North East Travels....

Tatamagouche Centre - my photo does not do it justice.

Last week I went to various locations in the North East Region on a variety of missions. First to Tatamagouche and area to check out venues for next spring's conference. Looks like we will be gathering at the Tatamagouche Centre, a comprehensive meeting facility complete with heritage houses just outside the town. I had'nt been there since my Grade 12 art class had a retreat at the Centre(and that was not recent times) so it was good to see the facility and meet staff. The facility is on a beautiful property and has been operated by the United Church since the 1950's. They have been good custodians for the property with parkland dotted with ancient trees and some of the oldest houses in the area as guest accommodations. The houses include living rooms so lots of opportunity for informal gatherings after the day's official events.


I also stopped by to visit a man and his mills, Darrell Burke, site manager for Balmoral Mill and Sutherland Steam Mill. On this occasion we talked "Interactive Interpretation", the conference theme for 2011. Darrell has a background in theatre and has presented very creative programs at a number of the Nova Scotia Museum sites over the years. My thought was if we can come up with new and engaging "grist for the mill" for Darrell in terms of interactive interpretation, we would likely inspire others with venerable experience as well as the newly interactive in terms of interpretation....

A joint meeting in Truro of the Training Advisory and Information Technology & Collections Management Committees was hosted by the Colchester County Museum. There is a series of really interesting exhibits on there for the summer including a focus on Truro's Victoria Park and feature exhibit on Loyalist settlers as warm up for next year's anniversary. Our joint committee meeting was facilitated by Max Chauvin and designed to move us through the process of determining new committee roles and responsibilities as we evolve the Passage project into the new Advisory Service and develop the new core curriculum. Very busy and interesting times ahead of us.

Later in the week, I stopped by Cumberland County Museum to visit Shirley and hear how her summer is going. We talked about new summer opening hours, visitor stats, a summer yard sale fundraiser and Passage DB issues. I've come to the conclusion Cumberland was the "canary in the coal mine" for quirks and jags in the system.She has lots of questions about the potential new system, some of which I did not have answers for and sent me off a number of fact finding missions. Onwards.....