A cottage fireplace, a frozen lake, a casino lesson in greed, and the best burger I’ve eaten in Canada.
The fireplace was already on when we walked in.
It was 7:31 PM. I know this because the screensaver on the TV above the mantle — a photograph of some European waterfront, Amsterdam maybe — had the time and temperature frozen in the corner. Minus one. Outside the cottage, beyond the balcony I hadn’t yet stepped onto, there was nothing. No streetlight. No traffic. No neighbour’s TV bleeding through the wall. Just the kind of silence you forget exists when you live in a city.
I put down the bags, stood there doing nothing. Just looking at the fire.
The trip had been two and a half hours from Ottawa — a cottage in Lac Supérieur, eighteen minutes from Mont-Tremblant village. Thursday before Easter. No plan. No itinerary. No ski lessons booked. Just four days, a rental car, and a bag of groceries I probably didn’t need.
My partner had been wanting to do this for months. I had been putting it off — too busy, too tired, too many things on the list. But underneath the excuses was something I hadn’t said out loud: I don’t know how much longer I’ll be in Ottawa. Life moves. Jobs change. Cities change. The opportunity to drive two hours into the Laurentian Mountains and sleep in a cottage by a frozen lake — that might not be there forever.
She booked it anyway. And standing there in that cottage, watching a fire I didn’t light in a place I didn’t find, I was grateful she didn’t wait for me to be ready.
That was the whole point.
The Drive
If you’ve never driven through the Laurentians in late winter, let me tell you something: it looks like a painting somebody forgot to finish.
The trees are bare. The snow is thick but losing its confidence — retreating from the road edges, softening around the trunks. If you’ve ever wondered what Canadian winter looks like when it’s finally deciding to leave, this is it. The sky is grey, the kind that doesn’t threaten rain, it just sits there, heavy and quiet, like it has nowhere else to be.
And the road. The road is the thing.
Winding, narrow, flanked by forest on both sides. Houses built into hillsides. A cottage half-hidden behind birch trees. A mailbox at the end of a driveway you can barely see. Everything about the drive says the same thing: slow down. You’re not in a hurry anymore.
Barely a word spoken during the last thirty minutes. Not because anything was wrong. Because there was nothing that needed saying. The road was saying it all.
At one point, the scenery opened up — buildings appeared, lights, what looked like a village centre — and I thought: this is it, this is Tremblant. Google Maps said otherwise. Still twenty minutes out. The place I’d mistaken for the destination was just another beautiful stretch of road. That’s the thing about the Laurentians. Even the in-between places look like somewhere you’d want to stop.
The Cottage
I didn’t stay in the village. The cottage was twenty minutes away, in Lac Supérieur, found on Airbnb. This was deliberate.
The village hotels are beautiful but expensive. And I didn’t come to sleep in a hotel. I came to disappear. To cook my own food, sit on a balcony overlooking a frozen lake, and remember what quiet sounds like. I’d brought groceries from Ottawa — rice, potatoes, fruits, drinks — and picked up a few extras at Les Marchés Tradition, a local grocery store about ten minutes away. Fifty dollars. Most of it wasn’t needed, but there’s something about filling a fridge in a strange kitchen that makes a place feel like yours.
The cottage had a fireplace — the real kind, the kind that makes you not want to move. A balcony with a view of the lake and the mountains. In the morning, I would stand out there with tea and just look. Snow-covered pines. A frozen lake stretching out flat and white. A wooden cabin on the far shore, smoke from its chimney. Mountains fading into cloud.
Nobody called. Nobody texted. Nobody needed anything.
Here’s what surprised me: it was my first time in a cottage. Mountains on every side. Frozen river below. Trees so thick you couldn’t see the next property. A handful of neighbours and then — nothing. Just wilderness. I should have felt uneasy. I didn’t. I felt safe. And that’s when something clicked — this is why Canadians are so big on cottage country. Not as a luxury. As a necessity. A place to come undone without worrying about what’s outside the door.
It reminded me of home. Not Scotland — not the rain, the grey, the wind cutting through your jacket on Princes Street. It reminded me of the feeling of home. That feeling when your body decides, without your permission, to stop being tense. When your shoulders drop and your breathing slows and you realise you’ve been carrying something you didn’t know you were carrying.
That is what that cottage did.
The Kid at the Gas Station
One of the best things that happened on this trip happened at a gas station.
I had stopped to fill up before heading to the village. Behind the counter was a young guy — couldn’t have been older than twenty — and something about the way he looked at me told me he didn’t see many people who looked like me walk through that door.
His name was Nameer.
I told him I’d come from Ottawa. He told me he’d lived near Tremblant his whole life. And then — without me asking — he started telling me everything. Where to eat. What to see. Which roads had the best views. Where the locals go versus where the tourists go. He told me about the casino, the trails, the history of the village.
He didn’t have to do any of that.
But he did. And it changed the trip. Because the Mont-Tremblant I experienced over the next three days was not the one on the brochure. It was Nameer’s Mont-Tremblant. The local version. The version you only get when someone who lives there decides, for no reason at all, to share it with you.
That is something I keep learning about Canada. The best moments here are almost never planned. They come from ordinary conversations with ordinary people who turn out to be extraordinarily generous with their time.
The Village
The drive from the cottage to the village each morning was its own reward. Eighteen minutes of pure countryside — nature left and right, houses built on mountainsides, cottages hidden behind trees. It reminded me, every single time, that Canada is not just a country. It is a continent wearing a trench coat.
Mont-Tremblant village looks like someone dropped a European ski town into the Canadian wilderness. Buildings painted in yellows and reds and greens. Stone walls. A clock tower. At the entrance, a sign: Place des Voyageurs — Bienvenue, Welcome. Above it all, the gondola, sliding silently over rooftops carrying skiers up the mountain.
I spent hours just walking. A laser tag spot in the village pulled me in for a round with a few locals. $120 for two, worth every dollar for the experience of being absolutely terrible and laughing about it. One of the kids eliminated me four times in ten minutes. He apologised each time. Very Canadian.
The souvenir shops had fridge magnets for twenty dollars. My partner grabbed a couple before I could argue. But she’s right — everywhere I visit in this country, a magnet comes home. Each one goes on the fridge next to the others. Each one is proof that I am actually doing this — actually exploring this massive, beautiful, ridiculous country.
In the middle of the village, there is an inukshuk — a tall stone sculpture surrounded by bare winter shrubs. An inukshuk is an Inuit landmark. It means “someone was here.”
Standing in front of it — an immigrant, two and a half hours from home, in a francophone ski village in Quebec — I thought: yes. Someone is here.
The Slopes — From the Bottom
I don’t ski.
I need to say that clearly because this is a post about Mont-Tremblant and most people go there to ski. I stood at the bottom and watched. And honestly? That was its own kind of experience.
Kids — four, five years old — carving down the mountain like they’d been born on it. Teenagers spraying snow. An older couple at the bottom, laughing, holding onto each other’s poles. I’ve never stood on a ski slope in my life. Where I come from, the closest thing to winter sport is arguing about football in the rain.
But watching those people — all ages, all levels — something shifted. I turned to my partner and said: “We’re learning before we come back.”
She looked at me like I was crazy. But she didn’t say no.
So that’s the vow. Next winter, I return. And next time, I don’t watch from the bottom. I go up.
The Food
Two dinners out. Both worth it.
Friday night at a Chinese restaurant in the village — fried calamari and wonton soup to start, two grapefruit-ginger cocktails that looked like sunset in a glass, then Singapore noodles for mains. A window seat, village lights reflecting off wet cobblestones. $139 for two. For a resort village, that’s not bad. The food was good. The cocktails were better.
Saturday night at Le Club Morrit is where the trip peaked.
Shrimp tempura to start — golden, crunchy, served with sweet chili dipping sauce. Then the main event.
I ordered the Philly steak. Thinly sliced beef, sautéed in red wine with onions and mushrooms, piled onto a toasted submarine roll, topped with fresh arugula and roasted peppers. Caesar salad on the side.
I have eaten a lot of sandwiches in my life. In Edinburgh. In Toronto. In Ottawa. This was one of the best things I have put in my mouth in Canada. The bread was right. The beef was right. The wine reduction on the mushrooms was right. Everything about it was right. My partner ordered hers and said nothing for ten minutes. That’s how you know.
$100 for two. For food that good, in a place that beautiful — a bargain.
The Casino
Casino Mont-Tremblant sits just outside the village. The entrance is a massive glass fireplace with real flames, framed by fibre-optic lights that look like frozen rain. Worth the visit even if you never touch a machine.
Fifty dollars at the door. Slot machines only. No strategy. Just two people from Ottawa feeding a machine and watching lights spin.
The machine paid out. Not a fortune — but enough that any reasonable person would have looked at the screen, looked at their partner, and said: “let’s go.”
I did not go.
Greed kicked in. The winnings went back. Every dollar. When the machine swallowed the last of it and the screen went quiet, there was nothing to do but laugh. Because what else can you do?
Fifty dollars. Gone. The casino taught me exactly what casinos are designed to teach you — except I had to pay for the lesson. On the walk back to the car, she said: “We should have left when we were up.” I said: “We should have left when we walked in.” Laughter again. That’s what you do when the mountain air is cold and you’ve just donated fifty dollars to a slot machine and the stars are out and you’re two immigrants standing in the Quebec countryside at 11 PM on a Friday night.
You laugh. Because your life is absurd and beautiful and you wouldn’t trade it.
The Last Morning
Easter Sunday. I woke up early and went to the balcony one more time.
The lake was still frozen. The mountains still sat behind it, patient, unchanged. The sky was the same flat grey it had been all weekend. Nothing had changed out there.
But something had changed in here.
Four days earlier, I had left Ottawa tired. Not the kind of tired that sleep fixes — the deeper kind. The kind that comes from routine. From commuting, working, cooking, cleaning, commuting again. The kind that builds so slowly you don’t notice it until you stop. And then you stop, and it hits you all at once — how long it’s been since you just stood somewhere and breathed.
I said earlier that I don’t know how much longer I’ll be in Ottawa. That’s true. But standing on that balcony, I realised something: that’s not a reason to wait. That’s a reason to go. Every city you live in has a Mont-Tremblant somewhere nearby — a place two hours away that could change the way you feel about your life. The mistake is thinking you’ll get to it later. Later doesn’t come. Later is a city you’ve already left.
Canada is big. Canada is beautiful. Canada is rich — not just in money, but in land, in space, in silence, in places that will make you stand still and feel small and grateful at the same time.
And it is yours. If you landed here, it is yours to explore. All of it. Before later becomes somewhere else.
What It Cost
| Car rental + gas (Ottawa return) | $250 |
| Airbnb cottage — Lac Supérieur, 3 nights | $678 |
| Dinner — Wok Restaurant (Friday) | $139 |
| Dinner — Le Club Morrit (Saturday) | $100 |
| Groceries — Les Marchés Tradition | $50 |
| VR Laser Tag — 1 hour, 2 adults | $120 |
| Casino Mont-Tremblant | $50 |
| Souvenirs — fridge magnets | $20 |
| Total | $1,407 |
That’s $704 per person for four days at one of Canada’s premier resort destinations. Roughly $176 per person per day.
The drive home was Easter Sunday. The road back felt shorter — it always does. The trees were still bare. The snow was still softening. The grey sky hadn’t moved. I stopped once for gas at a different station. No Nameer this time. Just a quiet pump and a quiet road and a quiet drive back to a life that would be loud again by Monday morning.
But the fridge magnet was in the bag. And the vow was made.
Next winter, I ski.
Big country. Tight budget. Explore anyway.
— J. Alabi, LandedAndLiving.ca 🍁
