Go on a cool trip that drips with sweetness

A wolf runs to my car door as I park between a sugar shack and a lumberjack-style building at the end of a wooded country lane, about 45 minutes outside Quebec City, Canada.

Its teeth seem to be bared in a smile, but maybe it is a snarl. As I debate whether to get out of the car, a huge man with a long beard appears, wearing knickers, a puffy shirt and suspenders — clothing that only adds to his striking resemblance to Paul Bunyan.

"Not to worry, that's just Lulu," he says with a heavy French-Canadian accent.

Actually, Pierre Faucher is saying Loup-Loup — Wolf-Wolf in French — but it sounds like Lulu. And she is only 80 per cent wolf. The rest is Siberian husky.

Customer friendly

Loup-Loup greets thousands of customers each year here at La Cabane a Pierre, and at Faucher's other property, Sucrerie de la Montagne, just outside Montreal.

Both properties are dual-purpose, producing maple sugar and preserving French-Canadian traditions from the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Visitors from around the world come all year to tour the maple groves, to dance to French-Canadian music, to learn to play the spoons and to eat a hearty French-Canadian country meal, parts of it doused in syrup.

March and April are prime-time sugar-shack season. Maple trees are tapped, sap drips into buckets that are then collected on sleighs pulled by Belgian horses, and wood fires blaze to reduce the thin, watery sap into a sweet, amber liquid.

As the sap will begin to drip, producers eager to get customers hooked on their product open their doors for tours. Most add special events, such as a fiddler band, pancake-eating contests, petting zoos, sleigh rides and, almost always, free samples of hot, sweet and gooey treats.

All sell maple syrup, maple sugar, maple candy and whatever else they can think of that uses syrup as an ingredient.

Producing more

Many also stock their stores with whatever they produce outside the sugaring season, which runs from March to April.

Thus, you might find cedar furniture, cane chairs or refinished antiques. Or, a chance to pet an alpaca, buy a sweater made from its wool, or pet a lamb and buy sheepskin.

Touring sugar shacks is an old tradition that has grown more popular in North America.

In New York state alone, sugar shacks logged 2 million visitors during two maple-sugar weekends last year, said Mary Jeanne Packer, executive director of the New York State Maple Producers Association.

Sugaring, as it is called, is a fascinating process. Consider this: You must boil down 40 gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup.

For travellers, sugar shacking is also a chance to rub elbows with locals and experience the kind of small-town life you might have thought disappeared in the 1950s.

Shortly after I arrive at La Cabane a Pierre, a bus arrives, full of sophisticated-looking teens from a Connecticut school.

No mean teens

The boys horse around during the tour of the sugar shack and a re-created trapper's shack in a maple grove.

I am betting they will all be making snide remarks and rolling their eyes at the music of country fiddlers and washboard players.

They and other visitors that day find seats on benches at pine tables inside the replica of a big lumberjack camp, built by Pierre and local craftsmen using axes to get that rough-hewn look from the timber.

A lumberjack meal is served family-style: maple-cured meat, pea soup, meat pie, soufflé omelette, baked beans in maple syrup, potatoes baked with cheese, bread just pulled from a wood-fired oven.

Even before dessert arrives, waitresses in traditional dress set out pitchers of maple syrup and encourage diners to try it on everything.

Sugary mood

After a couple of those, you do not feel shy about responding to the invitation to learn to play wooden spoons, which poor families would use in olden days to supplement whatever store-bought instruments they had acquired.

The traditional French-Canadian band begins playing and calling out instructions for line dancing.

Amazingly, the teens join in. Maybe they are on a sugar high. And we have not yet had the hot maple taffy poured on ice.

Watching from the back of the room, Faucher beams. "We're keeping a culture alive."

Quebec City from the UAE

From Dubai
British Airways and Air Canada Jazz fly daily via London and Montreal: Fare: Dh4,500
Air Canada and Lufthansa fly daily via Frankfurt and Montreal.
Fare: Dh3,892
KLM and Air Canada Jazz fly daily via Amsterdam and Montreal. Fare: Dh3,351

From Abu Dhabi
British Airways and Air Canada Jazz fly daily via London and Toronto. Fare: Dh5,105.
Northwest Airlines and KLM fly four times a week via Amsterdam and Detroit.
Fare: Dh3,253
(All fares exclusive of taxes)

Information courtesy: MMI Travel