Roads to Remember: The Insider's Guide to New Brunswick

Randall White is the author of Voice of Region: On the Long Journey to
Senate Reform in Canada, Too Good to Be True: Toronto in the 1920s, and
Global Spin: Probing the Globalization Debate.

As many readers of New Brunswick newspapers know, Colleen Thompson has
visited most of the major tourist spots world-wide and has written
informatively and engagingly about them. In Roads to Remember, she
writes about her own province.

Clearly aimed at luring visitors to New Brunswick, this book is one
that travelers should read first before setting out. Thompson has
included almost all the myths and generalizations that her fellow New
Brunswickers would recognize, and readers quickly become aware that she
knows her province first-hand.

Mind you, she has biases. While her hometown of Fredericton is covered
in 32 pages, the much larger Saint John gets only 23. The residents of
St. Andrews, a well-known resort town, will be surprised to learn it
“belongs to fishermen” (actually, only five still use the local
wharf as their base).

When it comes to assessing places to stay, Thompson doesn’t pull her
punches: Fredericton’s Lord Beaverbrook Hotel “serves pricey but
forgettable food”; St. Andrews’s much-touted Algonquin has “iffy
dining, although the food looks good”; Moncton’s Crystal Palace Best
Western Hotel is “not soundproof—you can hear conversations in other
rooms”; but she would book a room at Woodstock’s Queen Victoria B&B
“just for the breakfast.” Le Fief in Edmundston gets 18 glowing
lines.

Roads to Remember is not the kind of “handy reference” one can
easily refer to while driving along New Brunswick roads—it’s too
chatty and filled with fascinating history and local folklore. And while
maps appear throughout the text, motorists would more likely consult
road maps. And there are no illustrations. But the book is a good
resource. The New Brunswick tourist department should hand it out free
to visitors entering the province or at least make sure copies are
available at each B&B.