My Experiance with Via Rail Canada

On the via rail hudson bay train I encountered quite an unpleasent experience, I wrote a letter of my annoyance and frusteration to Via Rail's customer relations services, now I will just copy-paste both letters from my email to this blog.


Dear Customer Service Person for via rail Canada,

My name is Joshua Grossman, and I would like to tell you how thoroughly disgusted I am by the fact that you sell alcohol on the 18 hour train ride from Thompson to Churchill, MB. I am 12 years old, and I was traveling from Thompson to Churchill on train 693 on 9 October to see the polar bears in a “tundra buggy” as part of a year-long trip around the world that my family and I are taking. As I was sleeping in one of the passenger cars, I was rudely awakened by an alcoholic fool who decided that it would be a good idea to warn both me and my father of the 20-12 Mayan end of the world. He said, and I quote “You know, we’re all gonna die in 20-12, so you gonna want to be alone and s***, and you’re gonna want to get the f*** away from your family and die alone, you know what I mean?” *all said in the accent of a drunken moron*. I was scared by his aggressive behavior, and was relieved to see that he was in the process of getting off the train in Gillam when he woke me. I was flabbergasted by many things, mainly the rudeness of how he spoke, and that there was even a small amount of alcohol allowed on the train (let alone the massive amount that was actually allowed). And, that your staff continued to provide him with alcohol even after he was clearly very drunk. I request that you immediately cease and desist all alcohol on any train what so ever, as soon as possible.

Sincerely,
Joshua Grossman.



Here is their reply:

Dear Mr. Grossman:

Thank you for your email concerning your recent trip with VIA Rail Canada between Thompson and Churchill.

Please accept my sincere apologies for the discomfort caused to you during your trip aboard Train 693 on October 9th, 2009 due to the reported disruptive behavior of a drunk passenger. Although our personnel can and have refused transportation to inebriated passengers, discretion and judgment are always required, as improper behavior is not always evident or predictable when such a person boards the train. The reported behavior of this individual is unacceptable, and I regret that this situation was not addressed in speedy manner for the benefit and comfort of all passengers.


I should mention that VIA personnel have been advised to politely refuse the service of alcoholic beverages to passengers who, in their judgment, have consumed enough, particularly if their conduct is disturbing other passengers. Again, I apologize for the inconvenience caused to you on this occasion. I can assure you that this incident has been reported to the manager responsible for follow-up with the involved employees.
Again, thank you for writing and allowing us the opportunity to apologize and take remedial action.


Lise Richard
Customer Relations Officer

I was frusterated by the fact that they did not agree to make any changes to their policy, but at least they responded and said that they would alert those responcible for that particular train.

My Arctic Adventures

For the past three days I have been residing in Churchill Manitoba, where I have been on a dog-cart, a 4-wheel drive pickup truck, and a tundra buggy.

On October 11th I went dog sledding, well actually it was dog-carting because there wasn’t enough snow to go dog sledding, so we did pretty much the same thing, but there were wheels, making it a cart. My family and I went at about 15mph, being pulled by eight dogs. It was really fun, my favorite dog was Zaboo, he was an orange-goldish color, and very energetic. On the actual ride I took a video, (which I will include later) but the snow and dirt kept flying in my face and I was afraid it would damage my camera’s lens so I had to stop it short.

The next day we went on something called a “tundra buggy” it was like a really big bus, but it was completely customized so that there was a bathroom and a kitchen, and an observation deck at the back! So we were driving around the arctic tundra in a big bus-thing for about eight hours! We saw a total of four polar bears within those eight hours, but we only really got close to two of them, the first, and the third. The first bear we saw was pretty young and after about three minutes took shelter from us in a large outcrop of rocks. The second was just a sleeping lump in the distance and so there isn’t much to say about it. Then there was Paul, well I named him Paul because he reminded me of a character in my friend Jaret’s story. At the end of fifth grade we had to write a narrative for an assignment in English class, Jaret and I made a decision to include each others characters in our stories. Paul was the name of Jaret’s character and this polar bear, for some strange reason, reminded me of Paul. So Paul was a pretty lazy polar bear who woke up about every five minutes, once he woke up for about three minutes. I have a pretty good video of him which will be up on my blog later. The final bear was probably the second bear, just this time he was awake, but he was pretty far off in the distance so there isn’t much to tell about him this time either.

The next day was the trip home, but I convinced my parents to rent a car for three hours and we drove around all of the back roads in search of polar bears. We actually found one, we had heard about a man who owned a team of dogs, for dog sledding, and according to the story whenever he fed his dogs, he would throw out a fish to “the bear”. Now, the town didn’t like this at all, because he was taking money away from tundra buggy companies, he would charge people to drive around on his property, and they would get to see the bear. But then he sued the town because he said that if he stopped feeding the bear, it would come and eat some of his 180 dogs, he actually won the court case and kept feeding the bear. So we drove over to his property, and just kept on the outskirts but, there we saw it, a very large, well fed bear! At first it was hard to see, because it looked like there were 20 of them, but after a closer look we saw that 19 of them were incredibly large, white huskies. Unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures of him, because my video camera ran out of battery, but it was still a great last minute experience.

I think this was a great trip because there is so much of a difference between looking at the taxidermy polar bear at the London Museum of Natural History, or going out in a tundra buggy for eight hours. Another reason I’m liking the big trip, and this section in particular is because it is teaching me so much about the difference between seeing, and doing! I will try to get the videos up as soon as I can but it may take awhile, so bear with me, I assure you that some of them are pretty good.

Monthly Financial Report #2, September

It’s now October 8th and I have finally finished with tracking the September expenses, and we actually turned out to be under budget by 0.33%. Gas topped the charts again at 31% of the budget, followed not so closely by groceries and household expenses both amounting to 15% of our monthly spending. Gas at 31% of our budget came 5 percentage points more than last month!

I am happy that we have been able to spend less than 10 percent of our monthly funds on restaurant meals; I think this shows how we have been able to cut back, even on things that we really enjoy. Other key differences between September and August were: in August admissions were 17% of total spending but in September they were only 3%. Household expenses had the reverse situation where in August they were 2% but in September they were 15%. One of the reasons admissions was much higher in August is that we bought an annual National Parks pass, which we then got a lot of value out of September. I’m not really sure why household was higher in September, but will be watching it closely.

So far, we are just slightly under budget on a trip-to-date basis, but October is likely to be a very expensive month, mainly because of our trip to Churchill to see the Polar Bears.

IT’S JUST A STATUE!

In my opinion Mt. Rushmore should never have been made into a national monument, because in essence, it’s a statue. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great, but as I said, it’s just a statue. It may be an utterly massive statue showing all of America’s greatest presidents, but it’s just a statue! I know I may be starting to get incredibly repetitive, but I really want to make my point. Yes, I am actually a junior ranger there so I know I shouldn’t be insulting it, but…IT’S A STATUE, A BIG, BIG STATUE!!! See, I just don’t understand why they make it such a big deal, sure whoever made it was probably a great person to learn all sorts of useless facts about, yet it’s still just a STATUE!!! I wonder, if I made a big statue of Elvis Presley out of a mountain, would it become a national monument?

The Biggest Ball of Twine in the World

Right now I’m in the RV, headed away from Cawker City. In Cawker City lies the world’s biggest ball of twine! It was pretty ghost-like in Cawker City, not much but the ball of twine. But what was really cool was how in all of the old shop windows there was a re-worked famous picture so that the ball of twine was featured. So, for example, there was a fake picture of Picasso’s Sunflowers, but lying there, on the table was the ball of twine. Or, there was a twine-a-fied version of American Gothic, where the woman was holding a ball of twine.

I think that it’s really cool to visit almost-ghost towns, because they’re a great way to find out all sorts of information about stuff you’ll never need to know. Here are some facts that you will never have any use for, but I’ll tell you them any way; The ball is 11 feet tall, 42 feet in circumference, it weighs 19,092 pounds (which is 5,042 pounds more than the RV!) It is also started in 1953, making it 56 years old. So, all in all, I think that was a great experience that I’ll luckily never need to have again. I hope you like the weird twine pictures my dad took.

Here’s a picture of me adding more twine to the ball!

Here are some of the other Twine-art masterpieces:

The Mysterious Book, Number 2

A Little Treasury of American Poetry, edited by Oscar Williams is the title of the book my grandmother gave me. It was my grandfather’s when he was little. Here are some of my favorite poems;

Glyph (from the Washoe-Paiute)

Truly Buzzards
Around my sky are circling!

For my soul festers,
And an odor of corruption
Betrays me to disaster.

Meanness, betrayal, and spite
Come flockwise,
To make me aware
Of sickness and death within me.
My sky is full of the dreaded sound
Of the wings of unsuccesses.

I really liked this poem because of how it seemed so… other-worldly. It was translated directly from the glyphs of the Washoe-Paiute.

I think whoever is reading this poem will really like it, it’s called “I saw Eternity”.

I Saw Eternity, by Louise Bogan

O beautiful forever!
O grandiose everlasting!
Now, now, now,
I break you into pieces,
I feed you to the ground.

O brilliant, O languishing
Cycle of weeping light!
The mice and birds will eat you,
And you will spoil their stomachs
As you have spoiled my mind.

Here, mice, rats,
Porcupines and toads,
Moles, shrews, squirrels,
Weasels, turtles, lizards-
Here’s bright everlasting!
Here’s a crumb of forever!
Here’s a crumb of forever!

I enjoyed that poem because of how it made me look at eternity in a completely different way.

I thought both of the poems really made me look at things a different way, and I’m looking forward to reading more poems as we travel.

Monthly Budget Report Number 1

I have now “closed up the books” for the month of August and found out some interesting facts, such as, the fact that we spent 26% percent of our budget on gas. Currently we are 1.4% over budget, which, considering the fact that we bought many staples is actually quite good. Our major expenses were gas and groceries which totaled 50% of our monthly budget. We also spent a large amount on admissions (17%). In the future I think we should be driving less to reduce gas costs. I also think thank we should be more careful when buying gas, because if gas is 20 cents cheaper, it makes a big difference when you’re driving an RV that gets eight miles to the gallon with a 55 gallon tank! Another point I will make sure to get across to my family is that we should buy more fruits like apples, and not stuff like strawberries which are out of season and are usually imported, and thus cost more. Finally to lower admissions I would like us to stop going to places that we go to just out of boredom, so we can go to better places that we will enjoy more.