On the south side of the St. Lawrence River – sort of on the way over to Quebec City – and east of Montreal is an area with several small towns called – oddly enough – the Eastern Townships. Thursday we had a “snow day” – which here means a day that is booked into the calendar to serve as a snow-day buffer in case you need it, but since snow removal is a major part of the economy up here and they don’t even really plow, per se, until the snow is deep enough to lose your livestock, a “snow day” means an extra vacation day that gets tacked onto “Spring Break” (i.e., Late Winter Long Weekend).
If you’re not fast enough off the draw to get yourself down to Florida, it’s the Townships for you. But only if you decide to. And I decided.
The first stop was the little town of Knowlton, just below Lake Brome (i.e., Lac Brome). It’s a nice-looking lake, although a little cold and uninviting for swimmers this time of year. Apparently in French, Knowlton is pronounced “Lac Brome.” The town itself has a river runs through it with a mill pond (but no mill) and a small and inviting chocolaterie. Sadly, the invitation of the chocolaterie was unfulfilled, as no one answered the bell on the counter. It seems like the town caters to the summer life of the lake – although given the number of fully vacant storefronts (vs. the closed-for-the-season ones), it is no more secure from our economic world than anywhere else.
Lake Brome
Town hall - Lake Brome
Antiques store sign (3D!)
Lake Brome millpond outflow
Knowlton municipal ice rink
Local winter economy
Store window - that's original 1970s packaging! Luke's frozen in time!
After Knowlton, I drove eastwards until I found the Benedictine Abbye de St-Benoit du Lac. I don’t know what’s going on with me and monasteries lately. I find the phenomenon of an eremitic religious commune to be fascinating. Sort of like seminary, but with cows. My visit overlapped with the monks’ afternoon prayers, which they still chant using the Gregorian modality. The moments after the prayer bells rang brought an influx of monks dressed in coarse brown habits, like pouring oil into a funnel: the center of the church waxed and waned with a flow of genuflecting brown, purposeful and focused. After the prayers, they all disappeared, with one last monk, the right side of his body apparently still drawn after a stroke, slowly making his own rhythm out. The church itself is only about 10 years old, while the abbey traces its lineage back to France in the 1300s.
Abbey from the road
Abbey church narthex
Abbey church with monks' stalls
Abbey hallway
The area of the Townships feels kind of like the Virginia Piedmont area (go Charlottesville!) – it is at the far northern end of the same Appalachians, although it is not particularly IN the mountains, per se. There are a few here and there – and there are a small handful of ski resorts with the (apparently directly) corresponding spas (i.e., sauna, whirlpool, & massage) in the area – but a lot of it is rolling countryside, rather proverbially.
Headed Eastern to Townships
Cool barn - buried up to the eaves - near St Benoit
I made a short stop over in Magog, which is apparently much more of a scene for swimming and biking during the non-snowbound months (although it looked, though I couldn’t be sure over the shoulder-high snowbanks, that there was an ice-skating path that had been cultivated around the outside of the lake – it was either that or a wicked-cook cold-terrain roller-blade bath). There was a grocery store there which I interpreted by its name to be a VEGETARIAN grocery. I am sure that the boutique pork and beef came from animals that had only been fed vegetables. Maybe the name was French for Whole Foods. But – I didn’t stay long in Magog.
I did zip up to the Mont-Orford National Park for a little bit, and hovered around the edges (looks like a good place to come camping when I’m more prepared), and then stopped in a cool consignment antiques shop (Antiquites Autre Temps) on the edge of Magog near the highway and had a chat with its two proprietors about schools and economies and teenagers.
The last stop of the day was in the university town of Sherbrooke. It was very definitely a university town – and sadly, I don’t have a lot more to say on it than that. It was late in the day, and between my mild fatigue and its real grittiness (not the least because of the use of cinders to increase traction on icy surfaces as part of the spectrum of ice-negotiation that includes sometimes salt to prevent ice formation), there may have been a lot there to see but I only scratched its surface. I did find a good bookstore – all French books, and which followed what I recently learned is the standard European method of ordering books in bookstores: according to publisher. They had a good selection of Tintin and Asterix, and a honking huge section of Catholic religious books. I wasn’t sure if it was a religious bookstore or if that is somehow typical of bookstores here. I snapped a shot of an apartment complex parking lot: many, many people (also in my area) have these parking shelters over their driveways to reduce getting their cars snowed in. This is the first time I’d seen this on a surface lot like this. Kind of fun image.
Parking shelters in an apartment complex
Former Bank of Montreal - now fertility clinic
Sherbrooke memorial
Night-skiing near the highway
