If you’ve been looking for the trip of a lifetime, do I have the trip for you. We’re just home from a 12-day Trans American/Canadian rail trip that I want to tell you about in the next few posts. But, first, and most importantly, I want to tell you in the most positive way that if you are thinking of making this a dream trip of yours, now is the time to do it. Our trip was full of bonus experiences. The biggest being that we had over twenty extra hours on the rails that we didn’t have to pay for! Imagine something FREE in today’s economy!

Now, in railroad terminology, these extra hours are called delays. Seems the railroads value oil and grain much more than folks named Ollie and Granny. You see the latter don’t make them any money, so which train cars do you think get to sit on side tracks while the money-makers get the right-of-way?

Another grand bonus is you don’t even have to see the cities you signed up to see! You can just skip the notion that you will see Seattle, Toronto, or Montreal, because all the bonus hours on the train ensure that you arrive too late to see those cities. They also ensure that you only get four to five hours in the really nice hotels that are included. But why would you want more time in a luxury hotel with a thick bed and thick linens and thick pillows when you can enjoy paper-thin mattresses and limp-noodle linens and pancake-flat pillows on some trains?

You just remind yourself you didn’t really want to waste time sleeping on this vacation anyway, nor did you want to waste time walking anywhere when you can just sit, idling on tracks, and stuff your face with bran muffins, short bread cookies, and some nondescript semi-sweet eatable discs (available for FREE for the lucky sleeper car folks).

You don’t even have to think about getting your 10,000 steps in each day because there aren’t even that many steps to be had in the two sleeper cars in which you are quarantined, along with lurching visits to the observation or dining cars.

I say lurching because often rails are uneven in height and are not continuous, so if you’re really lucky, you can come home with free black and blue marks on your shoulders and sides from bouncing between the walls as you attempt to move from Point A to Point B. I said FREE again. Did you catch that?

Honestly, I can truly say, you won’t know what you’re missing unless you try it! Sign up now! I’ll be telling more positives, actually real positives, later. But for now think bonuses: extra hours, tasty carbs, and colorful bruises. What’s not to like?