It was a very pleasant train ride to Salisbury. Lots of scenic countryside rolling past, and occasional stops in tiny little villages, or at least places which looked like tiny little villages from the train.
This place also uses the lockbox with key system for check-in, and had very good instructions for finding the front door, which is always nice for the trickier spots. It’s an upstairs one-bedroom place with a kitchen that I won’t get that much use out of because I’m only here for 4 days; I am looking forward to being able to prepare even simple things, or use plates.
Worked Thursday/Friday, though I found that rather than using the kitchen table, I preferred sitting on the couch & working at the little coffee table. Not much else I can say about that.
I did some wandering around before the weekend, but the standard situation of “tourist stuff is closed after working hours” applied here, as I expected it to, so I saw the outside of scenic things.
And also advertising for a play I’ll not be here for;
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a ‘normal’ production of The Tempest – Prospero’s Books was a very strange movie, there was a production at Auckland University which went a quite modern with the costumes & is probably the most normal, and there was a movie which set it in the Louisiana bayou.
Saturday was my “Go See Stonehenge” day, and there’s a whole post on that, so … Go see that post?
Started poking at the Gen Con wishlist in the evening, just to get some items on the list. Spotted a few odd ones out there, so that’ll be entertaining. Or awful. Or both
Sunday was for Gen Con Event Registration, but also for a bit of a morning off, so I went to a cafe for breakfast & got a Croque Madame. The Gen Con stuff I’ll put in another post, but the rest of the day was some wandering around, a nice breakfast, packing up for the very early trip to London, and a late night wander down to the cathedral, mostly to take a walk after a less-than-ideal event registration experience.
I enjoyed Salisbury; Seems like I prefer the quieter places like Salisbury & Bournemouth, which I’m sure will make my next destination of London a bit if a hit to the senses. I’m staying in Greenwich though, so there’s still some ‘quieter’ to be found.
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.
