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 )

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.

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.