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For eleven consecutive days now, I've been riding across Canada on the train. I left Toronto on Tuesday, May 31st for Vancouver with one companion: Mark Stevenson, a freelance producer who would be running the CTV Travel production "Canada's Greatest Ride."

We were joined in Vancouver one week ago by nine more crew members, and our cross-country extravaganza began. It officially ended last evening, as the crew wrapped up shooting on the Halifax station platform, and most of them frantically poured into cabs and drove pell-mell for the airport to catch their flights back home to Toronto. The tech crew - the two Michael Nunans, Matt Sherman, and John Scalena from Via - stayed behind to strip our control room of all its many components before flying out this morning.

I stayed, too, partly for logistical reasons, and partly for reasons of preference. I'm picking up my daughter in Montreal, where she lives with her mom, and taking her back to Toronto with me tomorrow. It was easier to arrange the stop-off and pick-up by rail than by air, and anyway, I really wanted to complete my Toronto-Vancouver-Halifax-Toronto excursion the way it began: by train.

This is old hat for me now. I'm riding in air-conditioned comfort in an ultra-modern sleeper car, at ease with my laptop computer, digital cameras, suitcase and guitar neatly stowed around me. I've got my own bathroom, (complete with shower), a closet, two bunks, a folding table and even

little snacks placed neatly on a doily for me to enjoy between meals in the dining car. I've spent the last 10 days in the grandeur of the great Canadian landscape that I love so well, and this train feels totally comfortable and familiar to me.

But here at Pier 21 in Halifax, I'm thinking about the thousands of people whose journeys to their own new homes have included boarding the train right here at this platform. I can see them standing in long lines after spending weeks at sea, staring around at the completely unfamiliar city that they might never see again. I imagine them boarding trains to all parts west:

Moncton, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Regina, Calgary, Vancouver and who knows how many places in between. I can only guess how it felt to see the red tidal flats of Nova Scotia, the thick spruce forests of New Brunswick, the mighty St. Lawrence pouring the Great Lake waters through Quebec - all for the first time.

This country that I would gladly wrap around myself like a scratchy, smoky old camp blanket must have seemed a vast, empty and at times terrifying wilderness to the fortune-seekers, the refugees and the runaways who watched through the windows of those trains with wide-open eyes.

Canada's not like that now; at least it's rare to experience it that way. We've put the ocean into pamphlets and stamped the mountains onto cans of beer. We've poured our pollution into lakes and rivers and sold our forests down the river for pulp. We glide over the prairies in planes and bridge the wide land with speed-of-light communications. The majority of us live in cities now. Our day-to-day lives don't include the immigrant's view of the vastness, the farmer's sense of the seasons, the fisherman's oneness with the wind.

But we're all still newcomers, after all, whether we arrived ten thousand years ago, or ten. And we're all still moving restlessly around, shaping our dominion to our strange needs as we go, laying networks of lines of steel and glass to help us hold onto our little patches of soil when the land threatens to shrug us off. When you take the train today, you'll be sold a little majesty in a pamphlet, yet you'll be told true tales of awe and wonder as you roll.

You'll be treated royally, but you'll have a regent's choice to make, too: shall I rule this land, or shall I be its most loyal subject? I've come up with a little mantra for Canada's Greatest Ride, a cross between doggerel and dogma that goes like this:

"This country we call Canada won't fit your window pane... look beyond your own reflection when you're riding on the train."