Long a favourite with skiers from Ontario and Quebec, this tres cool village in the Laurentian Highlands is now one of the hottest destinations in skiing. Bonjour.

I learned to ski by accident in the early 1970's. My best friend Patricia and I kicked around Europe for three months, often using the trains as overnight accommodation. One morning we awoke to find ourselves in France with a breathtaking view of jagged Mont Blanc plastered across our compartment window. "The hills are alive and they're calling," Patricia announced, cahnneling Julie Andrews. The next thing I knew, my friend, a certified ski freak, was dragging me off the train at Chamonix. I say dragging because I didn't know how to ski and wasn't about to risk breaking my leg trying to learn in a foreign country. Until, that is, I met Jean-Claude Badeau, the charming son of Madame Badeau, who managed the pension we checked into. Jean-Claude was the director of a local ski school and as persuasive as he was good-looking. "Stay, take lessons, he pleaded sweetly. "You'll be amazed at what you can learn if you stick with the same instructor for a week."

And I was amazed. After two days of lessons, I was step-turning down the French equivalent of blue cruising runs; after four days, I was flying down them. This spontaneous stopover was one of the bright spots of our European holiday, and Patricia and I talked not long ago about brushing up on our skills in a similar way closer to home, which is how I came to discover Tremblant, Quebec. It's a ski village that sits at the base of Mt. Tremblant, the tallest peak in the province's Laurentian Highlands. Located less than two hours north of Montreal by car, Tremblant the resort - not to be confused with nearby Mont-Tremblant the town - looks like a storybook hamlet. More important for me, it is that rare bird among North American winter destinations, a place that offers a "ski week," four days of lessons with the same instructor and classmates, plus such extras as after-class cocktails, a videotaped race and a farewell dinner.

"It's our most popular program," Marie-Andree Champoux, supervisor of the ski school, tells me when I call for specifics. "Some students have returned every year for the last 20 years." In fact, Tremblant claims to have invented the ski week concept in North America. The mountain was already a going concern when Philadelphia millionaire Joe Ryan bought it in the 1930s. After Sun Valley in Idaho, it's the oldest winter resort in continuous operation on the continent.

The old Tremblant was always a favourite among skiers in Quebec and Ontario, but the new and improved Tremblant appeals to an international crowd. "Japan, Britain, Brazil, Mexico, the U.S.: our visitors come from everywhere," Champoux says. Credit for the influx belongs to Intrawest, the Vancouver, B.C.-based resort developers who purchased the mountain in 1991. This is the company that turned Whistler and Blackcomb mountains north of Vancouver into a world-class ski destination. Intrawest is well on its way to doing the same for Tremblant, having invested more than $800 million to improve the slopes, build some very classy accommodations and develop a stylish pedestrian village. Recnt upgrades include the addition of a second chamionship golf course, Le Geant. The Company's "visioneers," whose job it is to distill the essence of a resort location - its culture, environment and history - and then reconstitute it into a rich holiday experience, have even more improvements planned for Tremblant.

What they've done to date has certainly paid off. The golf magazines are beginning to hype the new course the way the ski press has been hyping the mountain. For the past six years, Ski Magazine has named Tremblant the number-one resort in eastern North America.

Tremblant's lively, pedestrian-only village is an easy 10-minute walk bottom to top, but before you set out to explore it on foot, take a ride on the free, overhead tram. From this vantage point, you can admire the eye-catching architecture. The new buildings here look old-fashioned, with brightly coloured roofs and bay windows with balconies that overlook the cobblestone streets. The directionally dyslexic (like me) will be happy to note that the largest of them have distinctive towers that serve as landmarks.

The village is divided into neighbourhoods, each with a theme. Place Saint Bernard, just off the slope, is the gathering place where you meet up with pals for beavertails (flat wholewheat doughnuts) and brews. Next door is Promenade Deslauriers, high-end shopping central. Around the corner is my favourite neighbourhood, Vieux (Old) Tremblant, a collection of 1930s-era half-mortar, half-log buildings that were part of Joe Ryan's original development. Here you'll find Diable, a microbrewery with six of its own beers on tap; Le P'tit Caribou, the top-rated ski bar in Canada, according to Ski Canada magazine; and La Grappe a Vin, a country-quaint restaurant with great regional cuisine. Tremblant's 28 other places to eat serve everything from tacos to sushi. At the Sugar Shack, you can roll your own decadent lollipop from hot maple syrup poured into clean snow.

Accommodations at Tremblant are plentiful and include the always-comfortable Westin, Marriot and Fairmont chains, plus a few choice one-offs. The newest of these is Le Sommet des Neiges, a ski-out condominium hotel next to the base of the high-speed gondola.

Although Tremblant cannot boast the endless runs of its sister property Whistler-Blackcomb in B.C., or the deep powder of its American cousin Copper Mountain in Colorado, there is still some outstanding skiing on its 610 acres. Ninety-two trails wind down its four groomed faces and all of the runs are open to both skiers and snowboarders (the latter also have two snow parks at their disposal). Greenhorns start out at the base of the South Side, the site's original ski area, where moving sidewalks called magic carpets whick them up a wee hill so they can oractice wedge turning (snowplowing) down to the bottom. Confident beginners take a heated gondola to the summit where the trails include the gentle Nansen or the narrower Le P'tit Bonheur with baby bumps. Tremblant's skiing for beginners is first-rate.

For intermediate skiers, a dozen sweet blue cruisers tempt. On the South Side, they can sail across Le Crue Deslaurier's undulating snow waves; on the North Side, they can charge off Dynamite's heart-stopping drops, the steepest in eastern Canada. Le Edge is an area near the top of the mountain that links Mt. Tremblant with its neighbour, Mt. Johannsen. The glades on this face are as fine as they get in this part of the world, with a tree run for every level of skier. Versant Soleil, on the other hand, is best left to the experts; 80 percent of its 15 runs are single or double-black.

If you don't ski or ride there are other outdoor diversions. Dogsledding is high on my list because you can't do it everywhere, and so is snowmobiling because Bombardier, the world's leading manufacturer of snowmobiles, is a Quebec enterprise and that makes snowmobiling quintessentially French-Canadian.

After the ski school, the thing I like best about Tremblant is that it feels European. You're in French Canada after all, where the signs are in French, "Canadian French" is the mother tongue and the energy level just feels different. Public relations coodinator Jean-Sebastien Tremblay says that European visitors tell him all the time that Tremblant feels exotic to them too, in the way North American culture automatically feels foreign to someone who grew up reading Asterix comic instead of Archie & Jughead.

Tremblant is an original, a glitzy chameleon resort with something for everyone. Cool.