Location, Location, Location

It's an old saying for business, that location is everything.  As discussed briefly in the first post, "Acots Dining Experience," location is often the last thing on our minds, but it turns out to be pretty important.

What leads me to this discussion today is that i was excited to open an email from an old colleague looking for help with what to do on their vacation.  I would have loved to have helped, but sadly I have never been to the Bahamas.  Another friend recently told me that he would love to come and check out our diving scene, and would be happy to hop on a flight from the Cayman Islands.  With regret I suggested that he do so via Miama, Atlanta, New York, or Boston as there are no flights from anywhere in the Caribbean to Bermuda without landing first in the US or Canada.  Well, you could do Enland too, but that would be rather inconvenient.  Bermuda's main source of revenue is International Business and Tourism.  Location would seem to be awfully important to both of these things.  Notably, both industries are currently below their ideal levels of revenue generation, and the government and independent commissions are working very hard to figure out what the problems and solutions are.  I had an epiphany, thanks to my two friends who are in no way the first or last people to be a little uncertain of where i reside.  The problem for everyone, tourists, businessmen and businesswomen, and quite possibly the entire Bermuda economy is this -- no one seems to really know where Bermuda is!

Take a minute to pause your reading (i know it will be hard as this is riveting stuff or at least it is to me as i sip my coffee), but scroll to the bottom to the comment sections and type in a description of exactly where you think Bermuda is located.  No cheating!  And if you have been here before, please put a disclaimer by your post so that we don't have a skewed impression of this little impromptu quiz.  I look forward to reading your answers.

I am going to take a few moments to think out loud here on why the location of Bermuda is such an unknown.  It's not like the former soviet union which broke up into a lot of xx-stan's that everybody who graduated post 1990 has a hard time naming or pointing to on a map.  Bermuda was discovered in 1505 by Juan de Bermudez, and although the Spanish and Portuguese were well aware of the island and used it in a worst case scenario, they never tried to settle it.  With the dangerous reef, wild pigs, and the haunting call of strange birds, it became known as Devil's Isle.  That's right, I moved to Devil's Island (more stuff we don't tell mom).  In fact, nobody bothered to settle it until 1609...and that was only because an ill fated ship named the Sea Venture was forced by a storm onto the rocky reef...and they became Bermuda's first expats!  To be fair, 10 months later they had built a new boat and got out of dodge and headed to Jamestown where they were long past due (their failure to arrive with supplies to the Jamestown colony is known in history as the starving time...all but 60 of these colonists perished waiting for supplies)...but something about Bermuda calls some of us home.  So it was with the captain, Sir George Somers, who came back to Bermuda (they say it was for food but i say it was those Bermuda Blues).  Sadly, he became ill on the journey over and died in Bermuda in 1610.  His body was returned home, but legend says he loved Bermuda so much that he requested his heart be removed and buried in Bermuda.  You can visit the site in the town of St.George's where a quiet, weathered stone sarcophagus holds the heart of the first believer in Bermuda.  History lesson aside, my point is that Bermuda has been sitting quietly over here, going by the same name for over 400 years, so changes in  borders or politics are not the reason for its obscurity.  My next thought is the media.  Unless you are an avid fan of the weather channel in hurricane season, Bermuda doesn't pop up in the news very much.  No shark attacks like Brazil, US, and Australia (we have a nice reef that keeps the riff raff of the shark world out).  We did have and earthquake here about 2 years ago.  Fortunately some seismologist was keeping a sharp eye and documented it, because i was walking along the road at the time and would have been completely unaware that i had survived and earthquake had it not made a tiny blip in the headlines.  We have crime...but not enough to gather international attention.  I guess the biggest thing Bermuda has done in the international media during my 5 years on the island is the Uyghur incident of 2009.  I don't even think I should get started on that today, but if the ex-premier sneaking off in a private jet and coming back with 4 Uyghur's who were arrested in Pakistan and detained in Guantanamo Bay under the suspicion of Taliban ties doesn't get enough attention to get us on the map in 2009, really, what will? 

Perhaps there is just no reason to wonder where Bermuda is unless you are going for a visit.  Supposing you did decide to go looking for Bermuda.  Go ahead and try any of these methods, it's kinda fun.  Got a globe or an atlas?  Look up Bermuda.  What you will find is that it isn't discernibly there.  You will find letters in the middle of the Atlantic.  Imagine using those old atlas maps as a wartime pilot, thinking about the mysteries of lost ships and airplanes in the Bermuda Triangle, and realizing your mission is to fly to somewhere that doesn't appear to exist!  I suspect there were a few deserters at that point.  Google maps makes it a little bit easier.  When you search for Bermuda, you get a nice image of the island in all of it's tiny glory filling the screen.  But when you hit the minus sign to bring into perspective where it is in relation to the world as you know it, it gets smaller, and the water gets bigger.  You do this time and time again until again you are looking at a tiny smudge below letters in the ocean off the Eastern coast of the US.  Home sweet home.  That's my rock.  And don't believe the references that say Bermuda is actually the Bermuda isles, "made up of 181 smaller islands outside of the main island."  I don't know what they were counting, but i suspect it was mostly those pokey volcanic rocks within wading distance of the beach.  Wikipedia says our square footage AS A COUNTRY IS 20.6 square miles (and i hope they aren't counting those 181 mystery islands that i have yet to locate).

With regards to the rest of the geographical confusion, I blame the Beach Boys.  We all know the song..."Aruba, Jamaica, ooooh I wanna take you to Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty momma, Key Largo, Montego baby why don't we go Jamaica, off the Florida Keys...."  The movie is Cocktail with Tom Cruise for any juniors that don't know what that means, and the song is Kokomo.  The movie, and all radio stations who play this song, should consider the best interests of a confused society and immediately play the Sesame Street Jingle "One of these things is not like the other."

Today's focus will be a geography lesson aimed at clarifying one of the Bermuda Triangle's greatest mysteries...where is Bermuda?  Well, Bermuda is a remote, isolated island located in the Atlantic Ocean about 1328 km from Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. Whaaaaaaaat?  Yeah, you can guess what that means for our winter temperatures...Bermuda is actually subtropical, unlike all those more well known Caribbean Islands.  No snow, no frost, I am still a happy expat, but it isn't all sunbathing and pina colada's down here.  For my friend who will be in the Bahama's shortly, if one had access to a private jet, it is 1475 km from Bermuda to the Bahama's.  Only 1250 km from New York, but a whopping 3,450 km for the English to visit their little colony.  Further still is an airport I am getting to know well visiting family, Regina at 3,490 km, and to head to Edmonton -- dubbed yesterday by my friend Mark as the land of Eternal White -- 3,505 km.  So basically, we're a long swim, cruise, or flight away from most things.  The isolation, or insular quality as is the popular term these days, provides for a lot of Bermuda's unique characteristics which will pop out from time to time as I blog on.

So today I will leave you with some pretty maps and links tocatchy tunes to help you prepare if you are serious about coming to visit.  Enjoy!

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXB4LspLQE0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6keZIUJBsQ




here it is, looks big right?  nope!

No peeking until you have put your location guess in the comments below.  You'll need to manually zoom your screen to see us clearly anyway.  We are the Where's Waldo of the geographical world...