Ranch Chez Ti-Gars

My family and I ended up at Ranch Chez Ti-​Gars after a dream morning of dogsledding across the field at Adventure Plein-​Air Inukshuk. Normally Inukshuk offer a full day package of sledding in the morning, a hot lunch, and then sleigh riding a at Ti-​Gars in the afternoon, but over the Christmas break they weren’t doing lunches and so couldn’t offer us the full package – but told us we were more than welcome to organise a sleigh ride ourselves for the afternoon.
Firstly, I was on crutches with a broken ankle, so I wasn’t going to be able to trek through the field to get to Ti-​Gars from Inukshuk – that’s how you normally get over there. The lovely old man from Ti-​Gars was kind enough to come pick me up in his car. Every kindness shown to me while I was busted up just gave me extra appreciation for a place!
We’d booked our sleigh ride a couple of days in advance and asked if there was somewhere warm where we could eat our packed lunches after our sled ride, so when the old gentleman brought us over to the ranch he led us into a warm room full of tables and chairs and a little touch of Christmas (lights and a tree, it was Christmas Eve after all). He didn’t speak much English and we didn’t speak much French but we got by just fine.
My sister suspects the old man was actually Santa Claus, as around halfway through our lunch he reappeared from behind the stable door, threw three fluffy and enthusiastic barn kittens into the room with us, and closed the door again. BARN KITTENS! Just moments earlier I had remarked that on a day full of puppies and ponies (fine, whatever, «dogs and horses»), all we needed was kittens to make the day complete, and HERE THEY WERE, all up in our lunch business. They were nuts, just little furry bundles of energy and we got the giggles.
The magic didn’t end there, though – a short while later the old man summoned us into the stable on the premise of watching him gear up the horses for the sleigh ride. We came along willingly… and entered a farmyard wonderland. How do farm animals survive the winter? By all living together in harmony inside a barn, apparently! Pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, geese, rabbits, kittens, all of them hanging out – and most of them pregnant? I later read that Ranch Chez Ti-​Gars is a baby animal farm, so all the pregnant animals made a bit more sense after that, haha. We patted some of them, cooed at others, got a walking tour of the stable’s tack rooms with wonderful attempts to understand from both sides of the broken conversation, and ended up out on the other side of the stable – where the horses were. The old man encouraged one big beautiful old palomino over to us and introduced it as Ti-​Gars. The ranch’s namesake!
The sleigh ride itself was slightly underwhelming, a balancing act on a big steel block on skis with a couple of rugs thrown across it as the two horses dragged said block through the same forest we’d earlier dogsledded through. But the horses were wearing bells that constantly jingled, and the forest was covered in snow. But by gosh, we were freezing!
We weren’t exactly dashing through the snow, the horse count was two and not one, forests not fields, freezing not laughing… but hey folks, it’s not like you can try this at home. Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingled all the way.
I’d give the sleigh ride a ³⁄₅ but our entire experience at the ranch well and truly deserved a ⁵⁄₅. Possibly ⁶⁄₅. Magic Quebec at its most magical.