By Harold Phillips | June 2026
My partner makes the same case every June, right around the time we're confirming dates for July at the cottage. The argument is always reasonable. Compelling, even. Via Rail to Sherbrooke is roughly five hours, about the same as driving, depending on the 401. You can sit. You can read. Someone else is in charge of not falling asleep on the highway. No construction near Kingston that stretches a ninety-minute stretch into two hours because someone decided late May was an excellent time to repave every lane simultaneously.
I listen. I genuinely consider it. Then I say something like "but the car is already paid for" and we book the drive.
We've had this conversation three summers in a row now.
The Case My Partner Actually Makes
Here's what makes it hard to dismiss: they're not wrong about most of the individual points.
Via Rail on that route is a genuinely comfortable way to travel. The trains that run toward the Eastern Townships corridor are modern enough, the seats are real seats, and you arrive in a town rather than white-knuckling through suburban Longueuil traffic trying to remember whether you turned left or right off the autoroute. My partner would read a novel, maybe nap, and arrive not completely wrung out from three hours of Quebec highway driving with one hand on the wheel and one eye on the fuel gauge.
The environmental math is also not nothing. I'm driving a nine-year-old Civic. It's fine. It gets reasonable mileage. But two people on a train are two fewer people burning gas on the 401, and I'm not going to pretend that math doesn't exist. I notice it, I just haven't acted on it.
So why do I still drive?
Honestly, Part of It Is the Drive Itself
The 401 to the 10 is not a beautiful highway. Let me be honest about that upfront. It's the 401. It's a construction zone approximately thirty percent of the time between Toronto and Montreal, and the stretch through Kingston always smells faintly of truck exhaust and institutional optimism. None of that is in dispute.
But there's a specific rhythm to that drive that I've had for as long as I can remember. My family has had the cottage in the Eastern Townships for decades. I've been making this trip since I was in the back seat falling asleep on a pile of duffel bags somewhere near Belleville. I know exactly where the terrain shifts from Southern Ontario flat to the start of the Appalachian foothills. I know the rest stop past Gananoque that always has parking. I know the point on the 10, east of Magog, where you can see the profile of the hills and the whole drive starts to feel worth it.
My partner doesn't have this. They didn't grow up making this drive. To them, it's five hours in a car. To me, it's the specific five hours that mean summer is actually starting.
That's hard to put a dollar value on, and I'm not going to try.
The IGA stop happens around the three-and-a-half hour mark, at a grocery store just off the highway near the Quebec border. It's become its own ritual. We get there stiff from the car, slightly over-caffeinated from the Tim's somewhere around Brockville, and we spend forty-five minutes walking through a francophone grocery store deciding what we actually want to eat for a week. Bread from the bakery section. Quebec cheese. A tray of sausages. Corn if it's already in season.
You can't do that on a train.
Or rather, you can stop at a Marché in town when you arrive. But you've just gotten off a train and you're tired in a different way, and someone has to come pick you up, and the whole arrival is compressed and transactional instead of gradual. The IGA stop is part of how I ease into cottage time. I'm not rushing anywhere. I'm standing in a grocery store in Quebec reading the French labels on things I would normally just reach for automatically, and the shift is already happening before I've even seen the dock.
The Real Reason Is the Car at the Other End
The practical argument I actually win with: once you're there, you need a car.
The cottage is not in a town with a transit system. There's no Uber or Lyft coverage worth trusting. The nearest grocery store isn't walking distance and the nearest LCBO might as well be a day trip. My parents have one car between them, and during our July stretch they're usually there too, which means borrowing it isn't a simple thing. If my partner and I take the train, we've now got four people, one vehicle, and two weeks of scheduling around pickup times and grocery runs that become a minor logistical negotiation every other day.
Driving up means we arrive with our own transportation, our own timeline, and no one has to figure out who's picking us up at the Sherbrooke station at 7 PM after the train runs late. Which it does, sometimes. Via Rail is better than it was, but "on time" is a relative term for Canadian passenger rail, and I say that without much malice. The infrastructure is genuinely difficult.
The car cost on the drive, when I've worked it out, is somewhere between $90 and $110 in gas for a round trip in the Civic. Two Via Rail tickets on that route (flexible class, nothing fancy) tend to run $160 to $220 depending on when you book. If you factor in that we'd also need to arrange transport at the other end, the math starts looking worse for the train than the original sticker price suggests.
I keep meaning to do a proper comparison. I've started it twice and gotten distracted by other tabs. My partner would find this unsurprising.
The Cottage Itself Is Not the Point, Except It Is
I should explain what we're actually going to, because I think people's mental image of "Quebec cottage" can run toward something grander than reality.
This is a modest place. The dock needs repainting every few years and my dad keeps putting it off. The WiFi is genuinely terrible — not in a charming "digital detox" way, just in a "the router is from 2014 and the connection drops if two people try to stream at once" way. The cottage itself is comfortable but small. There's a canoe that hasn't been fully patched in years but still technically floats.
I love it. I'd take bad WiFi and a dock that needs work over a hotel with amenities any summer.
But it also means the two weeks in July are the one stretch of the year where I'm not optimizing anything. I'm not tracking my lifts. I'm not reading about TFSA contribution room. I'm not researching whether there's a better phone plan that just launched. I'm sitting on a dock with a coffee in the morning doing absolutely nothing that I could report back on.
The drive is part of that transition. Five hours with my partner, music on, stopping when we want to stop, gradually leaving the city and the habits it comes with. A train gets you there efficiently. The drive gets you there in a way that feels earned.
The Honest Concession
My partner is right that there would be something genuinely nice about showing up not tired.
By the time we pull into the cottage driveway, I've been focused on driving for the better part of five hours. I'm not depleted (I actually enjoy long drives), but I'm also not the relaxed, present version of myself that I'm supposedly going to the cottage to become. My partner, who has been reading in the passenger seat since Belleville, arrives in a noticeably better state than I do. This is a consistent pattern that I've decided not to examine too closely.
If we did the train, I'd arrive rested. I'd have finished a chapter or two. We'd have talked more, probably, instead of me asking them to check whether this lane goes straight through or merges right in two kilometres.
The thing is: I know this. I'm not unaware of the tradeoff. I just keep making the same call every June.
Maybe it changes eventually. Maybe I wake up one summer, look at the cost per trip, think about the emissions, think about arriving to the cottage actually ready to be there, and book two seats on the train.
My partner would like that very much. They've mentioned it.
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