Two strangers met on a train. Then they decided to travel the world together
Savery Moore and his wife Jan always talked about traveling across Canada by rail.
The American couple shared a dream of waking up to the sun rising over the tracks and spending days winding through forests and across prairies, glimpsing snow-capped peaks and frozen lakes through the train’s domed glass roof. Making memories together.
For most of their 35 years of married life, Savery and Jan didn’t travel much, spending long days working in advertising.
But when the couple finally retired in their 60s, leaving New York City for a small town in Massachusetts, they were excited for a new chapter and new opportunities.
“We both retired the same day,” Savery tells CNN Travel today. “We looked forward to having our life forever, together.”
Savery and Jan finally looked into booking their dream trip on VIA Rail’s “Canadian” service, a luxury train journey that winds from the West Coast of Canada to the East over four days.
“We were going to spend some money and take The Canadian in a class called ‘prestige,’ which is VIA Rail’s most expensive way to travel,” says Savery.
This was a “bucket list trip,” explains Savery. The couple wanted to splurge, figuring “we were only going to do this once, so let’s just do it right.”
But just as they started planning the trip, life took an unexpected turn.
“Jan was diagnosed with cancer, and it was lung cancer, and it was aggressive,” explains Savery. “Within a month-and-a-half to two months after her being diagnosed, the cancer had already spread.”
In the months that followed, Jan had brain surgery. She was enrolled in a couple of clinical trials.
“But from diagnosis to her passing was 16 months,” says Savery.
Jan died in 2019. And without her, Savery was left heartbroken and lost. Life was put on hold. Travel plans were shelved. Everything was uncertain.
“That dream of taking The Canadian never went away from me, but it wasn’t… it didn’t have the same… I wasn’t looking forward to it as much,” says Savery.
Time passed. Savery, searching for meaning in his new reality, eventually found himself returning to that abandoned dream of traveling across Canada by rail.
“I decided to take the trip myself, to fulfill a promise I had made to her,” he says. “It took me about three-and-a-half, four years to say, ‘Just do it. Do it for me. Do it for Jan.’ Because she would want me to.”
A railway encounter
Savery boarded The Canadian on April 1, 2024, in Vancouver. He treated himself to the prestige class ticket, just as he and his late wife had planned.
As soon as he boarded the train, Savery felt a surprising feeling of contentment. He was proud of himself. And excited for what was to come.
It turned out Savery was the only passenger in prestige class. The whole front row of the domed viewing carriage was reserved just for him.
But on the second day of the journey, Savery was surprised when he walked up the stairs into the domed car and saw “the back of someone’s head sitting in one of those reserved seats.”
He raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything, instead sitting on the opposite side of the aisle from the mystery passenger: a woman with long curly hair, reading.
Savery recalls thinking: “She’s reading a book, so obviously can read the sign that says this is for prestige passengers only.”
But he kept the slightly ungenerous thought to himself.
“I didn’t say anything,” he says today. “And after a while, she got up and left without a word.”
Later that day, at dinner, Savery was sharing a table with a friendly couple, chatting about what prompted them to book The Canadian. Savery told them about losing his wife, about deciding to fulfill their shared dream, solo.
“Have you met Giselle?” asked the couple, glancing at one another.
Savery told them, no, he didn’t think he’d met a Giselle yet. The couple described her — tall, long hair.
“I know who that is,” said Savery, realizing the description matched the woman he’d spotted sitting in the prestige class seat.
“She lost her spouse too,” said the couple. “Quite recently.”
Taking in this information, Savery decided he’d make a conscious effort to seek Giselle out on board the train.
That evening, the train had an extended stopover in Edmonton. Savery was sitting in the lounge car, sipping coffee alone.
“And just before we left Edmonton, I saw Giselle walking towards me,” he recalls.
“I just motioned her, I said, ‘Would you like to have a seat?’”
“Sure,” said Giselle, smiling. She sat down, introducing herself.
Bonding on the train
Giselle Ruemke was a Canadian traveler in her 50s who had, it turned out, a number of things in common with Savery Moore.
For one, she’d always wanted to travel across Canada on The Canadian. “Taking the train was one of these bucket list things for me,” Giselle tells CNN Travel today.
And, like Savery, Giselle’s spouse had recently died of cancer.
Giselle and her late husband Dave had been friends for decades before they started dating. Within a few whirlwind years they’d fallen in love, got married and navigated Dave’s cancer diagnosis together.
Then Dave passed away in the summer of 2023, leaving Giselle unmoored and unsure of the future.
In the wake of her grief, booking the trip on The Canadian seemed, to Giselle, “like a good way to connect with myself and see my country, refresh my spirit, a little bit.”
Like Savery, Giselle had always dreamed of taking the VIA Rail Canadian with her late spouse. And like Savery, she’d decided traveling solo was a way of honoring her partner.
“That trip is something that I would have really liked to have done with my husband, Dave. So that was why I was taking the train,” Giselle says today.
But unlike Savery, Giselle hadn’t booked prestige class. She admits she was “sticking it to the man” in her own small way by sitting in the reserved seats that first day.
She’d only moved when Savery arrived. She tells CNN Travel, laughing, that she’d thought to herself: “I better get out of the seat, in case someone prestige wants to sit in that spot.”
Giselle didn’t tell Savery any of this in their first conversation. In fact, she didn’t share much about her life at all in that first encounter.
But Giselle liked his company right away. He was friendly, enthusiastic and respectful — sharing that he was a widower and indicating he knew about Giselle’s loss without prying about the circumstances.
As for Savery, he says, it was “the common bond, the losses of our respective loved ones” that first made him feel a connection to Giselle. But it was also obvious that for Giselle, the loss was much fresher. She clearly didn’t want to talk about Dave that day.
“So then we just shifted to talking about other things, everyday things, in a nice, relaxed atmosphere,” says Savery. “And I was very at ease speaking with Giselle right away. We started having meals together and as the trip went on, we would spend more and more time together.”
Over the next couple of days, Savery and Giselle also got to know the other solo travelers on board The Canadian. They became a group, and Giselle recalls plenty of moments when they good-naturedly teased Savery “because of him being the only prestige passenger.”
She appreciated having a gang of new friends. Their company distracted from the inevitable loneliness that would sometimes settle over her in her grief.
When the train arrived in Toronto, Savery and Giselle shared a final dinner together before going their separate ways.
The reservedness that marked their first meal together had all but melted away. It was an evening marked by laughs, recalling favorite memories of the trip across Canada and talking about their lives back home.
The next day, they said goodbye. Appropriately enough, their farewell took place at a train station.
“I was taking the airport shuttle to fly back home to Boston, and Giselle was taking the train to Montreal. So we said, ‘Well, let’s just say goodbye at the train station, since we’re both going to be there at the same time tomorrow,’” recalls Savery.
“We were under the big clock in Toronto station, and she was watching the clock. She said, ‘I really gotta go. I have to catch my train.’ And I just… I said, ‘I can’t not see you again.’”
Their connection didn’t feel romantic — both Giselle and Savery were sure of that. But it felt significant. Both Savery and Giselle felt they’d met a like-minded soul, someone who could be a confidant, who could help them through the next chapter of life which they were unexpectedly navigating alone.
Saying “goodbye” felt too final. So Giselle, who is French-Canadian, suggested they say “au revoir” — which translates as “until we meet again.”
And as soon as they went their separate ways, Giselle and Savery started texting each other.
“Then the texts became phone calls,” recalls Savery.
On these calls, Giselle and Savery spoke about their lives, about what they were up to, about their interests.
“Music was like a common interest that we both shared,” recalls Giselle.
Savery is older than Giselle, and their music references spanned “different eras of music, but very compatible musical interests,” as Giselle puts it.
On one of their phone calls, Giselle mentioned she was considering booking a train trip across North America.
Soon, she and Savery were planning a train journey across the US for the fall of 2024, together.
And in the meantime, Giselle invited Savery to visit her in her home in Victoria, Canada, for a week’s summer vacation.
