Our campground is about 30 minutes drive west from Fredericton, the province’s capital, but the drive into town is beautiful so we don’t mind at all. If we stayed closer to the city, the campsites would be much more expensive, so here we stay. The goals for our first day going into Fredericton was to explore the visitor’s center, get cash for paying for our campsite, and get a broad picture of the province and what we wanted to see.
When we first stopped at the visitor’s center, the volunteer was on her lunch break so we picked out many of the brochures that looked interesting to us—and were in English. We really had wanted to talk to someone who could give us an overview of the province since we really didn’t know anything about it.
So we walked to a Starbucks a couple of blocks away so we could start looking over our brochures.
As we were starting to spread out and organize our brochures, a nice man sat down next to us and asked if we were visiting.
Ken recommended this book as a good reference for New Brunswick. We went to the bookstore he told us about, but they were sold out.
We came back to the visitor’s center a little while later to ask for a referral for a cheeseburger since it was National Cheeseburger Day! She sent us to 540 Kitchen & Bar just down the street and also gave us a free pass for parking in the public lots and on the street since we were visitors. What a welcoming act for the city.
currency
Before we left on this trip we checked with our bank (Wells Fargo) and our credit card provider (USAA) about how to use them with a different currency. You probably know the answers, but we wanted to verify. For the bank, we could use our debit card for cash and expenses, but would have a $5 charge each time we used it. For the credit card, the provider would figure out the exchange ($1 Canadian = $.75 American).
When we arrived at the campground we saw the sign on the office that we needed to pay in cash, so we called the owner and asked how much our fee would be for our stay so we could get enough cash.
When in town, we stopped at a local bank and got cash so easily.
The tellers were so helpful, and traded some bills for coins so we could park across the street since we didn’t know yet that we’d be getting free parking from the volunteer at the visitor’s center.
Aren’t the bills pretty?
road signs
One of our first observations when we entered Canada (the first was the beautiful landscape) was that the road signs were both in English and French, and that many of the signs on the highway are pictures rather than words. We’ll talk more about the English/French connection in a future post.
highway sign 
in town sign
We’ll tour the Historic Garrison District in the next post.
