We moved to the area in a very middle class neighborhood when I was young, around the same time as the author of TFA. Like you said, what I saw was a lot of families had family summer homes on the Cape or one of the NH lakes. Everyone but the Dad would pick up for the summer, and then he'd work during the week & then go to the summer home on the weekend. But these weren't luxury homes by any stretch. These were small, often rustic, closer to shack than nice summer home. A place to sleep at night and not much more.

In the intervening decades, that's all changed. Today's summer homes are so much more different. I've seen a lot of those families I knew back then sell their homes over time. Developers scoop up several properties in a row and build some huge McMansion. So now these areas are the sort of wealthy person summer home people picture when the term is used.

- New Brunswick is very economically depressed and only has a few things of interest to your average tourist (primarily along/near the Bay of Fundy). It's about a 8hr drive just to get to Moncton from Boston.

- Nova Scotia - Also struggling economically in many areas outside of Halifax. Halifax is 11hrs out of Boston and what's arguably the most interesting scenery in the province (up in Cape Breton) is more like 13hrs.

It's also cold much of the year so the optimal tourism season is short and even in the warm months it's often not that warm (and the ocean water certainly never is).

Quebec:

- Quebec City is decently known and about 7hrs. The rest of the province besides that and MTL I agree are basically a mystery to most.

- That Maine is basically a remote wilderness along the Quebec border and has almost no land connections (and no good ones) makes exploring up beyond Quebec City less common than it seems like it should be. (Also no bridges over the St. Lawrence beyond Quebec City).

Were faster aircraft operating on this route at some point? Nowadays Icelandair says 5hr15min BOS->KEF and 5hr50min on the way back.

The sweet spot would have been 18-21 years old for a first trip imo

Quebec was a very different place until the Quiet Revolution (starting around 1960) and especially from 1930-1960. Quebec was deeply conservative and catholic. I think it's easy to look at Quebec and Canada now and think "why didn't I go there earlier," but places change. Your parents (who would have been making choices for you as a kid) probably wouldn't have thought of Quebec as a positive place to go for a vacation because of what it was through most of their lives (and maybe partly still was depending on exactly when we're talking about).

My parents would never consider living in the US South. It was a place of huge systemic racism and sexism.

I think the perception of the US South changed a lot in the 90s and 2000s. Bill Clinton won a bunch of southern states. George W Bush was pushing "compassionate conservatism" which many people (including myself) might criticize, but it didn't have the same hatred of generations past. Barak Obama won North Carolina. Sarah Palin's take on gay rights was that they shouldn't be allowed to marry, but no one was talking about taking any benefits away. North Carolina tried to ban trans people from bathrooms in 2016 and had to backtrack after a huge boycott costing them billions (including the NCAA basketball championship). Roe v Wade was the law of the land for decades. It might not seem as good as New York or Boston to people wanting that, but it didn't seem the same as the 1960s.

Fast forward a decade and women are dying from pregnancies that aren't viable (but doctors are afraid to terminate), trans people are getting banned from public life, and racism and sexism are coming back with a vengeance. The South today is different from the place it was in the 90s or 2000s - and the South of the 90s and 2000s was different from the South of the 60s and 70s.

In terms of the Maritimes, they've always been small and kinda hard to get to. The population is under 2M today combined. How would you get to PEI? There was a ferry until 1997 and now there's a bridge, but that shows how disconnected it was. It's a 10 hour drive today. It's longer to Nova Scotia. The largest city in New Brunswick is 80,000 people. So I think there's a certain "why would you go there." That's not to say they're bad places, but I could say: why did you never go to Allentown, PA? It's a 6 hour drive and a city of 130,000. Why not go to Scranton, PA? The Maritimes are definitely farther than DC. I like Nova Scotia, but getting there involves a ferry, ferries cost money, before the modern day you'd need to exchange currency which was costly and a pain, and then what are you doing in Nova Scotia? Mostly the same stuff you could do in places more convenient. It's a nice place, but there's no spectacular draw. DC is the nation's capital with so many museums and monuments. NYC is NYC. But you didn't say "Wilmington, Delaware was a major destination for us and we could have gone to Moncton, New Brunswick instead." No. For road and train vacations, you went for convenient places (within New England) or major destinations (NYC and DC, two of the most important cities on the planet). Yes, Montreal is a major world city and reasonably close to Boston, but the Maritimes have one city over 100,000 people and it's a pain to get to by car/train. Again, nothing wrong with these places, but I can see why there'd be a much larger inclination toward larger and much more convenient cities like NYC and DC.

EDIT: oh, and I think Quebec became a bit of a destination for young adults as the US raised its drinking age to 21 and things like that can certainly reorient a generation's thinking toward a region. It was a destination used to have fun during a formative part of many people's lives and that could create long-lasting positive memories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAirpass

It has a personal memoir style that I like