Since I've spent a lot of time travelling and writing about it, people sometimes ask me what trips are like when you're no longer a single footloose backpacker but the mother of a four-year-old boy.
On a month-long camping trip through Quebec to the Saguenay and Gaspésie - much longer than other trips we've taken as a family - I discovered that certain elements are definitely missing. Gone are the carefree days of anything-might- happen, the long and lazy café mornings that might turn into café afternoons, the late nights of unexpected parties, the exhilaration of meeting someone interesting on a mountaintop.
Instead, this is what it's like:
Twenty minutes after leaving your Wakefield, Quebec, home for the 2,500-kilometre journey in your camper van, it becomes clear that your son doesn't like the van or the long drive. "I can't see the cars on the road, Mommy. You're in the way." Since cars and all other vehicles are important to your son, you turn your seat so as not to block his view, an angle that will give you a kinked neck for the next month.
You and your husband soon discover that when you enter a new town or city, it isn't cafés or museums you seek out, but the local playground. You discover that eastern Quebec has some damn fine ones. They're not filled with the usual, ultra-safe play structures, but, in Quebec City, huge geodesic domes of rope and metal and, in the village of New Richmond, a Danish play structure with an obstacle course so challenging that every muscle in your body throbs after playing on it.
Then, in the old-fashioned resort town of Rawdon, north of Montreal - where your father lived for two years as a boy - you come upon what is surely the world's best playground. Under a grove of old white pines, kids rush between a fast and joyfully outdated metal slide, a high swing set and monkey bars. You can imagine your dad here as a boy in the 1930s, oblivious to the Depression, running down the sandy hill and plunging into the lake, with no knowledge yet under his young freckled skin of you or of his grandson, now running down the same beach.
When you and your son go up the elevator of the Château Frontenac to see the view, he doesn't get off with you. (Later, he will say it was because he was mad at you.) You turn around to see the door closing as he shouts "Mommy!" in a haunting tone you've never heard him use, and then hear his cries fade into nothing as the elevator descends. Frantically, you try to bring it back up, but wait what feels like a decade for it to open again.
When it does, your son isn't there. You get back on and check all 16 floors below you. Finally, you reach the lobby full of hundreds of people in 17th-century costumes - the Nouveau France Festival has just had a parade outside the hotel - and run out of the elevator calling your son's name as the crowd of merrymakers looks at you curiously. A woman dressed as a New France barmaid tells you in French that she has just taken your son to the front desk. When you see him, small and surrounded by strangers trying to get him to say his name, he runs into your arms and bursts into tears, telling you between gulps of air that he'll never again, in his whole life, stay on an elevator by himself.
