The Idler

Quebec

When our daughter was about 3, my wife and I decided it would be fun to spend a week near “Parc Safari Africain”, Quebec, in a small cabin on the shores of New York State’s Lake Champlain. We live in Ottawa, so the plan was to make a comparatively inexpensive arrangement that would allow time for leisure, swimming, and couple of zoo visits to view wildlife our daughter had only ever seen, to that point, as photos in books.

Having boundless faith in the Internet and armed with the
telephone-reinforced verbal promises of a cheerful helper at the host town’s Chamber of Commerce, I booked us for a week, and pre-paid for same, into a place with the charmingly rustic name, “les Chalets de Celine” in the town of “Venice en Quebec”, perched atop the one tiny finger of Lake Champlain
that juts out of New York State into Canadian territory.

After a couple hours on the road from Ottawa, as we drove into town we passed a roadside bar whose parking lot was filled with about twenty evil-looking black Harley-Davidsons, surrounded by dozens of bikers wearing “Satan’s Choice” colours — these were the genuine article.

“Les Chalets” turned out to be a line of shed-like structures that resembled those U-Stor-It mini-garages you see for rent; the “beach” was an oil-slicked boat launch ramp across an exceedingly busy roadway. The “pool” was an above-ground thing. As we headed into the office to register, we watched as some slob stood atop a minuscule poolside “diving” platform,
chewed the last few kernels from his heavily-buttered cob of corn, tossed it onto the grass, and then toppled into the water. Thoughtfully, he left his half-consumed bottle of beer on the platform.

I don’t even know why we unpacked. But we did and, about fifteen minutes later, someone opened the double doors of an actual garage (the kind for cars) that lay just across the driveway from our “chalet”, revealing two columns of
massive stereo speakers. The next thing we knew, our one tiny window started vibrating as the near-deafening strains of Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Achy Breaky Heart” finally pummeled us into submission.

I took the cabin key, walked back into the office, mumbled something about a “family emergency”, asked the owner to send us any money he thought fair if he was able to re-rent our hastily-vacated “chalet” (no prizes for guessing how much of a refund we received), packed the car with recreational luggage and family and drove back home through scenic Akwesasne, a First Nations reserve straddling the Canada / US border, where every second house was decorated with a flag proclaiming “You are on Mohawk Warrior Land!”, and the
ones in between displayed hand-lettered signs offering “Cheap smokes!” for sale. Once safely back in Ontario, we stopped at a convenience store and our toddler was beside herself with pleasure as she sat on a tiny patch of lawn lapping up an ice cream bar, while my wife and I agreed that we’d just go
home and spend the week day-tripping out of the house.

Mdicola520@rogers.com