I figured it deserves its own post, seeing as how it’s the reason I came to Salisbury
The bus trip left from the train station, which is right by where I’m staying, so that was very convenient. I’d picked the bus tour option because it means I didn’t have to pick a time slot to go and see the stones, I could just rock on up whenever.
(A much more diverse crowd, age-wise, than the Bournemouth bus trip; I might have been the youngest person on that bus at times)
Bus takes you to the visitor centre, or more accurately the visitor centre coach park, and you slightly confusingly bypass one queue for the shuttle bus to the stones in favour of walking to the actual visitor centre to join an entirely different queue for the shuttle bus to the stones. I took the shuttle, but in hindsight kind of wish I’d walked, because seeing the thing as you walk over the hill would probably be a pretty awesome sight. If I go back, and I might, I’ll do that; I walked back, and it was quite pleasant.
It’s out there somewhere, behind all the people
It was simultaneously bigger and smaller than I was imagining; Taller, and the stones are somehow more massive, but also way more compact in its footprint.
I’m not really sure how one is supposed to ‘do’ Stonehenge, but what I did was to read the plaques, look at it and at the surrounding countryside, and do a very slow circuit of the thing, taking photos from time to time if I saw something that looked interesting.
The crow was careful to stay on the correct side of the boundary rope, unlike at least one asshat I sawThis is because crows are very keen on historical preservation of things you can perch onI tried to get a low angle shot of this line marking the solstice sunrises, but owing to mystical energies people felt compelled to stop right on that line & just stand there.
As I said, I decided to walk back. It was a nice day, and it looked like a nice stroll through some fields.
Also, there was an ice-cream van Somewhere back there are the stones.
The visitor centre had a bunch of interpretation exhibits, models of how the site had developed and been reworked, that sort of thing.
Second part of the tour bus trip was Old Sarum/Sarum Castle, one of those “absolutely everyone who ever lived in this area saw this hill and built stuff on it” spots with a history going back thousands of years. Most of what’s still visible as a construction is comparatively recent, so less than a thousand years old, but some the earthworks are much older.
Looking at Salisbury Cathedral from inside the outer ring of defenses As seen from the outside As seen from the inside Inauthentic bridge to the inner bit, with authentic English Heritage Gift ShopI just liked the image; Giant tent with cathedral spire in background
I’m writing these a bit asynchronously, but hopefully I covered the leg thing when talking about leaving Bournemouth. Short version is that walking was painful but got better over time, and that I was hoping it was a dehydration/exertion thing, because the symptoms were worryingly close to The Great L5S1 Rupture Of 2015.
Lambeth Bridge at night
Slept well, didn’t wake up in the night with massive leg cramps, and while walking was still painful, I could at least walk somewhat normally. Well, normally for me, given the litany of injuries over the years.
Accidentally met a colleague on the way to hotel breakfast, so it was nice to chat. CB & I don’t work together, and our jobs in no way interact, so it’s fun seeing what things look like from a different perspective.
I’m sure I could have found the venue, but ended up accidentally following a management group, so chatted with various of them on the way there. Turns out the former CTO worked on the same thing I work on, 2+ generations of products ago.
I was issued with my purple stewarding polo shirt, and I have not included a picture of me in it. You’re welcome. Things went well on the crowd control front all the way through the opening plenary (“the stairs to the third floor plenary are to your right” × 1,000,000) , and then they fell off and exploded at the first session on the floor I was assigned to.
Two entry doors we could cover, but there was a bonus set of stairs, and the room filled so fast & so much that the conference centre facilities people declared it a hazard & forced people out. In an exciting period of rapid crowd management skills acquisition, we (there were a few stewards) blocked off all but one door to entry & herded everyone that way so that we could keep the numbers under control. Folks were mostly understanding of my Purple Gandalf “You Shall Not Pass because we need people to use the other door as a crowd safety measure” routine, though I did occasionally have to do the arms spread wide “I Am A Barrier” bit to make people stop and listen.
Some lessons to be learned there, and it identified a need for a way to tell all of the other rooms when a space is full, so that they can tell people not to bother heading in that direction.
My best moment was when someone jokingly tried to bribe his way in with a pair of Ordnance Survey Socks. After regretfully saying no, but complimenting him on an awesome swag item, he gave me a pair. 😁
We had a team dinner afterwards, which was a nice reward/comedown from the madness of the conference. It went late-ish, but didn’t turn into the sort of bar crawl where you get in at 2am, unlike some previous years. 2018, I am looking in your direction.
Next day was a team meeting. Breakfast this time featured one of those “hey, can I join my friends over there?” exercises which I suspect the staff hate, as the group expanded across multiple 2-seater tables when people arrived or noticed the growing cluster.
My leg was almost completely better by this point; Some twinges & soreness, but that’s it.
My hearing after a full day in the conference centre in a corridor and lift lobby? Yeah, I could hear what was happening close to me; The rest was just muffled noises & ringing.
Not a lot to say about the team meeting, partially because of commercial sensitivity, and partially because it’s probably a bit dull. It was livened up by one team member being spectacularly unwell & attending remotely, and for a while I was acting as the JonathanBot, pointing my laptop camera at whoever was talking.
In hindsight, I had my folding phone tripod in my bag, so we could have had someone with MS Teams on their phone call him & use the phone as a much more portable camera.
Not nearly as funny though.
The trip out of London was very simple & easy. Wandered the short distance to Waterloo ( the leg was almost completely better by this point ), hung around for a bit, then tried not to fall asleep too much on the way to Salisbury. I needn’t have worried; They stopped the train there and made all onward passengers change.
Found the place without issue, and it’s quite nice. Got a bedroom, a nice wee lounge, and a kitchen. It’ll do nicely for a few days.
Google Maps, or more specifically the directions part, has no idea what to make of Bournemouth. The streets as perceived by a person on the ground are very different to what it thinks is going on, so it’s directions tended to tell you to go the wrong way. Me, I just followed the mapped route and ignored the times it said I should turn left to go right.
The pedestrian mall area was amazing for this, because there are no street names, so the directions are even more useless. On that note; If you’re giving the street address of a hotel, the house numbers don’t help if everything is a hotel and nothing has a number. ( To be fair, that’s partly my fault; I overshot based on where the map said the place was, and didn’t think it might be behind me and on the other side of the street )
The Silver How (no idea why it’s called that) is a hotel in the AirBnB sense; A code for the front door, a combination lockbox outside your room with your room key in it, no reception desk, and no sign of anyone who isn’t a guest.
Or, indeed, of anyone at all. I occasionally heard other people, and some rooms had TV noise as you passed by, but the only times I saw another person in that place were;
A builder leaving at the same time as me. ( They had some building work going on, which might have been nice to mention when I booked )
Someone entering as I left after ‘checkout’, where checking out means putting your key back in the lockbox.
A glimpse of someone on the landing of the floor above.
A couple on the other half of the balcony.
If you’re getting a Doctor Who/Sapphire & Steel vibe, don’t worry; I got it too. I remember noticing that the place was in fantastic condition inside, but as time went by I started noticing scuff marks on the wall, and then some inexplicable nails in the wall at regular intervals, and then a giant watermark on the ceiling of the room. Had those things always been there? Was the hotel jumping forward through moments in time? Was anything watching me from the mostly bricked up fireplace in the room?
The whole area seemed to be Hotels or B&Bs, some big and modern, and some very much old and traditional, or at least looking that way from the outside. Didn’t see anything recognisable as a house, but that said I wouldn’t have spotted the difference between a hotel and an apartment building. The place across the street seemed to constantly have multiple big-ass tour coaches outside, so I’m assuming they’re part of a package holiday system, aimed at the silver-hair set from the look of the folks going in & out of the place.
At the end of the street were the West Cliffs, with a nice clifftop park & some pretty awesome views. Also goats.
So, for the working days, I worked. I’d have a bit of a wander down the hill ( the clifftop path was way nicer than the road route ) to get lunch, then wander down again after work. I’d been told about the bizarre Deskdog co-working space offered by the Brewdog pub chain, so I tried it out on day 2; £10 for a table from 12:00 to 17:00, unlimited tea/coffee, and a pint at the end of the day, though I never bothered with the pint. It worked pretty well, though the situation would probably be different for someone who drinks more than me, and much of the time I was outnumbered by the staff.
This was a better hotel to work from than the Canterbury one, partially because the room was better suited to it & was a bit more comfortable, but maybe also because the town was just quieter & more relaxing, so I enjoyed myself more? Hard to say for sure.
I can report that having balcony doors you can open for airflow & general ambiance is something I like, and that sitting there in front of the open doors ( on the floor, using the bed as a backrest ) with a hot drink while it absolutely pisses down with rain outside is something entirely awesome.
For the things I did? Mostly wandering around in a “where does this path go?” sort of way, and doing the occasional tourist thing on the weekend.
I’d spotted The Mary Shelley on the way to the hotel, but it was a few days later that I found out why it’s called that; Mary Shelley is buried in the churchyard opposite. Yes, I visited the grave. No, I didn’t take a picture.
My initial thought on seeing the sign was “tell me that you’ve never read Frankenstein without saying that you’ve never read Frankenstein”. Then I thought “Neither have you”.
Rode the Funicular Railway/Cliff Lift, partially for the experience, and partially because that climb up from town/beach level gets old when you’re doing it multiple times a day.
Went out onto the pier a few times, once by buying a ticket, then again after the ticket office had closed. Unless the 3 or 4 funfair rides appeal, not worth buying the ticket; The view’s the same.
Walked along the beach a fair bit, sometimes as a ‘going for a walk’ thing, sometimes because I’d taken one of the paths down to it & was walking along. Somewhere in the distance of this shot is a chine ( stream-carved gully ) which was also the end of the section of park by the hotel, so you could walk along & down & back. Lots of little seaside huts, mostly locked up, though I did see a few in use over the weekend; A wide variety of beach stuff, chairs, tables, … all the sorts of things one might want at the seaside.
My various thoughts were “are they habitable?” ( not really, and you’re not allowed to ), followed by “if you could fit one out with power & internet & maybe an inner door with a window, what an amazing office shed that would be”.
Over the weekend I did one of those hop-on/hop-off bus tours. Honestly, I liked the riding around looking at the view and listening to the recorded commentary bit the most, though I did spend a few hours in the nearby town of Poole; Nice, in the same way that every town with a pedestrianised area to which they try to attract tourists is nice, though Poole does also have a working harbour.
Overall, I enjoyed Bournemouth. It has a certain “this place was awesome in the 50’s” vibe, and there are areas of the pedestrianised/tourist zone which are clearly not responding well to civic improvements, unless boarded up chop windows is a new architectural style. The park running through the town centre is very nice to walk through, and the beach/promenade is good; I liked it there. Not sure I’d up and move there, but I had a more relaxing time than I did in Canterbury.
Leaving On A Monday is where things got a little interesting. I had to go to London for the Esri UK Annual Conference, and at the time I booked I hadn’t figured out that checking out on a workday and traveling in the evening creates the problem of where you work from during the day. My solution was a bit odd, perhaps, but it worked almost all the day.
Start work early, having packed everything but the work stuff
Stop work maybe 15 minutes before the 10:00 checkout, pack up, and go ( putting the key back in the lockbox )
Walk over to The Mary Shelly to get breakfast & work from there for a few hours ( it was fairly empty, so I wasn’t taking up a table, but nobody seemed to care )
At 12:00, head to Brewdog and work until 17:00
Where the wheels came off was on the post-work walk to the station. I’d done the walk yesterday to pick up my ticket & burn off some nervous energy, so I knew the way, and was confident that I’d do it in 20-25 minutes. Well, that didn’t happen.
What did happen was that maybe 2 minutes into the walk I got hit with a massive cramp/knot in my right calf, to the extent that I really couldn’t take a step with it. Stretching it out helped a bit, trying to gently walk it out helped a bit, fairly aggressively stretching it out at multiple points along the way helped more, but it probably took 40-50 minutes to make that journey, and I was in a fair amount of pain and a foul mood for most of it. ( No, I don’t know why I didn’t double back and find a taxi – I clearly wasn’t thinking clearly )
Made it with time to spare for my train, though the overbridge in the station wasn’t much fun. Kept trying to stretch out the muscle on the journey, but the same “can barely walk at first” thing was happening when I got to London: Again, it worked itself out to the point that I could walk normally, if a bit painfully, by the end of the trip to the hotel. ( Again, I can’t account for why I didn’t just take a damn taxi )
My theory for this at the time was a bit of dehydration and too much walking the day before, so when I got to the hotel I drank as much water as I could stomach. It’s only afterwards that I remembered that these symptoms, while being the sort of thing that can happen with dehydration/electrolyte issues, are also really close to how I found out about my spinal injury; A sudden and persisting cramp in that same place. Fortunately, the first theory looks to have been the right one.
As a final bit; Gen Con is fast approaching ( in August ), and I saw the opportunity to take an “I’m outside the hotel; Where is everyone?” picture.
The trip back to Aylesbury from Canterbury was more or less uneventful, and fitted into the middle of a working Thursday. Going to try not to do that again, because it was kind of disruptive, but it worked out.
Visiting a post office with a giant-ass pack isn’t as fun as it looks in travel advertising. It’s a bit tricky navigating the aisles.
The same goes for quaint little souvenir shops where the till is right at the back.
Staying in the guest quarters at Chateau Guineapig while I’m in Aylesbury, as one does when one is visiting Buckinghamshire. The vague plan was to rethink the packing/bag system, to marvel at The Glorious Coronation Of King Charles III, and most importantly to celebrate a birthday.
I tried really hard to take the Coronation seriously, and mostly succeeded. It was a big ol’ spectacle of a thing, as you’d expect. The Rockwood decorated with bunting, flags, and plastic hats, as demonstrated below.
The sudden shifts between “For all people of all faiths” and “Church of England above all else” were jarring. Bit of a mixed message there.
Oaths to support and maintain the church administered by the representative of that church have a certain “maintain the job security” feel to them.
The bit where screens are brought in reminded me of the “23-19” scene from Monsters Inc.
Or for another angle, any comedy bath bit, where increasingly ridiculous objects are passed over the screen or draped across the top rail as storage.
King Charles looked a whole lot happier by the time the coronation concert happened the next day. There are probably expectations of being formal during your coronation, plus there’s the whole “here’s your late mother’s job” aspect, so it’s understandable, but it was nice to see him laughing at a Kermit the Frog bit.
K’s birthday celebrations went well, possibly in two parts; I’m not sure whether the Friday trip to a fancy rooftop cocktail bar was part of the festivities or not. Probably was.
The official Birthday event was slightly re-vamped due to a whole bunch of rain the previous day, but went well, apart from a couple of unplanned balloon detonations. It might have been better if one of those hadn’t been confetti-filled, but you’ve got to accept that sort of thing when playing tennis with a balloon in a room with a textured ceiling. ( It rained during the coronation, and a commentator did go so far as to relate all of the other coronations where it had been noted to rain, as some form of Coronation Tradition, and not the fact that said coronations happen in England )
Bag re-thinking happened. Big Red is good for lugging stuff around, but because it’s basically three compartments, getting at anything involves moving almost everything, and it makes it tricky to actually live out of. Attempt number 2 uses two bags, a 35l sports-adjacent backpack with a laptop sleeve & a 22l clamshell carry-on backpack with a laptop sleeve; I’ve divided things roughly into daily clothing + personal electronics in the 22, and work things and occasional items into the 35. We’ll see how it goes.
I discovered, long after I got Big Red, that there are backpacks made with the digital nomad, or at least the more urban traveller, in mind. I may end up getting one, but I’m not yet convinced that this travelling while working thing is something I’ll enjoy long-term, so I’m a bit reluctant to buy anything just yet.
After A+K talked me down from a spot of panic when I figured out that my planned next destination wasn’t going to work because the hotels filled up very quickly, they pointed me in the general direction of the seaside town of Bournemouth, so that’ll be the next stop.
I’m trying to combine a round-up of all of the other bits of Canterbury, plus some sort of round-up of how the working process went. Let’s see how this goes, shall we?
The Roman Museum Did this on on the Sunday, partially by accident because while I’d planned to go to it, I was just out for a wander and happened to spot the sign down a sidestreet. It is, I think, aimed at a younger audience; The audio tour certainly was. Lots of reconstructions of ‘Roman Stuff’ with models & life-size displays, but also actual historical information & artifacts scattered in there. Mention of the existence of slaves, but not dwelling on what that actually means. It was a bit difficult to figure out what they were trying to say in some places; The layout of pictures and descriptions of Roman Canterbury through history meant that it took me a bit of cross-checking to get “the city grew, and then people just stopped being there anymore, and we don’t really know why” as the high-level summary.
That said, it was interesting and fun, and they have a thumping great section of mosaic floor preserved where they found it, which is kind of cool.
Generally Wandering Around I did a lot of this on the first few days, partially to get a feel for the place, and partially to get out of the hotel room for a while. The side of the main street which hasn’t been developed into a giant roofless mall, still has some of the ‘narrow streets and slumping buildings’ feel of old cities; A lot of cafes & restaurants & places selling tourist stuff, and also an art gallery and a Harry Potter shop.
There’s a chunk of the main street which is being paved, or re-paved, or something, but it means that a wide pedestrian zone is reduced to two narrow walkways which get clogged with people almost immediately, and can be brought to a screeching halt by an uncooperative toddler or a few confused tourists. Was glad to have a rough idea of the twisty somewhat parallel streets when that happened.
There wan’t much to photograph which hasn’t been captured a thousand times already by better photographers than me, so I mostly went with things which amused me.
A fraction of a second later the young woman in the headscarf did a grinning double metal-horns gesture at my camera; I’m sorry I missed it.
The Westgate; Not perhaps their best attempt at naming, though it is at least in the North-West of the city. Canterbury West railway station, on the other hand, is almost due North of Canterbury East railway station.
Also a nice park which eventually wraps around towards the other railway station, following the path of the remains of the city wall. I did take a few walks along the wall, and up the Dane John mound, but didn’t take any photos. Nice place to walk along though.
On To The Overview I enjoyed Canterbury. It didn’t go perfectly, but it was fun, and I learned a few things about remote working & travel in the ‘what to do differently next time’ department.
Having a working location right in the heart of things isn’t all that useful if you’re working a standard job; Most tourist things are closed by the time you’re free.
Big Red, as a pack, is great for moving stuff around, but it doesn’t have much in the way of internal structure, which means a whole lot of unpacking every time you look for … Well, anything.
An improvised workspace is OK for a day or so, then it gets annoying.
I did not need all of those connector cables.
Getting sink-laundry dry is much easier in hotel rooms with air conditioning & in places with warmer weather; I can dry a shirt in a few hours by hanging it in front of the air-conditioning vent in a humid city, but that doesn’t work nearly as well with a wall-mounted electric radiator.
It is possible, if you time it right, to cycle through 50-100 channels of television and hit nothing but advertising.
Hotel breakfasts will turn on you; Do not trust them. This may be a smidge unkind. I had a few days of feeling unwell, which may have been the standard “you’ve relaxed, time to get sick” immune system response, but also might have been one too many poor choces from the breakfast buffet options. Or both. Erring on the side of caution, I made better choices & dipped into the traveling medical kit. One of them worked.
English hotels continue to fit bedding designed for arctic expeditions. In this case they also fitted a heater I could get at the controls of, and a window I could leave open, so that was easily solved.
Leaving On A Big Train Something I’d not figured out soon enough is that hotel check-outs happen during the working day, leaving you with nowhere to work if, hypothetically, you’d decided to take the afternoon train back to Aylesbury. I was able to do some shuffling around of hours to give myself a nice long ‘lunch’ break on the last day, so that I could pack up, check out, post a postcard at the world’s slowest post office (the machines were offline, so I joined a short queue which took forever, partially because the guy behind the counter was a very slow typist, and partially because those few people ahead of me wanted to post very complicated things – by the time I got to the head of the line the machines were open again, but also had a scrum of people around them and a lot of red lights, so I stayed in line), and wander down to the train station to get back to Aylesbury via London so that I could work the afternoon from the office. Even got my old desk back.
The hopefully none of you who’ve been paying attention to the dates of these posts may have noticed that I’ve worked from Canterbury for five days & haven’t said a damn thing about how it went. This is for deep & compelling reasons; I wasn’t sure how to make it interesting.
Having given up on interesting, I’m instead going to go with potentially informative, and give a bit of a rundown of what worked and what didn’t.
The room was huge, and had a single trundle bed in it as well as the actual bed, so I had something to sit Big Red on. What it didn’t have was a desk, or more than one chair; That last one’s a shame because there was plenty of room.
There was a sort of workspace, where the kettle lived & 2 of the 3 power outlets were, and it was deep enough to make a pretty good impromptu desk. On the downside, it faced away from the windows. ( I’d had plans to try one of the local co-working spaces, but then things went hilariously wrong on a project in a way that made me suspect I’d be making a lot of calls, which seems kind of obnoxious for a shared space )
( dramatic action shot of workspace )
It was a functional workspace, if not scenic, and the hotel WiFi was fine; Took a while to connect, and it did crap out for a bit on the second day, but that can happen anywhere. No issues with remote machines, and the giant download I had to do would have taken a while in any circumstances.
Didn’t pass the Enjoyment test though. In theory, staying in town means that the tourist/sightseeing stuff is right there. In practice, it’s mostly closed after working hours, and after a day of work my energy levels can be pretty low, so there’s not a whole lot of advantage to being in the midst of it all unless the accommodation itself is in some way worth it.
And with all due respect to the Travelodge Canterbury Chaucer Central, … , It’s just not. There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s a good hotel option, but nobody is going to recommend it as the focus of a holiday.
On to the tech stuff. I tried to keep track of how much of what I brought I actually used, and it’s a pretty short list; Going to have to go back through that bag of connectors & ‘might need it’ items to see what on earth is in there.
( the ‘how do I fit all of that crap back in there’ shot )
Overall, working from the hotel was a success, in that I got work done, but I’m not thinking it’s the way forward for me. That’s fine, that was part of the point of this trip.
I am, of course, talking about Canterbury Cathedral, which turns out to be tricky to photograph, at least with a smartphone.
I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I’d been told the entry price ( still not sure I understand how that works for a functioning cathedral ) was quite high, but I paid it anyway on the basis of “May as well, it’s a famous building I’ve actually heard of”, figuring that I’d spend a bit of time there.
this one does have a “Cathedral rolling in heavy storm” kind of vibe
I ended up getting three hours of entertainment out of it, because there’s so much to the place. There’s an enormous amount of history, and reconstructions, and repurposing. I’d assumed that the cathedral was basically one big churching space, but kept finding little sub-chapel areas as I wandered around, both in the upstairs bit & in the vaults below.
There was even one of those grassy area surrounded by vaulted walkway things which I’ve seen in movies & TV, so that was fun to wander around in.
There were some folks doing guided tours, but I wasn’t sure whether they were a join in & tag along or a paying patrons only sort of thing, so I tried to stay out of their way. And after a while, used earphones and a rain noise app to muffle the narration, when it got a smidge distracting.
One interesting overhead bit, if I understood it correctly, is that Thomas Beckett was murdered there, and eventually a shrine was built which was later destroyed by orders of the king, and there’s mention of the shrine, but aside from one part of a stained glass window, nobody ever described what the shrine looked like.
I’m expecting to go through a few iterations of the packing scheme before I get it right. Today’s version had the everyday clothing in the low compartment, the stuff I thought I’d need as soon into a hotel room in the very top compartment, and everything else in the middle, as a sort of protection layer around the laptops.
waiting on a train at Aylesbury
It sort of worked. I’d thought the top compartment was too full, but it seems like the issue is that there wasn’t enough in the middle one to support it, so it droops over the rest of the pack. So some fine tuning to be done there.
Work happened. I checked out of the hotel & dragged the bag in, and had a mostly standard working day. There was a team lunch, a farewell for someone who’s moving to a new job in another company, and that was fun. ( Also kinda fancy – It was a very nice restaurant )
There were after-work drinks for the person who’s leaving, and I did go for one, while trying not to make her leaving do all about me & the Big Red Backpack.
waiting on a train at St. Pancras
The trip to Canterbury was pretty uneventful. Train to London Marylebone, tube to St. Pancras, train to Canterbury, and I got to the hotel at around 23:00.
Had pre-work breakfast with many of the crowd from last night. The enthusiasm for a pre-work pint had faded, which is, I think, no bad thing.
Does it make me a bad person if I want to see what an actual American would think of the Spoons ‘American Breakfast ‘?
Pretty sure it does.
Maybe I’ll take some pictures and see whether I can start an international incident over pancakes & maple flavoured syrup.
For the very start of the day I worked from the hotel room, just to be sure that it’d work like I expected, then wandered into the office for the rest of the day.
My lunchtime excursion was to find a coin exchange machine, to deal with a giant cup of shrapnel I’d accumulated over the years.
No, I don’t really mind that they take their cut; The alternative was that I count all of those coins by hand. Worth the price.
After work tomorrow I’m off to Canterbury, to stay in a different Travelodge. And to do some touristy things. And to work.
I’m still figuring out how to arrange things in the bag, but that’s an ongoing process. Everything fits without an issue, but I don’t have a system nailed down yet for what goes where.
I’m leaning towards the idea that the top section, which can be accessed without undoing the straps on the rest of the bag but not if the bag is lying open, should be for the stuff I’ll immediately unpack at the hotel and/or for the wet/cold weather gear
The traveling kit, version one, is about as packed as it’s going to get. I suspect I’ve got too much electronic stuff, or packed it badly, but we’ll see how it goes.
I’m still figuring out how best to distribute things between the three compartments, but I remember that changing multiple times over the course of the last trip, so it may take a while to get the system dialed in, or at least consistent.
In a stroke of brilliance, I put all of the stuff I know I’ll need for the Gen Con trip but won’t need while traveling around the UK into the carry-on bag ahead of time, so that it’s all already there in one place when it comes time.
A bunch of us got together at The Rockwood as a sort of ‘goodbye even though you’ll be passing through often and seeing a bunch of us on office communication systems’ event, which was also a slightly early birthday for Abhishek.
It was fun, but got cold as the weather took a turn for the worse, so we didn’t stay out too long. This turned out to be a good thing, because when the rain started it escalated fast; I could hear it from inside my hotel room.
