04/18/10 - 1930s Tourism Brochure for the North Olympic

We came across an old tourism brochure for the Olympic Peninsula. It is clearly from the 1930s, though the exact date is uncertain. Most of the local attractions seem unchanged. That's one of the big differences between urban and rural tourism. (Of course, it was all national forest back then. Olympic National Park wasn't designated a park back then.)

Click here for the brochure.

There's some familiar scenery

Keywords: historical

12/24/08 - Visit Soviet Russia

While reading a February 1932 issue of Fortune we came across a tourist opportunity that we had somehow missed, a tour of Soviet Russia. In 1932, the Soviet Union was barely 15 years old. In hindsight, it was 20% down, with 80% yet to go. Given how many jokes have been made about tours of Soviet tractor factories, award winning collective farms and endless ranks of modern apartment blocks, the advertisement sounds like a parody of itself.

Mind you, the ice breaker tour of the Arctic and the opening of the Dnieprostroy Dam sound pretty neat. There's also ostalgia, nostalgia tourism of Soviet era relics. If people are willing to ride around Berlin in Trabants, maybe there is room for Soviet retro-tourism in our post-Soviet world.

Keywords: fortune, historical

01/08/08 - New Software - Sunrise, Sunset and iCal

For the past few years we've been using TideCal to compute good times and tides for hiking the beaches of the North Olympic Peninsula. If you look at the left hand sidebar on this page, you'll see that we use TideCal to predict upcoming hiking tides.

Apparently, a number of people like using iCal, the Macintosh calendar program, but it is sometimes hard to find the calendar you want. TideCal will make a hiker's tidal calendar, while other sites provide calendars with holidays, sporting events, historical birthdays and other such wonders. Now there is an iCal calendar generator for people who just want to know when the sun will rise and set. We call it Sunrise Sunset.

In the traditional of fine Kaleberg Kludges, it requires that you know your latitude and longitude (try getting a map bookmark from Google Maps), your time zone offset, and if you aren't in the US, when daylight saving time starts and ends. We make no warrantees or representations, just software.

Keywords: beaches, software, tides, historical