Our apartment is a work in progress, meaning that we’ve been reduced to washing dishes in our bathroom sink and storing pots and pans on our fireplace. Anyway, as a quick retreat Bert and I decided to escape the chaos that is our home for one night over the weekend. Not wanting to wander to far a-field we went to Mont Tremblant.

To create an appropriately detailed setting for the coming tale, allow me to present a few facts about Mont Tremblant.

1. All of the golf course in Mont Tremblant are named after evil (The Beast, The Devil, The Monster, etc.)

2. The ‘Village’ of Month Tremblant is about 20 minutes by car from the “Pedestrian Village’ at the base of Mont Tremblant the mountain making navigation very confusing

3. About 40 km from Mont Tremblant the highway turns into a three land divided road with a speed limit of 100 km/hr and no on-ramps (or off ramps for that matter – not that you can’t get on and off the ‘highway’ there are just no ramps to ease the transition from 100 km/hr to 20 km/hr)

4. As Bert observed, the raccoons in Mont Tremblant have unusually large derrieres (a feature shared by many of the local chefs)

Now that you have an image in your mind, let me begin my tale.

For me the ultimate luxury is lying in bed in a hotel room reading a book until the wee hours of the morning (tee hee, I said wee). Unfortunately life is rather hectic at the moment so I haven’t had a chance to wander through a bookstore in ages. And so I very publicly set reading a book as a goal for the trip.

When we arrived in Mont Tremblant (the pedestrian village) we were greeted with rain so, like the outdoor enthusiasts that we are, we retreated to a pub for lunch and a beer. After a long, leisurely lunch I asked the bartender to point me in the direction of the bookstore and this is the extent of what I got out of the heavily accented, loud bar-based conversation.

“There’s no bookstore here, you have to go to Saint Joavite.”
“Where is that?”
“You take a car or the bus”
“Ok”
“There’s a fountain in the village”
“Which village”
“Go around”
“Ok”
“It’s opposite the gas station”
“Right then”

So off we went:

We went to where the busses gathered, but they were all shuttle busses for the hotels, so

We walked back to our car, and

We drove to the village (of Mont Tremblant) where

We couldn’t find the fountain, so

We asked a lady in a golf shop who sent us on the right track to Saint Joavite, but

We got lost, went around in a circle, until

We found our way to the “highway”, where

We got lost again, so

We pulled a u-turn, and

Found Saint Joavite,

Found a gas station, with a bar opposite it,

Found a gas station, with a grocery store opposite it,

Found a gas station, with a Jehovah’s Witness temple opposite it, then

We asked a lady sitting in a car who gave us directions, so

We drove back to Saint Joavite,

Past the first gas station,

Past the second gas station,

Behind the second gas station, where

We found the bookstore! Yay!

It had only taken us an hour to achieve success (in the form of a tiny little bookstore / seller of medieval paraphernalia and fake swords).

Proudly we rushed back to the ‘pedestrian village’ (almost running over a bottom heavy - or heavy bottomed raccoon) and set about our next, enjoy the outdoors in the rain weekend activity…finding somewhere to eat dinner and drink wine. In our quest we passed a little sign about a two minute walk from the pub where we had lunch. The sign read:

“Mont Tremblant Bookstore – 10 meters”