{"id":4998,"date":"2022-07-15T09:53:39","date_gmt":"2022-07-15T14:53:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/?p=4998"},"modified":"2022-07-18T11:45:32","modified_gmt":"2022-07-18T16:45:32","slug":"touring-three-pines-in-the-eastern-townships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/touring-three-pines-in-the-eastern-townships\/","title":{"rendered":"Touring Three Pines in the Eastern Townships"},"content":{"rendered":"

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EASTERN TOWNSHIP, QUEBEC \u2014 Christiane, the raconteur<\/em> for our Three Pines Tour, arrives at exactly 8 a.m. at our auberge<\/em> in Sutton, one of the towns in the Eastern Township, which starts about a dozen miles north of the Vermont-Canada. While French is the dominant language in Quebec, this area in large part was settled by Loyalists (as they were called) to Britain in the American Revolution, so English is also commonly spoken.<\/p>\n

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Chris, as she prefers to be called, spent 35 years working for the Royal Mounted Canadian Police in their counter-terrorism division. After retiring, she ended up helping the company\u2019s owner conduct these tours. For an entire day, she will take us to several places that were fictionalized in Louise Penny\u2019s murder mysteries \u2014 the Chief Inspector Gamache series, which are generally set in the Eastern Township, with occasional forays into Montreal and Quebec City.<\/p>\n

The Gamache murder mystery series now numbers 17 with another coming out this fall. They are wildly popular and deservedly so. As British mystery writer Ann Cleeves puts it, Penny is \u201ca crackling storyteller.\u201d Penny also cowrote a political thriller with Hillary Clinton, titled State of Terror<\/em>. Taking a tour that visits some of the places (under pseudonyms) that appear in the Gamache series seemed like a cool way to get reacquainted with the Eastern Township, which is where my mother\u2019s family emigrated from to New Hampshire. There are likely some (very) distant relatives of mine, with surnames of Bourque or Pr\u00e9vost, living around here.<\/p>\n

The Three Pines tours have been a boon to the tourist industry in the Eastern Township. Most of the tours consist only of the raconteur<\/em> \u2014 there are currently four \u2014 and a married couple, maybe two. It\u2019s quite an intimate experience. Here are a few of the places we were privileged to visit:<\/p>\n