It’s mid-May and Vancouver is green and blooming. Before we board the train, we stay a few nights at the Fairmont Waterfront, a 489-room luxury hotel overlooking the city’s harbour and arranged by Rocky Mountaineer. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows in our room, I watch shades of green and blue paint the water and the North Shore mountains behind it.

The elevator doors open and the sounds of a pianist playing the Beegees’ “How deep is your love?” fills the lobby. We walk up a few steps to ARC Restaurant for an oyster and B.C. wine happy hour. At a servery, staff are busy shucking and chucking the briny little bivalves onto platters over ice. My mom and I each take a glass of bubbles from a tray and take demure little sips, as if we’re not seasoned wine drinkers. We sample the oysters, too. Demurely. Cortes Islands, sweet little jewels from the Strait of Georgia, and the meatier Bijou are salty delights from New Brunswick.

Just as we start to settle into a good rhythm, it’s time for a tour of the hotel’s rooftop apiary on the 3rd floor terrace. Beekeeper Julia Common waits by the hotel’s hives to give us the buzz on bee tours offered from June to August, and how the thousands of honeybees living in this garden pollinate green spaces downtown. The honey they produce is also featured on a three-course pollinator menu at ARC. I don a stylish beekeeper’s hat and watch and she bathes a hive in smoke from her bee smoker, coaxing her little winged friends into a more agreeable state for us.

Back at the hotel that night, my mom stops a few feet from our room.

“This hallway smells exactly like [my grandmother’s] apartment,” she says, like dry wood and fresh green apples. It’s funny the gems of knowledge that parents drop when you do new things together. And now I know what my great-grandmother’s apartment, all the way in Ålesund, Norway, smelled like.

The navy blue Rocky Mountaineer train gleams under misty morning rain at the station. A bagpiper leads a procession of guests waiting to board. I ready our tickets: Gold Leaf Service. Sweet.

We follow a line of people and find our car. I see children from about eight-years-old to adults in their 80s getting ready. My mom uses a cane and has some issues with balance, and the accessibility of this train — including elevators and lifts, wide aisles, spacious bathrooms and more — was a plus.

The GoldLeaf Service upgrade gets us on a two-level car complete with an exterior viewing platform and a dining room with meals prepared onboard. We step onto the train and grab a pair of roomy reclining seats on the upper level.

Since 1990, Canadian-owned Rocky Mountaineer has hosted more than two million guests on its luxury train journeys through Western Canada and the American Southwest running from April to October. The Journey through the Clouds itinerary that we’re on is a version of the eight-night Rockies Highlights option (there are a few options of varying lengths), which includes a few nights stay in Vancouver, two days on the train, one night in Kamloops and a few nights exploring Jasper and Banff. The train travels during the day providing breakfast and lunch, and Rocky Mountaineer arranges guests’ accommodations and some activities.

A few minutes into our first day aboard the train and our hosts, Jacques and Mauro, let us know it’s time for breakfast. We navigate the spiral staircase down to the main level (there is an elevator beside it), where we’re seated at a booth in the dining car. From the handful of menu options this morning, I choose smoked salmon on toast; mom gets a traditional bacon-and-eggs breakfast, both made fresh in the attached kitchen. We both agree, train food has no business being this good.

One of the highlights of Rocky Mountaineer is the dining experience. Executive chef Kaelhub Cudmore crafts multi-course meals using locally sourced ingredients inspired by the landscapes we’re moving through.

We’re outside of the city now and moving through the farmland of the Fraser Valley, which is practically electric green in the rain. As we move closer to the Interior, we meander along the surging, silty Fraser River, flanked by canyon walls with train tunnels carved through them.

At Hells Gate, where the Fraser heaves through a narrow gorge, our hosts hop on the mic to give us a little history. American-born fur trader and explorer Simon Fraser ventured through the gorge in 1808 during his survey of the now eponymous Fraser River describing it as “a place where no human should venture, for surely these are the gates of Hell.” Of course, the river, called Stó:lō in the Halq’eméylem language of the Stó:lō  people, had long been used by Indigenous peoples as a trade route. In 1913, when the Canadian National Railway blasted a passage for tracks along the gorge, a rockslide blocked the migrating salmon — with devastating effects to the Nlaka’pamux and Stó:lō First Nations upstream, and other Indigenous fisheries, who had depended on the fish for survival. Channels built in the 1940s and more in the ‘80s brought salmon populations back up, though they never fully recovered.

After Hells Gate, we enter decidedly more arid surrounds, passing through stands of still-scorched forest near Lytton, B.C.

By the early evening, we glide into the open skies and golden grasslands of the Thompson Valley and stop for the night in T’kemlups (Kamloops), ancestral territory of the Tk‘emlúpsemc.