a guide for the greyhound traveller across canada

so we went to vancouver by greyhound!
this had been my project for a long long time, ever since i was living in vancouver and wanted to move to montreal (i could have done it when i moved, in 2010, but it was winter so i didn't want to force things.) i knew it would be 3 days and 3 nights on a bus, and it's hard to explain why that is fascinating to me.
the part a bit over the top was that we came back the same way. one cross-country trip i would recommend to everyone in a lifetime, but two of them 10 days' distance from each other, i'm not so sure.
before this, my longest experiences of bus trips were an eurolines to belgium in 2005 (19 hours - europe is so small! it sure seemed vast at the time) and a greyhound to san francisco the winter of 2008-9, which was supposed to take 24 hours and it took double because of snowstorms. still not sure this beats that in absolute terms, because (1) the weather wasn't desperate and (2) i wasn't alone.
as for b., i can't relate to his travel experiences, but he took buses in india, so that must account for something.

the beginning of the trip was chill, until we passed ottawa (some occasional sights of flooding, but yeah) and then in ottawa we had to change buses. dear gods of travel and security checks!! i understand that getting on a greyhound is dangerous (there's always a recent gruesome story of stabbing etc) but in montreal we just waltzed in and got on, even with our considerable luggage. i guess montreal-ottawa is a local/harmless route. but then the fun begins!
landscape-wise, going through ontario was the opposite of fun. we didn't realize it at first: we were reading, watching series on the tablet and (i) checking from time to time to see how much we'd covered. for hours and hours it was the same-same: desolate stretches of forest, thinning and drying on the edge of the road. sometimes craggy, mostly cloudy, windy and nothing to see. yes, we found some of the place names interesting: there's a Wawa, then a Petawawa, and a Kakabeka Falls. Most of these coming from Native words, i will assume.
also, there are lakes. although we only realized the extent of it/them on the way back.

it's hard to take pictures  while passing by, for obvious reasons. when the first lakes started showing up, i remember trying to get b. to get at least a good photo. (also, back then we still thought we were taking a plane back, lol). in the end we gave up, ("all lakes are the same, carmen!" - "yes, and we have pictures of none of them!")
later, looking at the map, i saw how we had kept going alongside lakes huron and superior, which are HUGE, for hours and hours (and days). 

this is on the afternoon of our second day on the bus. somewhere in manitoba?!
we knew we wanted to take a day off the trip, and visit somewhere. once you take a break, it has to be 24h, because there's one greyhound a day going cross-country. the first candidate was thunder bay, but it was too early on the trip. our first night was pretty bad, adjusting to sleeping etc, plus it was pretty cold and we hadn't yet come up with the genius idea of keeping a blankie on the seats. plus there was (literally) nothing to see in thunder bay. i imagine we would've hiked, but it was still cold. so we soldiered on.
winnipeg was a good candidate. pretty much the midpoint of our journey, we had a stop of 3 hours + there, and we arrived in the evening, while it was still daylight. also the weather had gotten to around 12 degrees, from 6-7 the previous night/morning. but! we found a better one. regina: arrival, morning of day 3; estimated temperature that day, 21 C.
regina it was. 

i went to downtown winnipeg and all i got was this picture of the building everybody knows (Human rights museum)
real talk: we wanted to take a bus into town, but we lost too much time looking for a bus stop/eating donuts at the airport tim hortons in order to get wifi/ scrounging for change for the bus. so we had to take a taxi, whose driver laughed to our faces when we told him where downtown we wanted to walk around - apparently not at all a good area to walk in at night as a tourist. thank you kind driver.
anyway, he dropped us off somewhere within 2 mins walking distance from (1) the above museum (here seen at 9 pm) and (2) an indian restaurant where we ended up buying a buffet and eating all we could in 20 minutes (it was a lot) (best gulab jamuns i've tasted yet - is this a weird thing to remember winnipeg for?).
and then we took a city bus, totally scenic route through a leafy neighbourhood i would not recognize in daytime. we liked what we saw of winnipeg in this scratching-of-the-ice glimpse.
and then we were triumphantly back to the station on time, after so much adventure (our fellow travellers had all waited in/around the station) , and the greyhound that was supposed to take us was late 2 1/2 hours. 

is this the prairies? i guess so.

on the bus days, i usually woke up with the daylight. those quiet hours at dawn, when you're not sure what province you're in and what time it actually is in the current province, and most people are asleep and the driver, of course, says nothing. it's hopeful, because the hurdle of the night has passed (what makes being cooped up in the dark harder than in daylight, even with the overhead lights available?)

an actual guide for the greyhound traveller would be mainly about rest stops, i guess. here is me in my favourite cafeteria on the trip, at swift current. 10/10 (points deducted for the bathrooms, though). somehow one always ends up there in the morning, both going and coming back, and it's large, no-nonsense, with REAL food! here i am a bit over breakfast (we had just left regina), but got coffee and fruit. on the way back, i burst into the place at 6 am and ordered a big omelette - i was customer nb. 1 for that day.
another good one, very well-lit, clean, with options!! is in regina, though we didn't use it. 
but  obviously not every rest stop has a proper cafe.mostly it was tim hortons and a&w s, which would explain the inevitable despair on night 3 when you just give it up and wolf down another cinnamon bun. then some greyhound stations have surprises, like a box full of books for travellers to take, at sault ste marie (a stop in the middle of the night going west). some have nothing! the calgary one i found pretty despicable, considering it's a big city/nodal point etc.

one of the first views of the mountains. it was evening or thereabouts as we got around banff both ways, but on return it was sunnier so we got better views.

a greyhound bus is just a bus. the small perch for the feet is nice, and being able to push back your chair a bit. for the headrest part, we bought a dollarama pillow midway and also used various coats and sweaters. travel became much easier once we decided to just let go of our big bags and abandon them to the belly of the bus instead of trying to force them into the overhead compartment. also, blanket: there's always some air conditioning when i personally don't want any, but that's the nature of being in a place with people.

a nice stretch of the road when there were so few people in, that we could each take a double seat. luxury.

i mostly read, and b. mostly watched series. i took 3 paper books with me (and the e-book reader) and managed to leave some on the way and pick up some others (from free exchanges, don't ask). but also i got through 2 seasons of "better call saul".

very random pic of "the canadian shield" landscape. so yeah. do you guys have any other questions?:) the hardest part is, of course, your body getting cramped in the same space. it doesn't help moving on the spot. standing up and walking along the aisle does it, when absolutely necessarily. getting off just to stretch my legs, even if i wasn't using the bathroom (but that too) at every stop makes it much easier on me personally. and they do have to stop...at least every 3 hours i think. there will also be short stops that aren't even on the schedule, but you always get warned not to venture too far. we actually "lost" someone somewhere in ontario (Wawa?) and the guy took a taxi to catch up with the bus!