TRAVELERS’ CHECKS

before dinner. Those passengers, who sleep in double beds, not bunks, and have showers in their staterooms, also have their own bar, Dome Car and a lounge at the end of the train. There they are served afternoon canapes and bar snacks.

Passengers on the rest of the train can enjoy the Prestige Class bar, lounge and dome car after 1 p.m. many days.

After lunch one day, I poked my head into the kitchen and chatted briefly with Chef Jean-Francois Dube, who told me he’d been cooking for Via Rail passengers for 13 years.

“It’s got its challenges,” he said. “But I love doing it.”

Storage is limited aboard the train, so, the chef told me, some provisioning is done during stops in cities, such as Winnipeg and Edmonton, where we stopped in the middle of the night on this trip.

“We’re serving Saskatoon berries with the duck this week,” Dube said.

The berries, unique to North America, look like blueberries but have a distinct wild fruit flavor and have been eaten by Canada’s aboriginal people for hundreds of years.

The city of Saskatoon, founded in the 1800s as a utopian settlement for the temperance movement, took its name from the berry found there. Soon the demand for the berry outstripped its supply, so now thousands of acres of Saskatoon Via Rail’s Canadian maintains a year-round schedule of four-day rail trips between Toronto and Vancouver with stops in Winnipeg, Saskatoon. Edmonton, Jasper and Kamloops. Those traveling in Sleeper Plus or Prestige classes have meals onboard included. Fares for those classes range from about $2,500 to $6,900 per person in U.S. dollars. See the website at www.viarail. ca.

Read more about traveling across Canada on the Canadian next month.

berries are grown. Saskatoon is the largest city in Saskatchewan, although Regina is the provincial capital.

JANET PODOLAK — THE NEWS-HERALD Skewered shrimp wrapped around scallops and placed atop fresh greens was the luncheon salad one day aboard the train.