Objects of Our Affection- the hidden stories on old postcards.

It is always surprising to me what survives the passage of time…

Recently, I have been going through my own belongings accumulated over the last fifty or so years; slowly I have been sorting through possessions which spanned thirty years of having a family at home.

But how, I wonder, do we decide what to keep and what to part with?

Image of One cent stamps on postcards

In what must have been a desperate need by my maternal grandmother to keep what she thought of as precious but also intimately private from entering the public domain, she burnt almost all her family photographs. The cupboard in the oak sideboard of my grandmother’s house, full of papers and photographs, was a forbidden zone to me as a child. There was one exception; on one rare occasion my grandmother allowed me to “sort and tidy” the contents of that cupboard, an endeavor which I took great pride in, as it made me feel so grown up.

 There are, no doubt, many more gaps in our family history; if we were to measure that history by the family photographs that remain in circulation between us all we would discover the gaps that we ourselves had created- editing our family lives as we decide which photos to keep and which to throw out. What I have noticed though as I am sorting through my own personal belongings is not just how patchy the photographic record of my life is-bursts of photos taken in some years and then nothing at all in others, but also just how few letters and postcards I have kept over the years.

I remember that cupboard of my grandmother’s and the drawer to the right of the fireplace which brimmed over with envelopes; you had to push the papers down with one hand and push the drawer closed with the other before all the letters spilled out! There were definitely postcards in amongst those letters too; lots of them as I recall, though none have survived the passage of time.

 

image of old postcard of Canso harbour

 I do have a small collection of postcards though. But these postcards, with scenes of Canso and Guysborough are relics of other people’s lives. They were purchased by my family mainly through e-bay; no doubt having previously reached the public domain in auctions and estate sales, in exactly the way my own grandmother feared her own might be sifted and sorted through had she not first burnt them. My own interest was in the history of the Canso area, being a “come from away,” everything about the area intrigued and enchanted me. I loved looking at those pictures of Canso harbor, imagining it in the winter covered in ice or in the summer with the fishing fleet spread across the horizon. But now, it is the writing on the back of these postcards which intrigues me just as much.

 

image of old postcard of Hazell Hill, Nova Scotia

 

My all time favorite postcard though is a black and white photo of Hazel Hill, (the houses on Front St. for the Commercial Cable Company officers remain today as one of the most unchanged streetscapes in Nova Scotia).

 But it is what is written on the back of the postcard that makes it special to me. On the back of the postcard, “Ada” writes to Miss Louis Nicholas of Mahone Bay, and declares,
 

“I am having an elegant time.

Mr. A was here

to meet when I arrived, he

left yesterday for Banks

so its not quite as

pleasant for me. Hope

your all well.” 

This postcard charmed my own mother so much that we started using the phrases, “having an elegant time” or “so it’s not quite as pleasant for me,” when we wrote cards to each other!

We have often thought about Ada and wondered who she was. Who had Ada meant by “Mr. A?” Were they courting at the time this postcard was written? Was Ada writing to her sister or a close friend? And did Ada and Mr. A eventually marry or was “Mr. A” lost at sea as he set out on one of his treacherously dangerous fishing trips to the “Banks” ?

Thinking of getting a (tourism) website makeover?

 

The competitive wooing of online visitors has suddenly changed the need for an online presence from a necessity to an essential.

Three years ago, as the owner of a bed and breakfast, Whitman Wharf House Bed and Breakfast, at the edge of the world in Canso, Nova Scotia, I started business with the premise that I expected most of my business to come from online bookings.  

Despite being an online advocate for the tourism industry, even I have been astonished at how quickly it is evolving and also the increased competitiveness of tourism sites. The knock-on effect of constantly creating content for my own site is that I now have zero tolerance for poorly maintained sites, or sites that are difficult to navigate when I am the customer.

What am I looking for on a tourism website?

1. I am looking for websites that deliver not just the usual information on room, rates, etc. but are visually enticing and give a glimpse into what’s going on there, who’s doing what and what’s new.
2. I am definitely on the hunt for interesting photographs and this is what is sadly missing on a lot of websites. 
3. What I am not looking for is uniformity. I have checked out a number of websites lately that have clearly just come away from having an expensive makeover only to find that the same two Adirondack chairs are sitting there on the home page!
4. Authenticity is critical. My answer in creating an “authentic feel” to a tourism website is to take the photos myself rather than relying on a web designer’s selection from a stock photo file.
5. The other thing is that I want the photos to tell the story, convey the emotion and describe the experience. Even in the past year I have noticed a real shift in the way websites are becoming much more visually oriented with more photos and graphics and much less text.

How do I create photos for my website?

 

1. I use a free download, “IrfanView” from www.irfanview.com for simple cropping, colour and light adjustments, and for resizing images.
2. I find that photos look better on the website if they are lighter rather than darker, and I increase the color saturation levels by about +50 for more colorful images.
3. More recently I have experimented with banner style photo cropping, as above. If you like the look of a photo on a website and want to use that size, in pixels or inches, then right click on it, go to “properties” on the drop menu, and it will display the image information. You can then use this information in the Irfanview program to customize your photos, by going to “Image” on the tool bar, and select the  resize/resample on the drop down menu. Now you can resize your photo to the preferred size, entering the number of pixels or inches to give you a banner size or a square, or a more traditional shape.

Getting the (web design) help I need!

Heather Holm from HolmPage Productions, http://www.holmpage.com has been my web designer for the past two years. During that time we have established a wonderful working relationship as well as friendship. I value her advice on design and graphics but it is a mutual relationship of educating each other in the areas that we each have expertise in that has made it such a valuable partnership. I craft the content and Heather artfully displays it, enhances the graphics, gives technical advice on new ideas, and generally ensures that my website looks the way it does.

I have also been dabbling in blogging software since last year with www.cansoBreeze.com, an e-zine on “wordpress,” a blogging platform, from www.wordpress.com.

Switching from an e-zine style to blogging in “Elizabeth’s blog on the ocean,” is teaching me how to adapt my writing style, but in both cases I am using all those image editing skills on Irfanview.

Photos are not just a great way to entice visitors to convert from a “browser” to a “purchaser” they are also a great way of introducing new content onto your website providing that all the alt and meta tags are put in- something that the webcrawlers love and keep coming back for, which of course translates into greater exposure for your website by the web search engines and more web traffic.

Tourist “spotting” now a nationwide phenomenon

Tourism operators wondering how the 2008 season may be shaping up may have seen the reports below from the CBC and The Canadian Press. 

The reports show that the March 2008 figures for foreign visitors to Canada are 12.4% lower than a year ago.

While visitors from the US make up a large proportion of this decline, there are declining numbers from Germany,  but gains from Italy and the Netherlands. The number of overseas visits to Canada fell by 3 per cent in March 2008 to 384,000.

With one in ten jobs related to the tourism sector in Canada, the tourism figures are beginning to make national headlines. Operators, on the other hand, have experienced the challenges of doing business in an ever increasingly competitive market ever since 9/11. 

“Tourist spotting,” rather like bird spotting, has been a local phenomenon in small coastal communities, like Canso in Nova Scotia, for some time. This sport is now apparently becoming a national phenomenon as gas prices and our exchange rate relative to European currencies and to the US dollar have changed foreign visitors’ perception of their purchasing power.

After SARS, Toronto’s tourism sector was decimated. With that hardened 20-20 vision of the SARS experience, Toronto has re-emerged as an industry leader in the tourism sector, positioning itself at the luxury end of the spectrum and being unabashed that their hotel rates now have the eighth highest ADR (average daily rate) worldwide.

In Nova Scotia, our learning curve may be a little flatter. Operators are confronted with the anomaly of having to position themselves between two much more divergent markets than Toronto experiences, the domestic and the foreign.

Despite the tourism research findings that pricing is apparently the fifth or sixth consideration in selecting a tourism destination, experienced market researchers in other industries make allowances for the mismatch between what consumers say they do and what they actually do.

So although people may answer a questionnaire with answers that indicate that a number of other factors are more important than price, when it actually comes to making their reservations, price may suddenly take a flying leap towards the top of the list.

This discrepancy is much more likely to have a direct impact on the domestic than on the foreign market: the domestic market is essentially a fixed entity while the foreign market comprises a constantly changing profile of various countries depending on their relative economic success in any given year.

The domestic market may just turn out to be a whole lot more price sensitive than we have been led to believe it is, just at a time when the tourism marketing mantra is “go luxury, go niche.’

The “propensity to spend,” issue is also a little more nuanced. While the propensity to spend may depend more on the visitor’s experiential rating than on the visitor’s gross income, it does assume that you have already managed to lure the visitor to your destination.

 

Referenced articles:

CBC – The number of foreign visitors to Canada in March was the lowest since record-keeping began in 1972, Statistics Canada said Tuesday.

About 2.26 million visits to this country were recorded that month, down 12.6 per cent from the same month a year earlier.

A big drop in American visitors was behind the decline. Only 730,000 same-day car trips were made by U.S. motorists in March. That was down 2.5 per cent from the month before and a 24 per cent plunge from a year ago as the price of gas, a high Canadian dollar and a weak U.S. economy kept Americans close to home.

The number of overseas visits fell by 3 per cent to 384,000.

“Travel declined in eight of Canada’s top 12 overseas markets, with the strongest decreases in travel from Mexico, Germany and Hong Kong,” said Statistics Canada.

Canadians, on the other hand, were showing no reluctance to travel, as the number of out-of-country trips rose in every category.

Canadians made 2.1 million same-day car trips to the U.S. in March, up 1.5 per cent from February and an increase of 9.5 per cent from year-ago levels.

The total number of trips to the U.S. rose to 3.8 million.

 ”The level of Canadian travel to the United States observed in the past six months has been the highest since 1998,” Statistics Canada reported.

 Overnight plane trips to the U.S. hit a new record high for the fourth month in a row.

 Travel by Canadians to countries other than the U.S. also hit a record high

 

The Canadian Press – OTTAWA – Travel to Canada hit a record low for the fifth straight month in March, following big declines in both same-day car trips from the United States and the number of visitors from overseas nations.

Statistics Canada reports foreign visitors made 2.3 million trips to Canada in March, the lowest since record keeping started in 1972.

That’s a one per cent decline from February, and a 12.4 per cent drop from a year earlier.

Meanwhile, the number of Canadian trips abroad rose 1.4 per cent to almost 4.5 million, the vast majority (85 per cent) to the United States.

U.S. residents made only 730,000 same-day car trips to Canada in March, down 2.5 per cent from the previous month.

Same-day car travel to Canada has fallen by 41.1 per cent in two years.

Overseas travellers to Canada made 384,000 trips in March, down three per cent.

Travel declined in eight of Canada’s top 12 overseas markets, with the strongest decreases in travel from Mexico, Germany and Hong Kong.

There were gains in visitors from India, Italy and the Netherlands.

Overall, Canadians made 3.8 million trips to the United States in March, up 1.6 per cent from February. Canadian travel to the United States in the past six months has been the highest since 1998.

Same-day car travel to the United States increased 1.5 per cent to 2.1 million trips, while overnight car travel rose 1.9 per cent to 991,000 trips.

Overnight plane trips to the United States set a new record high for the fourth straight month.

Canadian travel to countries other than the United States increased 0.4 per cent to a record 670,000 – the 10th month in the past year in which a new record high was set.

Frommer’s on Canso and The Flat Earth Society

I like to check travel books and websites to see what they say about the Canso area. I was somewhat taken aback when I found this on Frommer’s website:

“Way out on the eastern tip of Nova Scotia’s mainland is the end-of-the-world town of Canso (pop. 1,200). It’s a rough-edged fishing and oil-shipping town, often windswept and foggy.”

There are a couple of inaccuracies. Canso fortunately does not list oil-shipping as one of its claim to fame. The population is now 900-ish & falling (but that’s a story for a different day). However it was the reference to the “end-of-the-world,” that offended me the most.

It wasn’t until I had a chance to think it over that I realized that the description is entirely accurate. This is the furthest point east on mainland North America and thus the first point struck by the rising sun on the mainland. Whether for that reason or not, we are blessed with stunning sunrises. This time of day is is also enhanced during fishing season by the movements of the lobster boats through the harbour. It is a fact that has not escaped the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (of Beatles fame for those of you of an age to remember!), who has bought one of the Canso Islands from where he intends to broadcast messages of peace!

Much of the coastline is very reminiscent of the coast of North Yorkshire, near where I grew up, and has much of the same feel. The frequent light fog and drizzle, sea-frets my Mother would call them, are also almost comforting in their familiarity.

The coast is certainly rugged and sometimes harsh, as the Atlantic Ocean often is in comparison to her Pacific sister. There is nothing standing in the way of the wind from the ocean until you reach Europe. Indeed if you look directly east the next piece of land you would see, if you could see that far, is the west coast of France somewhere around Bordeaux. Looking out across the water though, it sometimes does feel as though there is no more land out there. According to Maritime mythology the Flat Earth Society believes that one of the corners of the Earth is in Newfoundland. Certainly here in Canso you can believe you are standing on a boundary running south from that corner – on the edge of the world!

J.Measures

 

Stan Rogers Folk Festival- a pilgrimage of sorts.

This year the Stan Rogers Folk Festival is being held on July 4th, 5th and 6th July 2008. 

This is a week-end to really experience the Atlantic music culture as well as to discover some surprising new music from various parts of the world. It is a smorgasborg of music from folk to jazz and everything in between. This year is the eleventh year the festival has been running.

 The Stan Rogers Folk Festival is now for many people a well established pilgrimage that transforms Canso from a small town to one which hosts thousands of visitors. Rain or shine, snow or hail the music plays on.