The week started off at midnight Friday morning with a full lunar eclipse. A thick, rain-filled warm front followed right behind, and the snow began receding from my yard. Sugarmakers began posting steam-filled photographs of their operations, which will be followed shortly by more photos of two-wheel-drive cars mired up to their axles on country roads. A cardinal sang lustily from a tree down in the brook bed below my house. And best of all, it’s spring break for universities, so I’ve got company.

Bea’s still teaching, so break is a big deal for her. But as far as I can tell, the only difference between her regular schedule and a vacation is the absence of sit-down, face-to-face meetings. The emails still pour into her laptop, she still has proposals and dissertation drafts to read and approve, and her social life continues online.

What work I still have, I do pretty much right here at my desk; so my office takes on the atmosphere of a dormitory room — silence, studiousness, and creativity. Now and then I get up to let Kiki in or out, and Bea goes off to the kitchen to brew a huge mug of lemon-infused tea. All very quiet, serene and unvacationlike.

But there’s excitement in the offing. A couple of weeks ago I got on the phone and made a reservation for a night at a most elegant of French auberges, Manoir Hovey, just north of the border in Quebec. My wife and I used to go there years ago, and took our preternaturally intelligent dog, Tucker, with us. Bea and I have been there once before, two years ago in January, but Kiki stays home.

It’s very soothing somehow to be addressed by a French-speaking staff, even if I deplore what happens to the pronunciation of my last name. And they take the very best of care of their guests. Last time we were there, I left my car in the parking lot above the inn — the valets ask your name, and your luggage beats you to your room — and struggled down the flights of stairs to the entrance. Next morning when we emerged to start for home, my car was loaded and parked beside the door. It wouldn’t be hard, if I could afford it, to get used to treatment like that.

But there’s a lot more — thanks to the fourth grade level of foreign relations currently in use in Washington these days — to visiting a foreign country. You have to wonder how you’ll be received, even in countries where it wasn’t a question before. The Eastern Townships, where the manoir is located, is sort of the English part of Quebec. During the American Revolution the “patriots” of New England managed to make life intolerable for loyalists, and many fled north to Canada. Today, we Yankees can get along there pretty well with only English and go to an Anglican church (far different from a church of the same name in the States). Still, in spite of a history of cordial welcomes at the border in the past, you wonder.

Last time, the young woman in the booth gazed at our passports and remarked, “You have different last names and live in different cities. What’s the story with that?”

Bea leaned forward: “How much time have you got?” The agent nodded, smiled, handed back our passports, and waved us on.

What I’m hearing from fellow travelers who post on the internet is that they’ve been met and engaged with a mixture of puzzlement and sympathy nothing like what our clueless vice president experienced when he ventured a week or so ago into the foreign territory of Vermont. In our case, it probably helps that we’re gray-haired and elderly and unaccompanied by a security entourage.

But in any case, if asked, we’re quick to assure our northern neighbors (whoops! neighbours) of our fervent good will and apologize for the indignities they, along with Greenland and Panama, have suffered lately from the boneheaded comments of our chief executive.

I’m hoping for conversations, even in the short time we’ll be in Canada, and even with fellow Americans. Most of all, I want to listen. Before the Civil War the manoir was the summer home of a wealthy American Southerner, as were several other mansions around the lake. Legend has it that after the Civil War, when those gentlemen came for their vacations, they had their staff lower the curtains of the windows of their private railway cars as they passed through New England. There have been interesting conversations here in the Townships before. It can’t hurt to assure our friends that, even amid the furor and blather, we remain fast friends.