Walk to the JW, Taxi to the Airport, Flight to Chicago, Airport Transit to T5, Long-Ass line for Security, Flight to Dublin, Flight to Heathrow, Train into Paddington, Tube to Marylebone, Train to Princes Risborough, Rail Replacement Bus to Aylesbury, Walk to the Travelodge.
Gave myself plenty of time with an afternoon flight so I was able to take a leisurely breakfast at Cafe Patachou, wander around the almost entirely Gen Con free convention center, and check out a smidge before noon. Patachou isn’t so much a tradition for me as it is a very nice, chill place to have breakfast. It’s absolutely rammed during Gen Con, so I like to visit when it’s quiet, and I can mooch back & forth to the coffee, take my time, and know that I’m not taking up a table they could be filling with more patrons.
I left Blackpool on the Friday & made it to Aylesbury in pretty good time thanks to a lucky connection at Preston where the train arrived as I got to the appropriate platform.
The reason for the trip was a birthday BBQ “Sausage Party” for Becs on the Saturday, with the idea that people would bring weird sausages. I managed to miss the fancy dress element, but was reminded in time.
Maybe wires got crossed, or maybe the folks I was with just ran with a theme, but that theme was ’90s. It’s slightly worrying that all I needed to do to hit a 90s theme was out on a bandana & tie my flannel shirt around my waist.
I didn’t take any pictures of the party, but I did take one of a cafe breakfast that day, so here it is
It was a fun day. 🙂
The very next day I went to Aberdeen, which was a mistake in terms of planning. Should have booked a sleeper trip instead for a few days later so that I could enjoy the weekend, instead of leaving very early to get a train to London so that I could not quite run but certainly walk at my best speed to get to the unreserved carriage in the hope of getting a seat
The booking websites were uncooperative, and I ended up with a ticket to Aberdeen but no seat reservation, which isn’t ideal. I got a bit lucky when it came to boarding; A family with a million suitcases was blocking the closest door to the unreserved carriage, so I went to the other one. Turns out only half of the carriage was unreserved, but my route let me walk through the reserved bit to get to the unreserved, where there were still seats free because nobody could get to them through the million-suitcase-family.
When we last spoke, I was leaving Bath & heading back towards Aylesbury on an unevenly-packed train, in what turned out to be a wildly uneventful journey.
Most of the reason for a return to Aylesbury is to see friends, though the specific timing is because of a work Company Update in Oxford. ( They’re trying the idea of smaller regional events, instead of enormous one, for these updates. I guess putting people in the same room as the speaker(s) increases the chances that they’ll pay attention, unlike a Teams call )
This time I’m staying in the Guest Suite at Chateau Guineapig¹.
There’s not a whole lot to say about spending a week in Aylesbury. Not that it wasn’t enjoyable, because it was, but there’s nothing I did that I’ve not done a thousand times, so the events are not exactly newsworthy.
I got my old desk back. Hadn’t booked it or anything, but it didn’t look like anyone was using it. Turns out that it’s not actually bookable on the system, presumably because nobody added it to the list of available desks; Given that this was the last week in that office for anyone for a while, it makes some sense.
Quite a few pub trips.
A semi-cheeky Nandos trip.
Swapping a few things in & out of storage.
The company update is covered in a different post, but as a summary; Not my best day ever.
¹ otherwise known as the spare room at A+Ks place.
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 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.
Slept ok. Better than the admittedly terrible idea of a night on the floor, but I kept waking up from dreams about cleaning, or with a panicked thought that I’d forgotten to clean something or clear out something.
I figure that I’ll have plenty of time for hotel breakfast buffets over the course of this thing, so for the first ‘official’ day, I went out for pancakes. I do not regret this decision.
My sneakers were on the way out, and the cleaning/moving process essentially finished them off, so I dealt with that in the morning; I’m sure there are shoe stores in lots of places, but I already knew where this one was.
Sports Direct have almost perfected the most annoying way to buy shoes, I feel. You can see all of the options, but in order to try them on you need to get a staff member to go & get the particular shoes in your size. As soon as there are more customers than staff, which is almost all of the time, the whole process slows to a crawl.
I say almost perfected because, in the case of their “these are on sale” shoes, they just have the various boxes of shoes out there, so you can do it yourself. I’m sure the “can you please get me a UK 10 in this” system cuts down on theft, but it’s so annoying.
I’m still sorting out a few things, so today’s effort was putting all of the “I’ll need this for the Gen Con trip in July/August” into my carry-on so that I know where the hell it all is, and taking that to the storage locker. And also the modem/router from the flat, because I forgot to ask them what I should do with that; I’ll send an email sometime.
this is more space than I need
Lunch with a friend ( waves at Terry ) at a pub named Honey Bee, which seems entirely surrounded by light & medium industrial facilities, but is a classic English pub/restaurant. They’ve stopped short of gastropub territory, and instead do very good high-end pub fare.
Dinner with Kayleigh+Alex+Tony at a “why don’t we come here more often” Italian place. It’s in an odd spot between two squares, and it’s easy to forget about, even when you’re walking past it. Very good food, leading to food envy as you see what everyone else ordered.
I tried Burrata, which I’d never had before and initially confused with Bruchetta. Not sure I spelled either of those properly.
( posting this from day one, but let’s not get too concerned about that, shall we )
The last of the furniture went away on day -1, and I’m already regretting this numbering system. I’m also somewhat regretting my decision to make a bed on the floor for the last night; I slept ok, and felt ok, but I feel that the sore … everything … by the end of the day may have been the result of that decision.
The flat is done. All of my stuff is out of it, and it’s cleaned to the extent that my time & energy permitted.
My stuff and I are in the Aylesbury Travelodge. There’s still some final sorting out to do, but nothing major; Documents to be sorted through, a few things to be donated, and some final decisions on what comes with me & what stays in storage.
pretty sure I have room for a few more things
:: editing to add things as they occur ::
It’s much easier to remove oven cleaner foam if you put a towel in the bottom of the oven & use an old spray bottle as a water gun to get the tricky spots around the grill.
An unexpected (to me at least) benefit of starting at the top of the space & cleaning down is that you can just drop any cleaning rags/paper towels when you’re done with them. Or fling them over your shoulder, which is oddly fun.
