First published in the Tri Town Transcript, March 11, 2017
By Esther C. Baird
We spent the February break skiing at Mont Tremblant, just west of Montreal. Regular readers may recall we went there two years ago and that I was enamored by their poutine.
I still am.
I just can’t help but be extremely impressed with a dish that’s so blatantly bad for you and yet served with wild abandon. Greasy fries, drenched in thick gravy, covered in cheese curds? Yes, please! What, no calorie count next to it? No “skinny” option? Nope. This dish is terrible for you.
And we felt great, almost blissful, about eating it.
But after we’d become part poutine, and skied for days, and stumbled over French/English conversations with store and restaurant staff, our vacation was over. Our international vacation that we’d reached after only six hours in the car. It was so close, we’d find ourselves saying, “Being here is like being in another country!“
Just like it.
But eventually being in another country, even a close one, makes you wish for home. I’d like to say we just wanted to be back where we could eat an all-American gluten-free, low-carb, sugar-free piece of melba toast made out of ground chickpeas, but actually, I wanted cell phone service again.
I know it’s healthy to take a ‘technology break.’ Please. I read all the blogs and tweets that say all the blogs and tweets are dangerously addictive. But when you are road-tripping, it’s very hard to plot the course, and avoid traffic jams, and know whether or not that storm on the horizon is going to hit, without weather and traffic apps.
Printed-out paper maps can’t reroute you around an accident or alert you to an upcoming traffic jam. And no hard-copy map I know will tell you that that snow will turn to rain before you drive through it. Plus, it’s hard to find a Starbucks without the Starbucks locator app. Just sayin’ . . .
Case in point, the line at the border was slow. And long. And we had no traffic app to let us know that a snack stop might be in our best mental health interest.
Finally we were one car away. And it was taking forever. For. Ev. Er. I could have invented cell phones in the amount of time we sat there.
Suddenly, the passenger in the car in front of us got out and walked to the trunk. Great. He’d bought what? A small cow in order to make homemade cheese curds? A set of fondue forks that doubled as a dangerous weapon? Whatever it was, could he hurry it up? Set the cow free or whatever it took??
The man searched through luggage for a few minutes, or eons depending on your perspective, and finally grabbed a bag that looked like . . .
“Avocados?” our one daughter asked.
He handed them to the agent and sure enough, it was a classic netted bag with three avocados in it. That dangerous produce item so famously grown and celebrated . . . in Canada??!
I can hardly get a decent avocado at my Stop & Shop in Danvers! If I want a good one, I fly to my parents’ backyard in Miami, where they grow naturally . . . because it’s hot and tropical.
With all the border tension and political rhetoric going on these days, maybe it’s a little confusing. Which country is it where we might find ripe yummy avocados and then accidentally pack them in our suitcase and forget at the border? Was it the country to the south, or, was it the one covered in snow to the north?
It’s tricky.
But we, in the Baird-mobile, were clear. When it was finally, light years later, our turn to cross the border, we were prepared.
Sure enough, the agent asked us, “Have you brought any citrus or avocados from Canada with you?”
We looked her squarely in the eyes and solemnly swore, no. No, we had not brought citrus or tropical fruit from their Arctic country. We’d managed to resist that siren call.
Unlike poutine. That particular siren call is impossible to resist. But as I’d firmly established, cell service doesn’t carry across the border, so if the poutine is calling, we won’t know until we return.