8 day trip to NB - Moncton was the starting and end point, two days in the new Wyndham in Dieppe and the last two at the Delta Beauséjour in town. We were visiting family in St. Quentin, and toured a big chunk of New Brunswick.
Starting off with impressions of Moncton, and keep in mind all of these subjective impressions are based off of totally insufficient time to really know the area, and based solely on where our feet, car happened to travel.
Most of NB didnt' seem to have a big foodie/restaurant/coffee/alcohol culture, but in every place we went there were good restaurants and the local home cooked foods were great (crouton, salted herbs, etc.).
We went twice to Tide and Boar in Moncton - very good, only two in house brewed beers, but both good.
There wasn't any liquor stores at all downtown and the town shut down pretty early, but wasn't a big deal as we weren't looking to party all night.
While Moncton was the least picturesque of the places we visited, it was still nice, so that's saying something. Obviously a booming city, not sure why it needs to be developing a suburb like Dieppe so rapidly or with the lower density there, but still, it's well laid out and traffic is minimal. In fact we found everywhere the traffic was basically non-existent. Even on the highways, it felt deserted, amazing if you don't want to be stuck in traffic and who does. And going off tangent, the roads from Moncton north are terrible, potholes the size of small countries all over the place, in fact we hit one on the 180 (I know..but they said that road was fine). It dented the rim, flattened the tire, and we limped along, filling the rental car tire with air every five km before it flattened out. It took us about 90 minutes to get to the peak of Mount Carleton before we finally got cell service late at night, and a tow truck had to come all the way from Bathurst to tow us to St. Quentin. Some locals did stop at first and offered to help, we thought we could make it at first.. and then we were pretty much deserted with a vehicle coming only every half hour or so. Good times.
We did find that from St. Quentin back to Moncton the roads were just fine.
Back to Moncton - friendly people, really friendly, helpful, down to earth, no pretension. Cars stopping to let you in even when they had no reason to. Maybe it's like the Calgary of NB, can do attitude, but with zero bravado. It seemed in all the stores French or English was spoken, not even sure you could get hired unless you were bilingual? Made a quick stop to the main mall in Dieppe to get groceries, it was here I really noticed the bilingual nature - nice mall for a smaller city, heck for any city if you're into malls.
The main strip was enjoyable to walk along, felt like you could feel at home pretty quick here and know most of the shop owners, etc. Tons of churches, great churches. Some of the historical homes right by downtown are amazing, and incredibly priced. Even if Moncton is not the jewel of NB, hard to argue with the lifestyle you could have with affordable heritage homes right downtown, or a huge plot of land in the country a 15-20 minute drive from town.
CATHÉDRALE NOTRE-DAME DE L’ASSOMPTION
Downtown
Don't ask me how I missed taking a picture of the tallest office building in town.. I'll have to check my files for that!
More to come, including PEI, Shediac, Bathurst, St. Quentin, Grand Falls, Fredericton, St. John, Hopewell Rocks, etc.