Notes & Tips

U.S. vs Canada Costs

All camping and fuel costs provided on this Web site are in U.S. Dollars (USD) after calculating the exchange rate for the Canadian Dollar (CAD). Other costs noted on the Web site—such as laundry, shower, museum, excursion, mass transit tickets, etc.—are in CAD.

Speeds & Distances

All speeds are noted in kilometers per hour (kph) because that is what is used in Canada. Generally, 80 kph = 50 mph and 100 kph = 62 mph. Distances are also measured in kilometers in Canada, but this site offers data in terms of mileage. Except the route maps provided in the Itinerary pages are shown in kilometers. There are roughly 1.6 kilometers in a mile.

Photography

Screen grabs of route maps and satellite images are sourced from Google for strictly non-commercial purposes.

All other photos on this site are copyright Ark-n-Tina 2017.

Exchange Rates

Monitor the USD-CAD exchange closely. During summer 2017, the USD started out strong relative to the Canadian currency (buying about 1,36 CAD) and steadily declined throughout the summer (to about 1,20 CAD). We monitored the exchange rate with a simple Google query.

Credit Cards

We paid most of our expenses with a credit card that (1) earns cash-back on every transaction; and (2) carries NO foreign transaction fees. Check out the exchange rate we received on each credit card transaction on the Statistics Page.

Cash

You will need a source of cash. If you have an ATM card free of withdrawal and foreign transaction fees, then use that. Check with your financial institution. Credit Unions may offer better terms. We, however, opted to exchange USD for CAD on the U.S. side of the border, because our first campground outside of Montreal accepted cash only for payment. We found an exchange bureau in the Mall in Plattsburgh New York just off I-87 which offered 1,360 CAD for $1,000 USD. The official exchange rate at the time was 1,37. We've since learned that our home bank offers *free* cash exchange, although it takes 1 to 2 weeks for the foreign currency to be shipped to our branch. Incidentally, that 1,360 CAN was sufficient for the entire summer. NOTE: Canadians do not use pennies, so they round up or down to the nearest 5 cents. Sometimes this works in your favor, sometimes not. Don't sweat it.

Language

In most cases, our English tongue was sufficient for communicating with business owners and their employees in Quebec and in Acadian New Brunswick. Younger people (college and high-school-aged), especially, spoke fluent English and they happen to run all the grocery cash registers and most of the national and provincial park entrance stations and information centers during summer. That said, a few middle-aged campground owners did not speak English, although understood at least a little bit. Our best ally was the Google Translate App on our phone . . . you can download the entire French-English dictionary so that you can use it offline. You will also want to familiarize yourself with certain French camping terms, like your RV type and length (for example, foot = "pied"), water and sewer, free showers, laundry, etc. We did not know ANY of these words on our first day, but within 2 weeks through repetitive exposure to signs in campgrounds, we had effortlessly and automatically internalized them. DON'T LET A LACK OF FRENCH KEEP YOU FROM EMBARKING ON THIS TRIP! Also, you'll find New Brunswick to be truly bilingual...everybody seems to speak at least English and French, and a great many others speak one or more First Nations languages and/or Acadian French.

Fuel

The cost and availability of fuel was not the least bit a factor. Diesel was available in most villages, and certainly every 60 miles or so you can find diesel. While Canadians pay by the liter rather than the gallon, our calculations after currency exchange showed that we paid on average 30 to 60 cents per gallon more than we would have in the U.S. Not an insignificant sum, but not the $5.00/gallon horror show some Canadians we met from Ontario and Alberta last winter described to us.

Traffic

Ha! Outside the Montreal metropolitan area, traffic was pretty much not a factor. Some miles north of Quebec City, the highways become single-lane roads, with passing lanes for steeper or longer uphill grades. Truckers, RV'ers, and motorcyclists are the predominant users of the route, and most motorists obey the speed limit within a kph or two. Summertime is construction time, but you won't wait more than 5 or 10 minutes where a stretch of highway is flagged for alternating one-way traffic flow. Just to be sure, you can check Quebec's road conditions website.

Roadside Assistance

Make sure you have a roadside assistance service that works in Canada. We used ours an inconceivable three times during the summer: once for a tire blowout, another for locking ourselves out of our tow vehicle, and a third for a stuck slide-out that we correctly diagnosed had an easy fix but wanted expert assistance to resolve in case we were wrong.

Camping Availability

Except for the National Park campgrounds, one Provincial Park campground, and potentially *all* campgrounds around holidays (see below), advanced reservations were not needed. We generally called commercial campgrounds the day before arrival to book a site, although we by and large stuck to week days. If a campground was booked, as happened once or twice, we called another nearby, usually in the same village or maybe another 10 to 20 miles further up the road. The Forillon National Park campground is perhaps the most difficult to book, and we got in by monitoring for cancellations on a daily basis beginning about a month prior to arrival. Quebec's stunningly beautiful and imminently hike-able and kayak-able Gaspésie Provincial Park with campground, in the interior of the Peninsula, was fully booked with no cancellations. Therefore, we booked a commercial park on the coast in Saint-Anne-des-Monts, about a 45 minute drive from the park entrance.

Tourist Offices

During your first days in Canada, do seek out a tourist office. Of course, Montreal and Quebec City have centrally located tourists offices. But we found that most villages have pretty nice tourist offices, too. You can get a boat load of free maps and brochures, and regional guides. The main thing to look out for are free camping guides for the province and/or region you plan to visit. Both the Quebec and New Brunswick camping guides were 100-paged glossy magazines, published in both English and French editions, with "Summer 2017" indicated prominently somewhere on the cover. You can get culinary and adventure guides at tourist offices, as well.

Holidays

Holidays present (not insurmountable) challenges to RV'ers who are winging it without reservations. Summer being short and perfect temperature is, itself, a 3-month holiday of sorts. On the whole, therefore, the Parks Canada campgrounds and the campground at Quebecs' Parc National de la Gaspésie were fully booked, and the Parks Canada campgrounds we got into was from diligently monitoring the websites for cancellations in the weeks prior to our arrival to an area. That said, there are so many commercial RV campgrounds in the Gaspé Peninsula that we felt perfectly comfortable winging it for all other holidays.

With one major exception! Beginning the end of July through the start of August, Quebec has an official 2-week Summer Construction Holiday with an official website showing this and other important holidays. During this 2-week period it will be difficult to find a campsite. We lucked out by seizing a cancelled 6-day reservation in Forillon National Park, and getting one of the last commercial spaces for 4 days in Percé. With 2 more days of the 2-week holiday remaining, we thought we would easily find a site along the south coast of the Peninsula. We were wrong. We managed to find a site all the way near the New Brunswick border, but it was less than optimum.

Internet Access

Most commercial campgrounds offered free or daily-rate paid internet access. Some public campgrounds also offered free internet access. These campground systems ranged from really good (Kouchibuguac National Park, thanks to our campsite location) to awful. We brought our own T-mobile hotspot, which found a Rogers or Bell connection literally everywhere we tried no matter how far off the highway we roamed, and we enjoyed the same rate and generally the same speeds we get in the USA. We had read anecdotes from other users reporting in internet forums that T-mobile would severely throttle or even cancel your account after 2 months roaming in Canada, but we never experienced any issues.

Telephony

Make sure you have a phone that works in Canada and allows calls both within Canada and across the border to USA numbers. Unlike many countries in Europe and elsewhere, you will likely find it cost-prohibitive to purchase a sim card and voice/data plan in Canada for 3 months use, but technology availability and tariffs change rapidly so it could be worth some quick investigation during the planning phase of any trip into Canada. We used Google's Project Fi, which charges a flat-rate for international cell-based calls or no charge at all for wifi based calls (Project Fi phones have built in VOIP capabilities). Interestingly enough, Canada still has public pay phones scattered about the landscape, and we occasionally used these cost-free to book campgrounds with toll-free numbers.

Climate

Bear in mind, we traveled the Gaspé Peninsula in June, July, and part of August, and the New Brunswick coasts in August and early September. We rarely endured very hot days or very cold nights. We used our heater maybe two or three times, our AC about the same. Most daytime highs were in the low to mid 70s, most nighttime lows in the low 50s. It was hard to find a do-nothing-laundry day, because it almost never rained. Locals told us this was considered unusual as many of the salmon rivers on the Peninsula were not running high enough to support kayaking and other riparian entertainments.

Ice Cream

Once you are in Quebec, especially north of Quebec City, check the local supermarkets and epiceries for Coaticook ice cream. A tasting of the sugar maple (sucre d'érable) is by far one of the more sublime experiences in life, although the other flavors we tried were outstanding, as well. Otherwise, be on the lookout for maple soft serve ice cream dipped in a coating of your choice...each town has its own "dippery" and is usually worth seeking out.