Cottage Life

Serenity is a luxury. As we live in a busy and buzzing city, a little retreat in the nature from time to time or during the weekend is what we like to call “cottage life”. While snugging away in a remote area one hour away from Montreal, we enjoy waking up to silence, following the sunlight as our reference to time, and doing things at a slow mo pace.

🌦️ | 15°C
📍 Fiddler Lake Resort

Quebec is such a vast province that doesn’t lack terrain. We can drive 9 hours outside of Montreal and discover the wonders of Gaspésie or 45 minutes away and appreciate nature’s blessings like the colourful foliage in autumn closer to home. My đẹp trai found a cottage resort in Mille-Isles, a first for my family and us to explore and to enjoy.

The concept behind this resort is a community of 100 cottages where each family or group has their assigned stay. Each cottage is called after a Canadian animal, and the type of homes evolves as the size of your group.

Rabbit is for the smallest groups. It’s an open-concept cottage with high ceiling, fully equipped (towels, laundry, kitchen) and comes with a jacuzzi. These cottage types vary up to Moose where there’s a home theatre room and a pool table. The front desk is also a recreational area with both an outdoor and indoor pool, a badminton, tennis and basketball court, a children’s park, and it’s right in front of a lake where we can do paddle board, kayak or canoe. And, in true Quebecois fashion, there’s a “dep” (short for ‘dépanneur’, meaning corner store) on site. It’s an intimate and safe location; the entrance has a security gate.

This place is called Mille-Isles, written in old French spelling, and is translated to “A Thousand Islands”. It could have been named “A Thousand Lakes” as well due to the many lakes around here. This municipality is charming with its forests, very typical of the Laurentians. And don’t mix this up with Mille-Îles, the “other” Thousand Islands over in Ontario by the U.S. border. That one is known for its opulent residences and grand castles perched atop private islands. Ours comes with less royalty and more rodents!

There are many essentials that I appreciate fully when retreated from the city life:

No social media
I used to think that my relationship with social media wasn’t that bad. I didn’t feel an obvious dependency. I wasn’t really active, but I scrolled a lot. After some time when I used to juggle both virtual meetings 7hrs/day at work and passively checking my phone, my mind couldn’t handle that much screen time anymore. That’s when I decided to put my phone away and to ignore it after working hours every day until I felt like I was healing from digital anxiety. Going to a cottage does offer me that safe cocoon shield protecting me from reduced to no social media time.

Quality time
On this weekend getaway, I spent time with my family and beloved. A much slower-paced environment incites us to share the time we have with each other in a much more mindful way than usual: we prepare meals together, we talk and reminisce old anecdotes and most importantly, we get to reset our energy.

Nature
Mother Nature is omnipresent and is often taken for granted. I get to appreciate more the trees, sky, lake, and air around me by being isolated in nature. There was a beaver that came every early afternoon at our cottage. It was looking for food but was contented with feeding itself with twigs and leaves. It was very adorable. I like to observe life; from water in motion, leaves in the breeze, to animals doing their thing.