New Brunswick

From St-Andrews-By-The-Sea we moved further up the Canadian coast to Hillsborough, New Brunswick.  Once again, it was a very pretty campsite, our front windshield looking out onto a pond.

Hillsborough didn't have a lot going on.  The primary excitement during our stay was a visit to a railroad museum.  There were several old railway cars and an engine from the days when those tracks were used for excursion trips outside Hillsborough.

That facility was not well-attended, and it was difficult pulling ourselves away from an older gentleman who appeared to be the manager of the museum and wanted to let us know ALL about it..

We drove to the nearest city, Moncton, partly because Costco has a store there.  It had the look of a stateside Costco, but Nancy was frustrated because many of her favorite items in the Santa Cruz store were not available in that one.

We did have a nice lunch at a French restaurant in Moncton.  New Brunswick borders the province of Quebec, and even though everyone speaks English here, all the signs are bilingual (English and French).

In Canada we have to deal with some changes in standards and measures.  Instead of US dollars, we have Canadian dollars, each of which is worth about 75 US cents.  Instead of miles of travel distance, we have kilometers, each of which equals around six-tenths of a mile.  Instead of gallons of gasoline (and other liquids), we have liters, each of which equals just over a quarter of a gallon.

We filled up our motorhome today with unleaded regular gas at C$1.26/liter (US$3.78/gallon) . It took 209.3 liters (54.3 gallons) and it cost us 290 Canadian dollars (205 US dollars).  We get a bit over six miles per gallon, so the higher prices north of the border hurt.  (This is not a Prius we're driving.)

We have now crossed into the province of Nova Scotia (New Scotland), which looks to me like the big sky country of Montana, with beautiful cloud formations above horizon-wide forested vistas.  Our campsite is in the town of Hilden and presents the same communication difficulties as Hillsborough did.  That is, internet access is spotty at best.  Our phone service is with Verizon, and we are able to make calls in Canada, but no longer can we raise the internet on our phones and certainly can't use them as hot spots for our computer.  Both of our last two campgrounds did provide wifi to its customers - but much of the time that wifi was and is dead in the water.

We are still able to receive satellite television signals and thus can watch TV.  But we'll have to wait until we go south of the border for streaming video.

I will continue trying to post updates to the blog.  Admittedly, our adventures in Canada so far have been few and seldom, but I'll be using poor internet access as my primary excuse for the slow posting schedule.  And in fact it is awfully difficult to transfer photos from my phone to our computer and to publish new chapters under these circumstances.

A while back, when Nancy searched TripAdvisor for things to do in Hilden, where we are now, it came up totally blank - a bad sign.  But it's possible that we'll find hidden treasures here.  Things should pick up when we drive over a bridge onto Prince Edward Island and settle down in a campground outside Charlottetown, which is a fair-sized city..