The eastern townships are an Anglo anomaly within la belle province, bordering on Vermont. Getting there used to suck hard but, after eons of construction, the Rive Sud bypass is finally open. By avoiding Montreal, we saved at least two stop-n-stop, white-knuckle hours.
  2014 Audi A8 TDI Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
The aforementioned rise in fuel consumption after lunch came mostly in the last half hour. Our friend’s cottage is south of the town of Magog, about a half hour from the main autoroute. On real highways, cruise control and regular drive were sensible. The final 30 km were pure play with hilly c- and s-bends galore – and the rain miraculously stopped.
I slid the lid of the armrest, creating elbowroom for sportier steering. Now in sport mode, paddle-shifting the eight-speed transmission (though we didn’t get near eighth gear) and letting the 3.0L diesel engine rip, I experienced a whole new vehicle! The A8 is a wolverine in wolf’s clothing. On these rally roads, it was like it had shrunk and intuited the conditions.
  2014 Audi A8 TDI Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
Hello adrenaline!
We arrived at Anna and Norm’s cottage just in time for sundown. The deck was still too wet for dinner outside, but the lake and air were warm. After a quick change, I threw myself into the lake’s weedy warmth, swam for 10 vigorous minutes, then dripped dry. We hadn’t simply gotten here with the Audi A8 TDI. We’d arrived!
Day 2 – Fat Naked Beauty in Mountainous Vermont
One byproduct of the previous day’s storm was detritus flying around the highway. Just before crossing the Quebec border, an aggregate truck dripped a thousand stones onto the cars behind, including ours. The A8’s windshield was chipped, a sensory sin: like a moustache drawn on La Giaconda, a Hollywood starlet with a missing tooth or Sir Paul McCartney singing disco. (Later, a precipitous drop in overnight temperature extended the chip to a foot long crack: heartbreaking.)
I didn’t have wifi but wanted to alert the media contacts at Audi Canada in case they needed me to visit a dealer in Montreal. Well, actually we did have wifi, but I wanted some guy-time in the A8 with Norm. So we drove five kilometres into the nearest town.
Georgeville is arguably the prettiest of the Eastern Townships. It’s been pickled in time by vast money supplied by elite Montrealers who want it kept olde and quainte. Nary a Boston Pizza or Walmart forever.
Norm was a tad fraught by my driving; just the day before he’d hit and killed a fawn – very sad – so I slowed. (This is a good point to talk about Night Vision Assist, an Audi option that uses infrared sight to detect people or deer ahead and alert you with a chime.)
 2014 Audi A8 TDI Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
Later, we took a trip across the border to hike Mount Pisgah (pronounced as distastefully as you’d expect) in Vermont. It’s only a forty-minute drive door-to-door, despite the border check in Stansted, Quebec. This crossing’s easily the continent’s most laid back. Until recently, the twin towns in Quebec and Vermont shared a library, which was only shut down because of paranoid hawks in DC. Locals take great pride in their peaceable ways. It’s been like that since 1814, the last time the two sides were at war. (Note the photo of the 1812 cemetery.)
We didn’t take the A8 because I’d neglected to get permission to drive it over the border. However, Norm’s Golf Wagon TDI offered an interesting comparison. He typically gets 1,100 km to a tank and the car is four years old. We’d do nearly the same during our trip. The comparison ends there.
