I flew to Toronto this week. One flight out, two flights (hello, bizarre sculpture in Calgary airport!) on the way back. While checking in at a terminal, uh, in the terminal, I glanced at the seat selection screen. There were plenty of other seats from which to choose. The seat next to me was empty on all three flights.
Julie was down at Granville Island today. It was a gorgeous day, and that place is usually teaming with tourists in the summer months. She was surprised how uncrowded the island was. She easily found parking.
We recently used Hotwire to book a four-star hotel in downtown Seattle for Gnomedex. The conference occurs over a weekend in August, surely a popular time of year for tourists visiting the city. We’re paying US $99 a night.
I know these are all isolated anecdotes, but they confirm what I’ve been reading over the past few months: fewer people are traveling shorter distances. Here’s some empirical evidence. Between March, 2008 and March, 2009, the Canadian Tourism Council reports an 11.5% reduction in the number of trips to and within Canada. That probably represents the entire profit margin for a lot of hotels, travel agencies and related services.
As a matter of curiosity, I checked which countries were showing the greatest decline in trips to Canada. The percentages reflect how many fewer visitors came in March, 2009 compared to March, 2008:
United Kingdom - 24%
Japan - 24%
South Korea - 23%
Mexico - 21%
Of course, most foreign visitors to Canada are from the US, where travel is only off 5.9% between March, 2008 and 2009.
In any case, I guess it’s all good news for the consumer, and pretty bad news for anybody in the travel industry.
Dave Gorman is a writer and comedian whom I admire. His recent blog post about visiting Kilkenny, Ireland for a gig reminded me of the two years we lived in that country:
On that walk I passed three girls in tears with broken heels, three girls being helped out of the gutter by angry men, four men being helped out of the gutter by angry girls, one couple drunkenly helping each other out of the gutter, two people throwing up, two sets of lads squaring up like rutting stags preparing for a you-want-some scrap that probably never transpired and one fella clutching a blood stained hanky to his face because, I assume, he’d found someone who actually did want some.
That could be downtown Dublin on any given Saturday night. We actually spent a weekend in Kilkenny during the Kilkenny Arts Festival in August, had a lovely time and didn’t see any of what Gorman describes. We saw Michael Ondaatje read, and had a nice, brief little chat with him when he signed the unexpectedly Canadian edition of The Cinnamon Peeler. We also saw a bad Stephen Berkoff play, and wandered around the splendid Kilkenny Castle.
We’re spending a couple of nights out in rural Texas–the so-called Hill Country–at the Inn Above Onion Creek. It’s this charming country inn with about eight rooms on 100 acres of rolling country. I went for a really nice walk this morning with the very spry three-legged dog that lives here. Part of it passed through a deciduous forest, which is a rare site for a west coaster like myself.
The Inn itself is comprised of a couple of large buildings and some outlying cabins. To the uneducated eye, they look like they’ve been on the property for at least a hundred years. In fact, it’s fairly new, but uses a tremendous amount of reclaimed materials. The doors, floorboards, fixtures and furniture all appear to date back to the early part of the century or earlier.
Here’s an unflattering photo of our room. It doesn’t convey any of the space’s charms. I find it hard to take good, truthful photos of interior spaces–but you can see that it’s full of period detail:
I wouldn’t claim that it’s a heritage building, but the aesthetic does kind of beg the question ‘what makes a house old?’ How much of a house must be ‘original’ for us to, informally, declare it a heritage building?
I’m reminded of the building that houses the Victoria Art Gallery, which is an odd chimera of a 19th century mansion, a modernist expansion in the fifties and a renovation a few years ago. Is still an old house?
I always feel a little existential when I’m in non-coastal cities and towns in the US. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s just the foreignness of not having an ocean that dominates part of the horizon? Or maybe its the highways which often bisect the towns? I felt the same way in Lake Tahoe years ago. Coincidentally, I quoted Merton there as well.
This is my first visit to Austin. To me, it feels kind of like the Calgary of the south. Or perhaps Calgary is the Austin of the north. Until we found the few boisterous blocks of 6th Street where all the action is, I was struck by how empty downtown Austin seemed. Two nights in a row we dined in half-empty restaurants in the centre of town. What do these establishments do when SXSW isn’t in town?
I haven’t had a lot of time to look around, but local two heritage buildings were highlights. The first is the Driskill Hotel, originally built in 1886. It’s in the Romanesque style, and reminded me a little of the Empress Hotel in Victoria. We had desert there. In what seems like a very southern tradition, the Driskill holds an annual pie bake-off, and the winning pie gets on the desert menu for the subsequent year.
This afternoon I saw the premier of Splinterheads, a charming if run-of-the-mill comedy at the historic Paramount Theater. It’s a gorgeous little theater built in 1915 (here are some photos), with a capacity of about 1300. It’s the prettiest cinema (I gather it’s also a live venue) that I’ve seen in years–it’s really a pity we don’t have more of these left on the west coast.
I don’t really feel like I’ve had the Texas experience yet. I’ve seen very few cowboy boots and hats (aside from those worn ironically by SXSW attendees), and haven’t heard much of that twangy accent which I expected. That, I gather, may be due to Austin’s status as the city that’s unlike the rest of the state. We’re spending a couple of nights outside of the city later in the week, so that experience may seem more genuine.
On an unrelated note, things have been quieter than usual around here because I, uh, broke the back end of this website. I’ll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say that my reach exceeded my grasp, and chaos ensued. Big thanks to local Vancouver SEO expert Kerry Morrison for digging around under the hood and straightening things out again.
UPDATE: Here are a few photos from our time in Texas:
We’re shortly off to South by Southwest, the big interactive, film and music conference in Austin, Texas. We’re there for eight or nine days, though we’re taking a little side trip into the countryside for a few days. I’ve never been to SXSW or Texas before, so there should be lots to discover.
The scope of the event is a bit daunting–more than 10,000 attendees, 108 film screenings, and hundreds of musical performances, panel discussions and parties. I’ve been paying attention to an unofficial SXSW blog and the Twitter search for ‘SXSWtip’ to try to get a handle on things. I’ve also been using this excellent web app from SCHED to assemble a schedule of what I plan to attend.
Posting may be light over the next week–we’ll see how it goes.
Some time last year, in some context, I’d mention the idea that Julie and I had to run a kind of TravelCamp in Vancouver. It would, I imagine, be in the mode of VinoCamp. That is, it would be an evening or day where enthusiastic travelers would come together to trade stories, tips and tricks about globetrotting. We’re thinking it would occur in Vancouver during the second half of 2009.
These events naturally attract the geeky and social media types, but I’d hope to corral some Normal Humans from the travel industry to participate as well.
The subject arose again today on Twitter, and a few people immediately expressed interest. So, as a kind of placeholder, I’ve set up a Google Group. It’s an announce-only group, and so will be very low-volume. You probably won’t receive more than six or eight messages from it. Once we have more details, I’ll set up a wiki or some other mechanism to solicit ideas and suggestions.
A couple of weeks ago we were at the Tsawassen ferry terminal, on our way back to Victoria. Due to a mechanical problem with one of the ferries, we faced a two-hour delay in departure. Julie and I wandered into the Tsawassen Quay Market, which is kind of a mini-mall situated between the vehicle lanes at the terminal.
I poked around with my iPhone, and eventually discovered that the Salt Spring Island Coffee outlet in the market was offering an open wifi network. We scored a table, purchased cookies and coffee, and set to work. The availability of internet access transformed that two-hour period from wasted to reasonably productive.
So, just a quick public thank-you to Salt Spring Island Coffee for making some wifi free and openly available at the ferry terminal.
On the other hand, I’ve abandoned all hope of having internet access on the ferry. I can’t imagine why they don’t offer it. My back-of-the-envelope math suggests that it would become an excellent revenue source in the first couple of years.
Every laptop-using traveler knows that walk. It’s the brisk trot of the security detail, scanning the surroundings not for threats, but for electrical outlets in an airport lounge.
In my experience, European airports are the worst. I defy you to try to find an available outlet in Heathrow. They’re under concealed floor plates, on the back side of columns and behind the stalls of credit card hucksters.
I rejoiced, then, to see these things in the Newark airport last week (click for the largesse action):
Hurray for Samsung
They’re ‘charging stations’, sponsored by Samsung (some background on Gizmodo). They have six or eight plugs, easily accessible at eye-level. As you can see, they’re branded with the Samsung name, and contain a little display case for showing off new Samsung stuff. They’re apparently in 15 airports across the US.
Hurray for Samsung! This is well-executed marketing. They’re delivering something of value to us just when we need it. The station doesn’t play audio or video ads, require registration or time out after 30 minutes of recharging.
The only addition I would have made was listing a specific URL on the station, or providing a little tear-off sheet with a product offer. That would provide another means of measuring the campaign’s success. I assumed that the airports are tracking power usage so they can bill Samsung appropriately, but I expect that’s assuming too much.
And bonus points for putting the stations in the actual boarding lounges. When they’re provided, study carrels and outlets are often in some dismal corner, far away from your boarding gate. It’s like you’re being punished for being a hard worker.
For example, in Chicago O’Hare, they have a bunch of study carrels with outlets in little clusters. I guess they’re owned by the airport, and advertisers can sponsor them on an ad hoc basis. Unfortunately, the carrels are usually in busy hallways, and the one I used wasn’t in view of my gate. Compared to Samsung, they get a C- on execution.
Today I was making a quick map using the same feature, and browsed through some of my older maps. I was surprised to discover that my Gozo memory map has received 13984 views. That seems like a lot. I just made it on a lark on a slow day in Malta.
I wasn’t sure where all those map views were coming from. I looked around, and wasn’t able to find a way to search all of Google’s publicly-accessible custom maps. Assuming they’re including them in Google Maps search results, I searched Google Maps for ‘Gozo’ (and variations), and noticed that my map is the only one listed under ‘User-Created Maps’.
I suppose, under certain circumstances, this would be a useful SEO strategy. You could embed links in placemark descriptions and, assuming they looked useful, Google Maps users might click them. I might add some relevant links to some more markers to test if it drives any traffic.
Browsing through my other custom maps, I see that our Sahara trip map has about 6000 views, and our zone-we-want-to-live-in map has about 4700 views. It’s not obvious what differentiates a popular map from an unpopular one. Any ideas?
In August, 1996, Julie and I went to New York. It was our first big trip together–10 days and across the continent–and my first big trip without my parents. We stayed with my aunt, a fashion designer (you should become a fan of the Facebook page I made for her) with a quirky railroad apartment in Nolita in lower Manhattan.
Never have I felt more like a country bumpkin. The city was an intimidating place for a naive 22-year-old Canadian. A lifetime of film and television had taught me that New York was home to serial killers, crazy homeless dudes and acerbic, mean New Yorkers.
Though I was a bit uneasy about the Big Apple, we had a great time. We took the subway at all hours of the day and night, rambled through the darkest corners of Central Park and managed not to be murdered, in serial or parallel. Amid a garbage strike and the August heat, it was an exhausting, exhilarating trip. It nurtured the sapling that was my growing love of travel and living abroad.
For no particular reason, it took me twelve years to get back to New York. What a difference 1.2 decades make. Manhattan now seems friendly, clean and of an entirely manageable shape and size. I found the people to be unilaterally friendly, and was only intimidated by the frigid temperatures on New Year’s Eve.
The difference is mostly me, in that I’m twelve years older, have traveled a lot more and lived in a bunch of different places. Still, the city is famously safer and cleaner than it was 15 or 20 years ago. And I wonder how much 9/11 changed the mood of the place? I really don’t know what long term impact a catastrophic event has on an entire city, if any.
It’s easy to imagine living in New York for six months or a year. My only real concern would be how difficult it must be to get some place where you are truly alone. That’s something I’ve loved about the west coast (and didn’t like about Dublin): quiet solitude is only an hour away. Still, I could easily live without that for a year. Do you live in New York? Have you ever lived there?
