If you ever find yourself hungry in Lennoxville, PQ, be advised that “Jerry’s Special Chicken Sandwich” at Jerry’s, which sits on the right-hand corner just after the beer hall, consists of the following: a processed breaded and fried chicken patty, crackling hot; one slice tomato; two slices iceberg lettuce; three small strips of bacon; and a demure schmear (this is not a word in French Canada, I know) of mayonnaise, all on a sesame bun toasted within an inch of its life. It will cost you $3.95 Canadian and it is delicious.

By that point you’re not far from Sherbrooke, which feels simultaneously like a frontier city and a university town and a manufacturing hub and as far as I can tell is all of the above. The girls outside the convenience stores have restless eyes, they’ve already plotted their escape. If you are from New England the rest of the drive will feel familiar-yet-alien and you will notice that the land looks as if a large hand had lifted Western Maine and tugged its edges, spreading it out, giving the hills more space. The barns lack the distinctive roofs of La Beauce to the east, but the houses are pinker, tidier, giving off an ineffable whiff of something you might be tempted to call European. Depending on your inclinations you may also indulge in the greatest Canadian sport of all (high-speed, competitive driving).

The nice thing about a destination where there isn’t much to do is that there isn’t much to do except stroll one way and then the other, stop for tea, watch people and dogs strolling one way and then the other, repair to your room and read, rinse, repeat. A decade had passed since we last drove through Magog and in the interim things got built up, more shoppes, more traffic. The finished product is a little ode to various mindless pleasures at the northernmost tip of Lac Memphremagog, and therefore it contains elements of Old Orchard Beach: the line of Harleys at the outdoor bar, the bronzed women in denim bustiers, the men with potbellies and blinking cell phones. But everybody was happy because there was no reason not to be.

At the local version of Reny’s I found these wigs, not to mention provincial flags for hand, home, and car; fleur-de-lis beer cozies and pendants; blue-and-white garlands. I laughed even as I recognized the sentiment. Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.

The creaky remnants of my French were a source of great shame, and I sheepishly anglais’d my way through most transactions — knowing words but afraid of how they’d sound — until a late-evening stop at an ice-cream parlor put an arrêt to all that. “Non, pardon,” shrugged the teenager at the counter. Not wanting to fail my traveling companion and her dietary restrictions, then, I managed a rendition of “Do you have anything that’s sugar-free / Oh, good, a sugar-free mocha for her / Yes, one scoop / Thanks.” A man looked up from his strawberry sundae and said “You speak French well,” ahh, sir, but you tell me in English….

We dawdled our way out of town, stopping in the shoppes to buy souvenirs to prove we had been there. Which, I suppose, is the same reason we write books and have children and establish historical societies.

But I want to end at the beginning: a notch in the woods between Us and Them, the fiat geography that people obey and deer disregard. For a moment I thought should turn off the music but Britt was singing she’s never been the places she oughta so I let it play, and then the Canadian guard ambled over to ask how we were and where we were headed and was it business or pleasure? (A hearty chuckle to think there was work to be done in the town on our map.) We had our documents and we handed them over for inspection, official-like. No guns, no knives, no pepper spray? Well who knows, ladies, you might meet a bear. And that was that. Window up, accelerator down, the southern edge of the Laurentian shield ahead, Welcome and Bienvenue.

When it finally came the envelope read With a United States passport the whole world is yours. I am a reasonably articulate person but I cannot even begin to tell you how true this feels.

Tags: driving, friendly neighbo(u)rs to the north, Quebec, vacation, victory lap