Imagine: You’re strolling down cobblestone streets, the strains of accordion-music flowing from an upstairs balcony. Or sitting and sipping a steaming cafe au lait in a sidewalk cafe, practicing your s’il vous plaits and merci beaucoups with mustachio’d waiters in white aprons. Snacking on maple sugar ice cream and buying moose souvenirs? Doesn’t quite fit, now, does it?

Paris? Mais non! This is Quebec City of course – the town just across our northern border and is much more fun than gay Paris, at least for me.

Paris is a seven-hour, $800 plane flight away. To get to Quebec, on the other hand, all you need to do is throw your clothes in the car and drive north four or five hours (depending on how OCD you are about speed limits and things like that).

And unlike Paris, where paying a bill is always an adventure in “suspended disbelief,” in QC you’ll be smiling smugly to yourself every time you remember you’re really paying about 10 percent less than you think you are.

In the three years we’ve known each other, my husband and I have been to 11 countries and taken road trips in four. If we ever win the lottery, we’ll leave the country and not come back till we’ve hiked in China, sipped tea on the Trans Siberian Railway, and bought pistachios in Tehran. We fancy ourselves adventurers, but you might just call us travel snobs.

So the thought of going to Canada had never really crossed our minds. Too boring, we thought. It’s not really a separate country, it just thinks it is, we’d joked (sorry, Canadians).

But poverty, and our one-year anniversary, struck, and two weeks ago my husband and I bundled into my air-conditionerless Mazda and headed north to Canada to celebrate our anniversary Quebec-style.

And you know what surprised us? Canada really is a different country: the houses look different, most of the roads are worse, two thirds of the traffic lights are horizontal, not vertical, and the people all speak in this really weird accent. My husband spent a lot of the drive pointing out pedestrians and exclaiming “look – he’s French!”

And then, Quebec City blew us away. Quebec City had in spades all the things I had enjoyed during the three miserable days I spent in Paris a few years ago, with none of the annoying hassles (like astronomical bills and insolent waiters grown bitter from too much contact with even more offensive tourists).

QC was beautiful, with old stone houses and those azure-painted shutters framing tidy window boxes that overflowed with pansies and nasturtiums. There were little old men and beautiful flowing-haired women playing instruments on the sidewalks, along with magicians, break-dancers, and a one-man band who played Neil Diamond over and over again.

There were bakeries full of fresh French bread, perfect salads dripping with olive oil and vinegar, frothy cappuccinos and unbelievable art – in museums, on highway underpasses and the walls of buildings, and in the galleries that lined the streets. There were great shows, quaint walks, a castle and a little market where Quebecois shop for fresh flowers, basil, veggies and cheeses.

Even better, perhaps, the people were friendly and seemed happy to have us eating at their restaurants or staying in their hotels – hard to come by in the City of Lights. And when we got bored of looking at art, flowers, cobblestones and moose T-shirts, there was a waterfall to climb and a music festival to go to.

Best of all, on our last day, when we were sad to be leaving but broke enough we had no choice, we jumped in the car, kicked off our shoes, and trundled quickly back over the border to plot our next trip in secrecy.

When Maggie Gill-Austern is not off on flights of fancy in Quebec she is a news reporter and photographer in the Sun Journal’s Farmington bureau.