Day twelve

This morning we left our hotel at 6.30am (!) and went to the Rocky Mountaineer train station. The people there were very nice and had us all sorted in about 10 minutes. We departed on the train at just after 7.45am for the first day's journey to Kamloops.

We travelled out of Vancouver and through some very nice countryside and then the mountains, but not the Rockies yet!

This pass is called Hell's Gate; there is a cable car across it that you can go on if you're not whizzing past on the train!
We went under this bridge and I managed to snap a photo of the structure underneath. There are several single span bridges in the mountains; you have to wonder how they built them more than 100 years ago!
What we didn't realise about these mountains is that some of them are in a desert! Everything is very barren and there are not many trees, as you can see from some of these photos.
These are some rock sheds that have been built across the tracks to protect the trains from landslides. You can see the avalanche tracks right above the sheds.
But more excitingly, we saw lots of bald eagles! This one sat nicely in the tree to pose for me.

We stayed overnight in Kamloops but I don't have any photos because it was dark when we arrived and dark when we left again the next morning! Kamloops is not very exciting in the dark.