There may be more than one place, in this big and startling world, to nuzzle ostriches, snap alpaca selfies and scritch curly-horned sheep while simultaneously skating mile after mile of ice trails through the woods. The only one I know is Domaine Enchanteur (domaineenchanteur.com/en; CA$18-25; free for ages 4 and under), the delightful and mildly psychedelic ice maze in rural Québec that doubles as a petting zoo and working apiary. Open-air animal enclosures dot Domaine Enchanteur's nine miles of Zamboni-smoothed ice trails, which corkscrew through ranks of pines, and a skate-up ice shack sells freshly poured sugar on snow. A small bottle of honey is included in the entrance fee — something to do with its agritourism designation. During a mid-January visit to the trails, I skated past a pack of teens in faded Montréal Canadiens hockey jerseys doing tricks while slurping their maple taffy. And I thought, rather hyperbolically but not for the first time, This may be the greatest place on Earth. Located in the small community of Notre-Dame-du-Mont-Carmel, the skating trails are about three hours and 20 minutes north of Burlington, in the Mauricie region that runs northwest from the St. Lawrence River between Québec City and Montréal. (See sidebar on page 32 for highlights of nearby city Trois-Rivières.) Entrepreneurial local Jean-Pierre Binette opened them to the public in 1997, after a few years spent bootstrapping methods to create and maintain the natural ice. He'd bought the land in 1973 with plans to create a pine plantation. The land was poorly suited to commercial tree cultivation, but many pines remain, some decked with DIY cutouts of Disney characters (Tinkerbell, Captain Hook) or the colorful lights installed in 2020 for night skating. Today, the operation is overseen by Jean-Pierre's 36-year-old son, Marc-Antoine Binette. "We were the first skating path in Québec, and people come from all over to visit: French, Germans, Japanese, everyone," the younger Binette told me, adding that his own three small children love to visit the animals and help around the farm. "I hope someday that they might want to carry it on, but who knows?" Ice skating has long been a specialty in Québec; Canada's first commercial rink opened in Montréal in 1850. Skating trails such as those at Domaine Enchanteur are a more recent innovation that combines the reliability of rinks — whose shallow ice can be maintained far more easily…