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.