grandparent. Yeah. See, they go. Education for everybody. It's just so true.
I mean, is there a better education than than travel? No, no, absolutely not. Absolutely not. Well, one quick question about that, about that. We just talked about the roots. One quick question about that. So I get the impression from what you're just telling me is that you can pretty much design your travel by rail vacation to suit your timeline. Like you can make it any length you wanted.
Yeah, it's sort of a minimum of two days. Minimum of two days. But, you know, I've talked to people who would go like, Camels, Vancouver, then they would spend some time in Vancouver, and then they go, Vancouver, Whistler, Quinnell, Jasper, spend a bunch of time in the Jasper, in the Rockies, the Icefield Parkway, and then they get back on the train and go, Jasper, Camels, back to Vancouver. So, yeah, you can mix and match. And it's so varied. This is the type of thing about the United States or about Canada that just...
The muses Europeans because I've been taught you and you can hear this on any day. They would say if you were doing this in Europe, you would have gone through five countries by now. Exactly. Yes. Yes. I've gone from Chicago to Seattle or Chicago to New York. And if you're from Chicago to Seattle and you think of going through Minot, North Dakota, why else are you going to get there? I'd like to be there because my grandma was born there. She was American, came up to Canada. And I got off the train in the middle of the night in Minot, North Dakota.
for fresh air, and I realized where I was. And you get things like that, then all of a sudden you've got a different story with your family. I guess I was in Ramazola again. I don't know anything out in the train station, and it was 2 o'clock in the morning. But you feel like you put a pin on the map, and when you get home, you look at the map again. But when you think of people from Chicago to Seattle, if you got on a train in the Netherlands, I mean, you'd be down in Spain, and I'd like to drive. Sure. Oh, yeah. Right, through having gone through half a dozen trips. Yeah, exactly. Well, you've done rail travel before on other types of trips.
Yes. Tell us about some of those. Well, I've had lots of that. One of the things I can say is that my two sons are red and strong. And they're older now, older than dirt. And we traveled. And over the course of five journeys, each of them three years apart, doesn't happen, we ended up circumnavigating the northern hemisphere by train. No kidding. Yeah. Wow. Right. I mean, and that was awesome. And some of that is places you can't go today easily. I mean, most people wouldn't be comfortable training through Belarus and obviously not Ukraine. So we had opportunities like that. But we also had an extraordinary opportunity. And around 2008,
We were able to make arrangements to get on a train in Beijing and go to Pyongyang in North Korea. And it was about a 36-hour train trip. We then had a week inside of North Korea in a year where they had only allowed in 300 Westerners. And it was... It was humbling at times and heartbreaking at other times. And then we took the train back out from Pyongyang to Beijing a week later. Wow. I have to believe that train travel in Europe and other parts of the world is significantly different than the Rocky Mountaineer. Well, so much of it is commuter.
training, and I was with Ryan, he was now 14, and his dad, my son Sean, who himself was taking a sabbatical from work, and part of it, I joined him and Ryan before in Norway. And, you know, we have family there we wanted to see around Hammer. We had lots of stuff to do, but we also were, of the eight days we were there, we were on a training. five of them for at least a short spell. In a couple of days, we were eight hours. And it's transportation there. It's reliable transportation. Though I will say when we went from Oslo to Bergen, which is supposed to be stunning scenery, and we had a blizzard right where the stunning scenery was. And here's the thing is that if you don't get on the Rocky Mountain, there might be one the next day or a couple days later. In a place like Norway, if you miss the 7 o'clock train, there will be an 11 o'clock train, and a 3 o'clock train, and an 8 o'clock train. So when we were going from Oslo to Bergen, and this is just a matter of weeks ago,
The train behind us, it was four hours behind us, it got trapped in the blizzard. And they were trapped for eight hours. So you then get issues around food, power, all sorts of things. So that's an element of danger. As a writer, what I wouldn't have liked the discomfort, there was a story in being trapped for eight hours on a train. Murder on the Orient Express. Kind of like that. What's next for you, Rick? You got another travel lot coming up?
So I would like to ride the Rochester Red Rock that I mentioned that Rocky Mountaineer has between Denver and Malab. I would like to do that. And we've talked about maybe doing that this summer. I really would like to... climb the Chilkoot Trail, which begins in Alaska in Skagway, and then goes up into the Yukon in Canada, and that's where the gold rush crowds went in 1898, and then we go up the mountain, you see these photographs of guys like you and me, who just said, we're going for the gold fields, and I'll have to go, whether you're 20 or 60 or whatever, I'll have to go for the gold fields, and you can still do that, it's arduous, so I'd have to do a lot of work here in shape, more than playing baseball twice a week, I'd have to really work out, but I do want to do that, and I'd love to go.
um and i'm i'm writing some shorter pieces five six thousand words at most about travels travel vignettes and so each of the ones i just explained could be of that and i'd also very much like to go um in search of an onion dish that i like because i hate onions and i thought you know there are some places some places in america or in persia and some places in the united states where onions are such a part of the local scene that you've got amazing concoctions by really talented chefs. And I'm one of those people that will unabashedly say, I love French onion soup until I get down to the onions. I love the smell of onions on the midway. And I cut me fair, but I hate onions. So I could spoil the meal for me. And I thought, you know, given that those sort of olfactory things are enjoyable to me about onions.
maybe I should go looking for an onion dish that I can learn to love the little beast. They say that if you were going into the desert and you could take one piece of food with you, the one that you would survive the longest with is an onion because of the nutrients in it, the moisture that's in it, what it does for your digestive system, how it keeps you going. And I've always thought... To me, that's one of my unfounded peers is that I'll end up in the desert. All I have is an onion. You might have to make your way down to New Orleans if you really want to find some sort of onion. Hey, there's this train that goes from Florida to New Orleans. I'm not going to get engaged. We're staying together. All right. Well, how can people learn more about you and what you're up to and all that?
Well, I do have a website, which is rickantonson.com. So www.rickantonson.com. And that's got my eight books and periodic updates. For example, when this interview gets posted, I'll link it there. I'll give it to Greystone Publishing, who are the publishers of Trailer on the Mountains. And they're just terrific. They've been a dream to work with. And they'll get it out to people. So things like that. Also, I mentioned Cathedral Thinking.
There's a cathedralthinking.com website about that philosophy, which has been around for 100 years. I had nothing to do with creating it, but I'm a bit of an apostle. So I speak about that. And there's a TED Talk on there about it in a recent interview. But there's a whole bunch of stuff because it gets used in Australia for water conservation or in...
Germany for things or on long-term climate change. So there's lots on there. It's just an interesting, easy-to-digest philosophy. So those are the two things, rickantonson.com and capitolthinking.com. Excellent. I'll put the links to those things in the show notes and, of course, on our website here. Rick, any last words to those who may consider traveling by rail, as you do? I would say two things. The first is...
Find a place you want to be, and if there's a train anywhere near it, get aboard. And if you want to see Canada, there's Via Rail or the train we're on, which, you know, if you listed the five most famous trains in the world, one of them would be the Orient Express, another would be the Rocky Mountaineer. But the other thing I would say is what I learned on this trip, and I write about it in Train Beyond the Mountains, and that's what the Japanese woman had said, which is, the mistake we make is we think we have time. If you've got travel desires, make them happen. Excellent.
Well, Rick, I want to thank you very much for joining me here on the podcast and tell us about your new book. Greatly appreciate it. And always wonderful to talk to you. And that's great. Thank you very much for being on the show. Well, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I thank you for making it so. Thank you very much, sir. Don't go anywhere. I want to talk to you when we're done. But thanks for being on the show. Thank you.
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to that cure. You can help him by going to longhaulpaul.com and donate for his quest for that cure for MS. Thank you for joining me and Rick here in the V-Twin Cafe where he told us about his new book, Train Beyond the Mountains, Journeys on the Rocky Mountaineer. Now, you can learn more by going to rickantonson.com. All right, links will be in the show notes and, of course, on the Motorcycle Men website at www.motorcyclemen.us. Don't forget to get on over to the Ride With Ted YouTube channel to watch many of the many videos that I have over there, including some Ted Shed and, of course, naturally, the Ride With Ted videos, some great stuff. And we're starting to give away stuff, too. So if you want to win some things, you want to check the channel out. All right, for the rest of the Motorcycle Men team, thanks for listening. And remember, boys and girls, we say stupid crap so you don't have to.
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