Our friend Brian left Calgary shortly after we did. Tired of the downtown working life and the untenable commutes, he just stopped. Sold his house, bought a camper, struck up a blog called My Time, My Way, and hit the road.

He left with no big plans other than to tour the continent. Brian is a very personable and curious man – he will pick someone out of a crowd and decide for himself that he needs to talk to THAT person. And then he does just that. As such, he has an incalculable number of stories from his travels that he carries with him.

What he didn’t do was try to foresee too much into the future and lived on whim. And he never could have known, upon leaving Calgary in August of 2011, that he would end up in New Brunswick. That he would become a fisherman and soon captain his own boat. That he’d live solo in a tiny trailer, that he’d work the lobster season, the clamming season, and then create his own season of house-painting.

Nor did he probably know how happy he would be to do it all.

Not that it’s an easy life by any means (ask Brian to show you the pose used for clamming), but Pete and I both, being fully appreciative of the desire for change from a corporate life, could see the potential of what Brian was enjoying. It may not be a simply carefree life at all, but it could be a very good one.

On the day we met Brian, we were on our way from Grand Manan to Saint John. We stopped at New River Beach and enjoyed a breakfast picnic we had packed; our consumption of it delayed by a panicky Pete. A dense fog, wispy at its edges, hung low over the long stretch of beach. Pete wanted to ignore the meal and go straight to shooting, and Brian snickered at his insistence that he had to capture it now before the fog lifted. This is New Brunswick, Brian explained, the fog always comes back.

He wasn’t wrong. Over the course of several hours, we caught up on each others news, swapped travel stories, and strolled along the water’s edge while the fog lifted, descended, and lifted again. This was a pattern that would repeat itself often during our two weeks in the province, and for these two landlocked Albertans who had never seen such a thing, it was fascinating.

We talked about the lives we used to have – I originally met Brian because he had been working with my sister – and none of our offices were far from each other in downtown Calgary. Can you believe those lives now? That this is where we are compared to where we were? I couldn’t, and neither could he.

Brian could have chosen to live anywhere, really, but he chose New Brunswick. It was surprising to me when he settled here, without ever having been, based on everything that we’d heard about the province before. Our expectations on arrival, dictated by years of hearing nothing very notable about the province, weren’t extremely high.

It is our job, and our nature after seven years of travel, to be a bit judge-y of those places we visit. It’s not often we come up with a resounding negative perception (let’s be honest people, travel is awesome), but it’s also not often that we feel overwhelming positivity. And if there is one definitive quality that Pete and I critique every place on, whether explicitly or totally subliminally, is liveability. I would say that in our seven years of traveling, the places that make our worldwide “liveable list” amount to less than a dozen. While a two week visit may not be adequate time to pass sound judgment, we still both say that New Brunswick is now on the list.

We admit to scouting real estate and finding some shockingly good value compared to the rest of the country. (There’s a whole island near Grand Manan on sale for just a cool million Canadian pesos. Okay, so maybe that one is a stretch goal for now, but still, what a steal.) We were told that Saint John is a hotbed of innovation and thus maybe a perfect place from which to base our virtual businesses. Pete loved Fredericton; I felt more partial to the stretch of land between Moncton and the Hopewell Rocks. I want a bit remote yet still accessible. I want to watch the tidal bore come in every day. I want to be near the dramatic coast shaped by the Fundy tides.