I’m back to reality after a fun filled weekend in Bermuda.
Reality sucks!
Joking aside. Although small, SPSBermuda was perfectly formed with a great speaking roster, a cool group of sponsors and an attentive information-hungry stack of attendees.
Congratulations to Craig Lussier and the other members of the organising team, you pulled off the impossible with a tiny budget and only 22 miles of island from which to draw a crowd!
On an event tip, my decks can be found in their usual place at http://bigseb.me/sebdecks – feel free to check them out.
I’m not a big travel writer (see Joel’s blog for this) but did learn some amazing stuff about Bermuda in my short time there:
- 65,000 permanent residents and 450,000 visitors annually are on an island 22 miles tip-to-tip and 1.5 miles wide at its most girthen point
- At the edge of the reef that surrounds most of the Island (about 500m offshore), the shelf drop off is over 18,000 feet in places
- The reef and “the drop off” is cited as one of the inspirations for the excellent movie “Finding Nemo”
- The island is not actually an island, its a collection of approximately 300 islands
- Contrary to popular belief, Bermuda is not in the Caribbean, it’s just over 500 miles off the coast of North Carolina
- If you look at a map of Bermuda it looks like a 22 mile long fishing hook
- Being in the Commonwelath and a former British colony, islanders drive on the left and have British signs and traffic signals
- Dark Rum is the national drink, drinking dark Rum is the national pastime
- According to expert estimates there are several billion tree frogs, lizards and other amphibious/reptillian residents on the island
- Millions of dollars of treasure has been recovered from wrecks around the island and continues to be a source of fascination for adventurous types
I’m already looking forward to the next time I can visit the island – I’m hoping it’s soon!
I’ll leave you with this image, taken in a sea cave I found when exploring on the Sunday – I risked life and limb to climb down to get this – not bad for a Nokia Lumia phone photo eh?
more to follow…